Joanna Newsom, throwing shade at my failure to accurately describe her rhyme scheme. She plays tonight with Robin Pecknold at the Paramount.
Joanna Newsom, throwing shade at my failure to accurately describe her rhyme scheme. She plays tonight with Robin Pecknold at the Paramount. Annabel Mehran

I know I should probably hold this confession for the next regrets issue, but I noticed an error in my analysis of Joanna Newsom's song "Leaving the City" two days ago and it has been HAUNTING ME ever since. Like one of those mocking ghost emojis (👻), the mistake keeps sticking out its tongue and goading me into a Slog post.

Newsom is playing tonight at the Paramount, (how there are still seats left I do not know) and the idea that any of you would walk into the theater with this hitch in my analysis rattling around in your head makes me feel terrible.

For the -4 people who care: In the last two lines of the chorus I analyzed on "Leaving the City," I mixed up the primary internal rhyme and the secondary internal rhyme. Here, let me show you:

The orange rhymes should be pink rhymes in the last two lines, and the pink rhymes should be orange.
The orange rhymes should be pink rhymes in the last two lines, and the pink rhymes should be orange. It occurs to me now that "slows" and "trot" should be marked orange, as well. And "canter" and "can't" should be splotched with pink. You'll have my resignation in the morning. Elaine Lin

I'll tell you what I was thinking. "Harder" and "deeper," though they're exact rhymes, don't feel like exact rhymes to me. I think this is because the first vowels in both words are accented, so we say them louder and with more force, which drowns out their "ers." Because "hit" and "sit" and "dent" sounded louder to me, I marked those rhymes as the primary rhymes and the "er" rhymes as the secondary rhymes.

But that's clearly not what's going on here. The rest of the chorus starts with the primary rhyme and then is followed by a secondary rhyme, with some variation. It's this variation that flummoxed me. In our interview, Newsom said she used a chart to keep track of her sonic structures, and she said she'd have to go back and fix some rhymes if they didn't fit with the formula, so I was expecting to see a very regular pattern emerge. I didn't expect there to be variations. But there are variations.

"Slows" doesn't pick up its rhyme until two lines later with "post," and the "trot" and "stop" rhymes are staggered across two lines. Plus, the addition of "can't" as a secondary rhyme piles up three secondary rhymes in that hectic third line. But what does all this mean?

Not much, really. I only meant to use this analysis to back up my point that "Leaving the City" is about the particular way in which cities are chaotic. A city's chaos comes from layers and layers of systems designed against chaos. The chaotic sounding chorus of Newsom's song comes also comes from layers and layers of systems—in her case, metrical and rhythmic systems—also designed against chaos, or formlessness.

In this way, form follows function, or the form enacts the subject of the song, or the very particular bird has found the very particular birdhouse that Newsom created for only it, or whatever you want to say to indicate that there's some high-level pattern-making going on in Newsom's work, and not just for its own sake.

My mistake also suggests that my hunch about Newsom's work is true: The deeper you dive, the more there is to her music.