Crucial Track for February 14, 2026

"Sapokanikan" by Joanna Newsom

#365songs (45 / 365)

There are going to be at least a few Joanna Newsom songs among these 365, and this isn't my favorite, just the one I happened to be thinking about today. But still, what a song.

Every incredible duality of Joanna Newsom is on display here. Writing such catchy, classic-sounding melodies over such a strange series of chord progressions. Ridiculously erudite, complexly allusive lyrics with a powerful, poignant emotional core: other writers may shine in different ways but I genuinely cannot think of another lyricist who does anything like what Joanna Newsom does anywhere near as well. Sophisticated, interesting internal rhymes, but always with something to say, never for their own sake. Virtuosic musicianship, but always serving the song, never for its own sake.

What I love about "Sapokanikan" is that when I listen to it, the climax moves me to tears more often than not. The way the lengthy outro turns down the instrumentation to almost nothing to "zoom in" for the vignette about John Purroy Mitchel (a man about whom I know nothing I didn't learn due to this song) and then swells with vocal harmonies and winds and drums as it pulls back to look at everything that gets obliterated by the vast sweep of history: it's a classic songwriting trick but "Sapokanikan" just nails it, and Newsom swinging up into the top of her vocal range is the coup de grâce. No, wait, the coup de grâce is after that, when the bottom drops out again and she flips "Look upon my works, and despair!" from the seemingly too-clever-by-half "Ozymandian" rhyme from the song's second line into simply "Look, and despair." Full circle, like Divers itself.

What I love about "Sapokanikan" is how even beyond the gut-level impact of the songwriting, every layer I excavate in the lyrics makes it still more moving. In a "Songs We Love" column about it that I think is great for tugging on a bunch of threads without risking unraveling the whole think, NPR includes a quote from Newsom about "Sapokanikan." She says:

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

What I love about "Sapokanikan" is that it actually literally is about all of those things while still being at its heart a fucking great tune. And it's still probably not even my favorite Joanna Newsom song.