Joanna Newsom once said the ’70s was her favorite decade for music in part because you could still feel the hand of the creator—an offhand comment with a mix of old-fashioned ideals and radical idiosyncrasy that could easily describe her own work. Born in the Northern California town of Grass Valley in 1982 and raised playing both piano and harp, Newsom came into the national consciousness in the mid-2000s by combining the rustic intimacy of singer-songwriters like Joni Mitchell and Karen Dalton with a sense of obscurantism both playful and aggressively high-minded. Just consider a line from 2004’s The Milk-Eyed Mender: “And the signifieds butt heads with the signifiers/And we all fall down slack-jawed to marvel at words/When across the sky sheet the impossible birds/In a steady illiterate movement homewards,” to say nothing of the labyrinths she built in the years following. (For a balance of her at her most accessible and her most ambitious, try 2010’s Have One on Me.) And yet for all their density, her songs always stick close enough to the same evocations of hope, loss, and wonder that make music useful to daily life.