Calling all hot women of the Lord!

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Up where the light undiluted is weaving in a drunk dream

And say say say in the lee of the bay, don't be bothered
Lay your troubles here where the tugboats shear the water from the water
Flanked by furrows curling back like a match held up to a newspaper.

Emily they'll follow your lead by the letter
And I make this claim and I'm not ashamed to say I knew you better.
What they have seen is just a beam of your sun that banishes winter.

Let us go though we know it's a hopeless endeavour.
The ties that bind, they are barbed and spined and hold us close forever
Though there is nothing could help me come to grips with a sky that is gaping and yawning
There is a song I woke with on my lips as you sailed your great ship towards the morning.

Oh Joanna, Joanna, Joanna! Lyrics like this have been swimming round deliciously in my head for the last month or so, since I discovered the exraordinary Joanna Newsom. (Thanks Reuben :)

She reminds me of that bit in "Mr Holland's Opus" where Mr Holland is talking about a record that someone lent him, which he played, hated, then played again... and then again... until he found he couldn't stop playing it. Joanna is very different to anything I've ever enjoyed before. Yet I feel like, in listening to her, I've learnt more about poetry than I ever did studying it at university. And I've learnt things about myself, and who I am and who I want to be, and how I see the world.

You know how on rare occasions you come across an album that, for a time, becomes like the soundtrack for your life? I find myself singing the oddest little bits of her songs at the oddest little moments. Especially when I'm at work, mindlessly entering columns of numbers into the computer and putting documents into alphabetical order. There's a sort of Robbie Burns feel to her, or Eliot perhaps - just revelling in the sheer pleasure of words being woven together in such a way that they point you towards some kind of truth that is felt rather than understood... or are just peculiarly evocative ("watch while the freight trains paw, paw at the wild wild night").

What do her songs mean? Some of them, like 'Sadie' and 'En Gallop' seem to express things that are inside me right now ("And all that I knew is moving away from me... and I have not forgot, but a silence crept over me"); others seem to contain things that ring true with life though not necessarily my own experience; others, I don't pretend to understand at all; but they've got inside of me somehow. It's curious; not sure if I can quite explain it. So I'll just let it be.

Check out more of her lyrics on the 3rd link above. I think they are just mind-blowingly, soul-liftingly, heart-stoppingly beautiful - especially the ones on the "Ys" album. But that's just my opinion :)

Happy days.

Does anyone happen to have a spare cable to run from my computer to the modem thingy or whatever it is that makes the interwebs go? (To use the technical term...) Just before I go out and buy one, thought I'd check. It would need to be about 10-15m long.