Last week saw the release of Joanna Newsom’s new album, a 3 CD set called Have One on Me. You have to admire the nerve of an artist putting out an album in 2010 that clocks in a little less than Sandinista! Hasn’t she heard that the entire world has a 30 second attention span? Evidentially Newson, who includes a 25 page libretto in the set, didn’t get the memo.

Jonah Weiner, writing on Slate:

As demanding albums go, Joanna Newsom’s Have One on Me is pretty smooth going. Songs amble along leisurely, heavy on warm, plucked strings, stately piano, and bright horns, as Newsom sings in a voice that’s both resolute and vaporous: an amplified sigh. Some agitations and eruptions breach the surface here and there, but mostly the pond just shimmers. And yet the album is demanding because it wants us to do something that we’ve grown largely unaccustomed to doing in the digital-music era: namely, to stop what we’re doing—close all the tabs in our browsers—and give it our undivided attention.

Have One on Me, released last week, mounts a three-disc, 18-song protest against distraction, against rushing, against gulping. Newsom, an audacious 27-year-old songwriter from northern California, tells complicated stories that don’t invite parsing so much as necessitate it, and the album forms a panorama so sprawling that the mind’s eye struggles to survey it in full. Here she is in one song, stealing a horse and hanging for the crime; here she is in another, pondering the life of Lola Montez, 19th-century bohemian scenester and mistress of the Bavarian King Ludwig I; here she is fallen in with ash-masked volcano worshippers.

The album—a patchwork of American and Celtic folk, medieval music, gospel, classical, country, and piano-pop—lasts two hours and four minutes. That’s two minutes more than Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness, 12 more than Wu-Tang Forever, and 20 less than Sandinista! But it takes at least three plays to begin to feel you’ve really heard it. One listen is necessary to collect first impressions and sketch a rough road map; a second to read along with the precisely transcribed paragraphs, parentheticals, puns, and mellifluous A.P. English stumpers—etiolated, palanquin, gormless—that take up a full 25 pages of liner notes; and a third listen to put down the liner notes and let the words settle back into partnership with Newsom’s music and phrasing, which emphasize lines that may have seemed throwaway on the page while underselling other, would-be zingers.

This takes some effort, but mostly it just takes time. Have One on Me is worth the cost, though, and worth the actual price tag retailers put on it, too, because it is exactly what it purports to be: a major work, moving, mystifying, transporting. You emerge from it with your bearings knocked askew.

The great arranger arranger Van Dyke Parks, who has worked with Brian Wilson, Carly Simon and other notables, told the London Times about hearing Joanna Newsom sing her song Emily the first time they met. Parks said: “In my mind were the images of the bards, the troubadours, the poets. And the very druid marrow of my bones started to shout at me, ‘You should serve this person!’” High praise indeed.

This sounds epic. I can’t wait to get my hands on this!