Sapokanikan by Joanna Newsom (2015)

Per Joanna, "'Sapokanikan' is a ragtimey encomium to the forces of remembrance, forgetting, accretion, concealment, amendment, erasure, distortion, canonization, obsolescence and immortality."

As it, along with the rest of her most recent album, 'Divers', involves itself with the passage of time and the 'tributes' left to the whims of that passage, repetition and tighter forms would be a mere pretension — artificial in the face of time’s arbitrariness, which itself is always moving unswervingly towards a climax.

That climax, in this case, is as stunning as any could possibly hope to be.

Try to watch the video, a tight shot of her (initially) joyously singing and dancing around the village — the sun sets, the outro begins and we eventually find her crying before the glow of a firetruck's red lights. I dare you not to cry along with her.

Outro begins at 2:52

Stream on Apple Music