Sprout and the Bean

Some songs announce themselves with a hook. This one announces itself with a rhythm that refuses to settle. A harp begins in a gentle waltz, and then the right hand starts wandering, plucking figures that seem to belong to a different time signature until, eventually, the two hands meet again.^[3] It is the sound of someone tending something small and fragile while the whole world rearranges itself around it.

"Sprout and the Bean" was the only single from Joanna Newsom's debut album, and it remains the easiest door into her strange, bright, unsettling world.^[1] It is also a song that rewards the question every Newsom listener eventually asks: what, exactly, is this about?

A harp, a notebook, and a very small record deal

Newsom was born in 1982 and raised in Nevada City, California, by two doctors. She attended a Waldorf school, where she practiced memorizing and reciting long poems, and she asked to learn the harp at age five.^[7] A teacher first sent her to the piano, but at ten she had a small Celtic harp and lessons built around improvisation and composition.^[6] At folk camp she picked up a West African cross-rhythm technique, which she applied to folk melodies by laying patterns of five or seven against a steady four.^[6] That training is audible in this song's wandering right hand.

She went on to study composition and then creative writing at Mills College, and it was around then that she began to sing and put words to her music.^[6][7] She dropped out, returned to Nevada City, and recorded two homemade EPs in 2002 and 2003, at first as a kind of personal archive. She burned copies to sell at shows.^[7] One of them reached Will Oldham, who passed it to Drag City, and the label signed her.^[7]

The Milk-Eyed Mender arrived on March 23, 2004.^[2] Noah Georgeson, a bandmate from the San Francisco group The Pleased, produced and recorded it, and Newsom played harp alongside a Wurlitzer, harpsichord and piano.^[2] The single version of "Sprout and the Bean" followed on November 2, 2004, with a video directed by Terri Timely.^[1] In it, as one writeup describes, Newsom plays in an empty classroom while chalk drawings animate on the blackboard and the choruses drift out to a grassy pasture.^[8]

Growing things

The title already tells you the song's native habitat. Seeds, sprouts, soil and weather run through the lyrics, and the narrator moves among them as a gardener, a witness and sometimes a participant. The song is organized around the question of what it means to nurture something into being, and what it costs the nurturer.

Newsom has said that a recurring concern in her writing is the danger of becoming so absorbed in craft that you shut yourself off from the life you hoped to write about.^[6] It is not hard to hear that worry in a song so occupied with patient, attentive growth. Tending a plant is an act of devotion, but it is also a way of staying in one spot while other things happen elsewhere.

The song also plays with scale. The imagery is domestic and tiny, but the stakes feel enormous. A seed in the ground becomes a way of talking about hope, patience, dependence and the fragile business of loving something that cannot yet speak for itself.

Two voices and a chorus that crowds the room

The arrangement carries as much meaning as the words. Verses move with a conversational looseness, while the chorus stacks Newsom's voice into a group effect that one reviewer finds deliberately jarring.^[3] The sound of one person suddenly becoming many works as a small piece of theater. A private reverie is interrupted by a crowd, or perhaps the narrator discovers that her inner life contains more than one voice.

That doubling suits a song about relationships between small and large things, between the one who plants and the thing planted, between a self and the community that watches it. The shift in texture gives the chorus the feel of a communal chant, which may be why audiences took to it. Newsom has mentioned it as a crowd sing-along she planned to play at a show in Iceland.^[4]

The voice question

Any serious discussion of this song has to address the way it is sung. Newsom's voice, high and bent and utterly untrained, divided listeners in 2004. Some critics dismissed it as poncy or whimsical, while others, including Stereogum's retrospective writer, argued that these were choices that served the songs rather than cloying affectations.^[5]

Newsom herself has pushed back on the idea that her work is about innocence. She has said she has no formal vocal training and sings intuitively, and she names Texas Gladden, a powerful and unconventional untrained singer, as a major inspiration.^[6] She has also said that what interests her about childhood is not purity but its capacity for sadness and its unembarrassed curiosity.^[6] In a 2010 interview she rejected the labels "babyish" and "innocent" as descriptions of her songs.^[5]

That distinction matters for this song. It is easy to hear a harp and a bright, elastic voice and assume a fairy tale. But the fairy tales that endure, the ones adults keep returning to, are rarely innocent. One reviewer compared the album to a book of adult fairy tales, blending grown-up concerns with childlike whimsy.^[3] "Sprout and the Bean" is a good example: its garden has weather in it.

Language as play

Newsom has described a love of interior rhyme and of shifting the emphasis within syllables, and says songs give her more freedom to play with language than prose does.^[6] She cites Nabokov, who bends and reworks sentences, as a bigger influence on her than poets.^[6] The result in this song is a lyric that sounds spontaneous but is built from thick, deliberate layers, with a vocabulary that is dense, literary and often ambiguous.^[3]

This is one reason the song resists a single reading. The words keep sliding between literal gardening, intimate address and something closer to an incantation. A listener can follow the sound of the language long before deciding what it refers to.

The recording itself was a deliberate choice. Newsom has said the album was made more cleanly than her earlier home recordings, and she rejects using lo-fi hiss and warmth as a shortcut to emotion, which she considers a kind of cheating.^[6] Some listeners who heard early versions found the sound too polished, a reaction she resisted.^[6] The clarity matters here, because it lets the harp's crossing rhythms and the stacked chorus be heard as composed decisions rather than charming accidents.

What it might mean

Newsom has not, in the interviews I could find, laid out a definitive explanation, so any reading is a listener's reading. Here are three that hold up.

The first is the relationship reading. The song can be heard as a conversation between two people at different stages of growth, one eager and quick, the other cautious and slow. In this version the sprout and the bean are lovers or friends, each helping the other become something, and the song is about the generosity and risk of that exchange.

The second is the artist's reading. A young musician who never planned to be professional was suddenly being listened to by strangers.^[6] She was terrified performing, and worried that people would prize her music for lo-fi novelty rather than the songs themselves.^[6] Heard this way, the garden is a creative life, and nurturing something fragile in public is the song's real subject.

The third is the cycle reading, in which the song is simply about growth, decay and return. Seeds do not stay seeds, and a song so devoted to a beginning cannot help but hint at an end. That undertone keeps the cheerful waltz from becoming merely pleasant.

Why it stuck

Part of the song's afterlife is strange. It turned up in the film The Strangers in 2008, in a Victoria's Secret commercial in 2009, and in a Melbourne tourism campaign in 2017.^[1] Pitchfork placed it 229th among the best songs of the 2000s, and Paste ranked it twelfth among her songs in 2020.^[1] That a song so odd could travel into advertising and horror films says something about how well its melody and warmth survive being removed from context.

The album around it was received warmly. AllMusic praised her voice and delicate harp arrangements, Mojo called it a weird, dark record, Pitchfork named it the 47th best album of the 2000s, and Dusted put it at number one on its 2004 year-end list.^[2] It sold more than 200,000 copies in the United States without ever charting.^[2] Newsom also belonged to a loose wave of artists that included Devendra Banhart, CocoRosie and Antony, and she toured with Banhart, Vetiver and Antony that year.^[5]

Conclusion

"Sprout and the Bean" works because it holds opposites together. It is small and enormous, playful and wary, simple on the surface and tangled underneath. The harp pattern that drifts away from its own pulse and then rejoins it is a good picture of the whole song.

You can listen for the garden, the lovers, the young artist, or the turning of the seasons. You can also just let the waltz carry you. The song does not demand that you choose, and that generosity is probably why people are still singing along.