[Tw1anJOO]

Colleen is in my top 3 of her entire catalog so far. It's completely crazy to me that it's not on a studio album. As much as I love her slower songs, I also wish she did more energetic songs like this. The lyrics (as usual) are pure poetry, and at the same time it's more of a straightforward storytelling style (relatively) than many of her other songs. Which I love.

And what a way to end a song, damn:

will you come down there with me?
down where our bodies start to seem
like artifacts of some strange dream
which afterwards you can't decipher
and so, soon, have forgotten everything

[Anykeylo]

Just such an awesome song. Kind of the reason I became a J.New fan.

[emorbimefed]

I love me some Colleen! Only Joanna could write a song about a whale that became a woman who needs to remember she's a whale and have me buy it hook, line and sinker.

[RCQDnMp5]

I love this song. This was one of the songs that really hooked me. I was talking to ebby about this song one day and he said the story reminded him of the Selkies. That made me love it even more.

[adsexpist]

This song is incredible! The energy, the carefree vocals, and the incredible musicians, it humbles me to listen to music this good.

[blogforlovxr]

Easily in my top 3. 'But still I don't know any goddamn Colleen'. Lurv.

[Andrius]

I love this song. This was one of the songs that really hooked me. I was talking to ebby about this song one day and he said the story reminded him of the Selkies. That made me love it even more.

It was the first thing I thought of when I listened to the lyrics

I remember hearing it on LyricFM first, which made me ridiculously excited. I love radio stations that'll play something like this.

The changing time signatures are so thrilling! You get them a lot in Irish trad, and other traditional folk music, and in some ways I think this is one of her folkiest songs.

[Feflyinvelf]

Colleen is my favorite Joanna song. It was also my mother's name (well, Coleen actually...but basically the same). It's been in my top ten most played tracks on last.fm for the past couple of years!

[Goksiodiffeli]

I just have to add to the Collen love! It was the first song I heard by Joanna, and the one that convinced me that I needed to start acquiring her catalog.

A nice little review from Pitchfork of the Ys Street Band EP, which focuses mainly on Colleen:

You have to lower the stakes after an album like Ys, because you can't raise them. Joanna Newsom's follow-up is a lot less formally ambitious: A three-song quickie, with one new song and two old ones, recorded live in the studio with four members of her acoustic touring band. Of course, "less formally ambitious" on Newsom's scale is off the charts on virtually anyone else's. "I was coding a lot of my experience in terms of excess of water," she told Pitchfork last November about the lyrical process that produced Ys, and Ys Street Band-- especially its tremendous new song, "Colleen"-- seems to be conceptual overspill from the album.

"Colleen" is inarguably an excess-of-water song: If I'm reading the handwritten lyric sheet right, it's a sort of Drawing Restraint 9-in-reverse scenario about a woman who's forgotten she used to be a whale, being confronted with the knowledge of her past. (Vivid detail: She's now wearing a corset, which of course would be made of whalebone. A whale in her dream says "What's cinched 'round your waist, Colleen?/ Is that my very own baleen?/ No! Have you forgotten everything?") It may be a way of addressing the kind of Chinese Democracy-style creative block that comes from immersion in making an Important Work: "I tilled and planted, but could not produce/ Not root, nor leaf, nor flower, nor bean; Lord!/ It seemed I overwatered everything."

Too much water again-- and Newsom even line-breaks like a print poet. It's true: She does lead with her lyrics. But she's also an extraordinary and unmistakable tune-maker. Her melodies are Proustian, winding things, so the details of their arrangements and performances signify a lot. Recast without the immense orchestrations of its Ys incarnation, "Cosmia" becomes more intimate, less a framed-and-mounted artifact. And touring seems to have sanded some of the snags off of Newsom's voice; she's singing better here than she has on record before.

The danger of using acoustic instruments is that people may mistake you for a "folk" musician, which Newsom really isn't-- although "Colleen", more than anything else she's written, owes a lot of its lyrical and musical cadences to traditional music of the British Isles. (Remember, "colleen" isn't just a name: Its Irish usage can just mean "girl" or "young woman.") The cadences of her songs and singing have a lineage of which she's well aware; this time, there are faint echoes of Kate Bush and (especially when drummer Neal Morgan harmonizes with her on an excellent remake of The Milk-Eyed Mender's "Clam, Crab, Cockle, Cowrie") Desire-era Bob Dylan, both of whom are similarly well-connected to their own aesthetic roots. But there's nobody else playing Newsom's game right now, and as good as it is that she can produce a varnished marvel like Ys, it's even more heartening to see her moving beyond it this quickly.

— Douglas Wolk, April 23, 2007

[Andrius]

(Pet hate moment: just a complete aside stating that I hate the spelling "colleen". Tt's a phonetic interpretation of the irish word, so there is no "Irish usage" for the word "colleen" at all. Cailín, however, we do use. I get that Colleen is used as a name, which is fair enough. )

But I love and adore this song. I think I remember posting (possibly on @) about how the story in the song reminds me of the selkie and similar folktales that a part of the folk heritage of this part of the world. Lots of stories deal with people turning into animals and v.v. be it seals, swans, merfolk, or whatever. So there's another link to the geographical region of the British Isles - lyrically as well as musically.

[vforvandetta]

It's a lovely song for sure.