Listening to has always required certain things: patience, trust, an ability to overlook cosmetic flaws in favor of the more complete picture, more patience. Her precedent releases–2004’s and 2006’s –required these virtues in increasing numbers. But, her new Victorian triple-decker of an album, is asking for a much longer commitment. Commitment being the key word. It’s unfair, really, to judge Have One On Me the week, the month, and maybe even the year of its release. Newsom is an artist of considerable talent and intentionality: Have One On Me is as carefully built as Bleek House, and takes as much long-suffering to get through, much less appreciate and critique. There’s so much happening here: narrative lines about man and God and law and love and death weave and block one another throughout the album’s two hours and three discs, fitting together into something so, well, so big that it’s going to take the truly committed at least a good nine months just to determine what, exactly, Newsom is trying to do with Have One On Me, and whether the thing holds together at all.

Joanna Newsom - Have One On Me (2010) 3CD EAC FLAC Tracks (Cue you pretty much liked it or you didn't based on how you felt about Newsom's sound and her ability to put a song together.

But is it even worth the attempt? There’s no virtue inherent in releasing an album that takes two hours to listen to, and I’m not sure that Newsom should be lauded for the length and ambition of her creation any more than Merriam and Webster are for theirs. The question, the real question, and it seems almost unfair to ask, is whether can justify its own existence. Continue reading after the jump. To answer that question, we have to go back to that list of virtues at the top of the review. When I say that this record requires patience, I don’t mean to say that it’s tedious, or a chore of some sort.

The kind of patience required to appreciate Have One On Me is the same kind required by love–whether it be filial, erotic, or divine. Have One On Me must be allowed to spread itself out in your listening room.

It must be given its time, its space. It must be listened to in order. It will not bend to your will. (Believe me, I’ve tried.) If you try to squeeze it between YouTube videos, it will not love you.

If you try to listen to it while you commute, it will not love you. If you put it on in the background while you type up your notes, it will not love you. Encoder pro. Much like the lovers Newsom describes across her album, it will only love you if you give yourself up.

If you can do this, you will find a spot at the feast. You might be thinking that I haven’t said anything at all about the music. This is not at all true. Because the album is entirely dependent upon Have One On Me the experience; the two go hand-in-hand, and it’s perhaps Newsom’s greatest artistic achievement that an album whose songs seem to be about love and trust requires nearly as much love and trust from its listeners. By asking us to sit down in our seats and pay attention while she unfolds herself and her heart before us, we are put in her place in the narrative. We, too, are waiting, and we wait with her, and we begin to understand–sometime around the beginning of disc three, I believe–that waiting can be a challenge. Not that Have One On Me is dull.