The Joanna Newsom is out there, somewhere

What follows is an actual conversation between myself and a long-time friend, Justin Koeppen. No spelling has been corrected.

PBR: Ever listen to “The Do”?

JK: Never haves.

PBR: I was hoping they’d sound remarkably different. But they don’t, really. Female lead is kind of like Hope Sandoval, but not enough.

JK: How much more Sandovalic does she need to be?

PBR: About a 1/3rd. What unit of measure are we using?

JK: A sliding scale of preciousness that ranges from Pink to Mum.

PBR: Nice.

JK: It can also be repesented as a “Newsom”, as in “her voice is so twee she registers at 9.5 Newsoms.”

PBR: I didn’t think 9.5 Newsoms was realistically possible. I mean, it’s been mathematically proven under ideal circumstances. But get out of the lab once in a while, man

JK: Ok. So 9.8 Newsoms is theoretically possible in a pure vaccuum at or near absolute zero, and 10.0 Newsoms reaches the threshold of current science. It’s beleived that an artist with a 10.0 rating would occupy all genres simultaneously.

PBR: The God Artist, also known as the Les-Bosson particle.

JK: That’s if you subscribe to the current model of Harp String Theory.

PBR: Which, you know, I do. I could never get behind the Zepplin Field Theory

JK: Well, yesh, the physics break down as the artist approaches the event horizon, also known as the Coldplay Line, beyond which no talent can escape regardless of the force of opposing hipster cred.

PBR: I can’t abide by any school of thought that believes that Coldplay is actually inevitable. It screams of creationism, as if the boring and uninspired of the world are preaching some fanatical version of musical religious doctrine.

JK: It’s true, the musical cosmos operates much more akin to the Rolling Stones model; it began ages ago with a bang, then over billions of years colled and evened out to form a void filled with mostly empty space, continuing it’s course until it’s eventual heat death.

PBR: I’ll stick with Jenny Lewis Wave forms, which give you a really interesting quotient when you feed Kate Nash into the equation

JK: You know that’s dangerous. They tried a similar experiment in the 90s by trying to introduce a Belly variant into a stable Susan Vega waveform. that’s how we got Lisa Loeb.

PBR: But that overlooks the Costello-Dylan hypothesis, that the universe is expanding and contracting in repetition for infinity, with each action spinning off an infinite number of variants. In some parallel universes, Dylan was actually good in the 80s.

JK: Unless you believe in the Guided by Multiverse theory, wherein each song Robert Pollard pens creates it’s own parallel universe where the lyrics actually make sensen.

PBR: Bah, that theory hasn’t been used since people started to really trumpet the qualities of The Magnetic Fields Theory – in which happy songs are really sad songs, but sad songs are really sad songs too.

JK: Ah yes, the old Grandaddy era school of thought.