Joanna Newsom took four years to make Divers, her latest from Drag City. The album’s apparent depths invite an equally deep analysis, one I haven’t seen much outside of fan forums and hot-boxed bedrooms. Many reviews say that her work sounds ornate, but stop short of explaining how or why she writes her music and lyrics that way.

Since it’d be too overwhelming for anyone to talk about all of the structural concerns of a work like Divers, especially in the amount of time typically afforded an interview with a musician on tour, I limited my focus to an often overlooked feature of lyrical construction: the rhyme scheme.

I’m looking at the first and third verses of “Sapokanikan,” and I’ve never come across this rhyme scheme. It looks like you’re weaving internal rhyme with end rhyme. Could you tell me why you chose it?

I don’t know if I could tell you why I chose it. I do know that for whatever reason, with this record, and with particular songs more than with others, I felt this strange kind of, inclination—I don’t know if it’s strange—but I felt this inclination to impose a set of rules over the rhyme scheme and the lyrics that maybe I hadn’t done before in the past.

The world “rules” is cold, and it’s not how I felt when I was using them. I kinda felt like there was this odd little system of gestures that I could make, that, in combination with each other would unlock something for me. I don’t know why, but, with “Sapokanikan,” so much of that song has to do with permanence and impermanence and the roles that documentation plays in our concept of cultural permanence or cultural impermanence, and maybe because of that I felt the imposition of a lot of weight on each specific word I chose. I don’t know why though.

Were you going in there thinking about wanting to weave internal rhyme and end rhyme? Or with some kind of game?

Not with “Sapokanikan.” With that one—I just sort of did it. It was an intentional thing, but—there’s a different song on the record called “Leaving the City.” That one I did a chart for. I had a very specific chart to trace the rhyme scheme because it’s much more complicated than Sapokanikan's. It has the rhyme at the end of each line and the internal rhymes that follow one meter, and a secondary set of internal rhymes that sort of quietly annunciate a contrary meter that’s overlayed on the first meter.

Then there’s another…not necessarily contrary meter…but like a polyrhythm that is voiced in the pattern formed by the syllabic emphases of the words. In order to layer all those rhythmic and metrical patterns, I did need to make a chart.

Do you have a photo of this chart?

I have the chart itself amongst my papers. I had a little key, so there was like a crescent moon, and a square and a heart and a diamond representing the different considerations. The heart represents this one particular consideration of rhyme, the diamond represents a different consideration of rhythm, and here’s the secondary rhyme and here’s the tertiary rhyme.

Sometimes they would overlap, and that was a fun little puzzle. I’d have to go back and change what led up to it for all the different imperatives to agree.

Compared to that, “Sapokanikan" is just sort of a nice easy—it took a while to find the right words, but conceptually the rhyme scheme isn’t that difficult.

I think the rhyme scheme in “Sapokanikan" is complicated! You do all that sonic weaving, and then the last three end rhymes stitch back to the first three internal rhymes!

That’s definitely true, the only reason it was easier for me is that at least all of those various rhyme considerations lined up along the same musical meter. In “Leaving the City” there was actually a contrary musical meter that I was overlaying, and I was very quietly articulating it through a hidden lacing of seemingly—you know if you just read it in a line, you have to be conscious of the sublimated contrary meter in order to trace the rhyme of that one.

The thing is, I don’t know why, but…I do have a real belief that the exact right word—in terms of conveying meaning as efficiently and correctly and concisely as possible—will also be the word that agrees in terms of rhyme, musical weight, syllabic weight, beauty, and elegance.

I think that words are magical. All of that effort is all about uncovering the word that is just sitting there waiting for you and when you find it it’s like—the equivalent of watching your team get a touchdown. It’s just like WHOA. And you run in circles and say “Fuck yeah!”

Do you have any games you use to find the right word?

If I can’t find the right rhyme, I start researching or thinking about the thing—the thing itself. So, if I wanted to talk about a particular phenomenon—like a bunch of bodies buried under Washington Square Park—or the layers of political, colonial history on top of that, and if there’s a word that I need that has a certain number of syllables—and a particular one of those syllables needs to be the weighted one, and it needs to rhyme on the first of the syllables, or it needs to rhyme on the last of the syllables, or it needs to rhyme in the middle, or whatnot—the way I’ll usually find it is by reading more about the thing, or thinking more about the thing.

That’s the research component—there are other songs I have that do not have a research component for one reason or another. But in that case, that would be the way I’d find the word. Not to lead with searching for the rhyme, but to trust that the word that will be perfect is just waiting there inside all that information.

But in music you can cheat those syllabic weights a little, due to your voice.

That’s true. Though it does depend on where in the song the word appears. There are many places where the syllable that would naturally be emphasized within a word becomes arbitrary because of where in the song it appears. There’s other places where that rule doesn’t matter very much.

Could you give me an example?

Let’s say there’s a more legato passage, where each syllable is stretched out to the point where it sheds its rhythmic weight because the word itself is broken down syllable by syllable and each of those syllables is stretched out. Or because of the rhythm that the word is sung in, because the word overlays a melody in which one of the notes of the melody has twice the value of another note in the melody—er, lasts twice as long— then that lengthening of one of the notes, which is also one of the syllables of the word sort of steals what would otherwise be the syllabic weight of the word and cancels it out in one way or another.

What are the considerations of construction for “The Things I Say,” which to me sounds like a melancholy Opry ditty?

Um…even that one has a bit of a structural conceit. It’s just zoomed out a lot more. You have to wait a lot longer for the rhyme to hit, but it’s still there. For that one, again, I can’t really say why. All I can say is that the type of mood I wanted for that song and the type of thing I wanted to say with that song didn’t suggest a highly formal lyrical structure to me.

The song played a part in a larger role, though. The thing about this record is that not only did certain songs have very specific rules governing how the story was going to be told and how the lyrics needed to be arranged, but also the record itself had a superimposed structure that was very specific, and basically from quite early in the process—not from the very beginning, but from the budding first leaves up, let’s say—I was pretty clear on what the sequence of songs was going to have to be, and because of that I did know where in the overall arc of the album this song—“The Things I Say”—was going to land. But that consideration was one of the things that governed the mood—the fact that it wasn’t arranged densely at all, just solo piano and voice. It affected the tone, the perspective of what that story is about because of where it fell in the sequence.

Who made you feel like you could write this way in the first place?

The person who made me feel like I could write in the first place was my friend Erin. I always wrote from a really young age, but she was the person who had the highest bar. She was such an incredible writer, and she and I would read and trade books and talk about writing and talk about words and care at a level that I had never known anybody else to care other than myself, and so for a few years in high school there was just this constant desire to raise the bar and be a better writer because we were constantly just reading each other’s writing and talking about language and stuff. And I think, in retrospect, that her friendship was one of the most important things for me as a writer.