"It was the last song she wrote, and the one where, perhaps foolishly, she attempted to weave together all the various threads and 'ghost characters' in her tale. 'It was an attempt to encapsulate everything, and to find some measure of grace.' In her 2004 Arthur interview, Newsom described her patchwork method of writing songs: 'I have little objects and every once in a while I take them out of my pockets, lay them all in a row and I like the way they look next to each other, so that’s a song!' Here the row of items goes on for pages. Most revealing, perhaps, is Newsom’s admission that the last few verses of the song—where the long-suffering female protagonist promises to do right by her darling—are the only place in the whole album where she just made stuff up, where the song steps away from poetic autobiography. 'I was hoping for a good resolution, but I felt helpless and foundering at the end. And so I reached for this fiction, because I didn’t know how to end the song in full truth. Otherwise, it would go on forever.'"
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"It was the last song she wrote, and the one where, perhaps foolishly, she attempted to weave together all the various threads and 'ghost characters' in her tale. 'It was an attempt to encapsulate everything, and to find some measure of grace.' In her 2004 Arthur interview, Newsom described her patchwork method of writing songs: 'I have little objects and every once in a while I take them out of my pockets, lay them all in a row and I like the way they look next to each other, so that’s a song!' Here the row of items goes on for pages. Most revealing, perhaps, is Newsom’s admission that the last few verses of the song—where the long-suffering female protagonist promises to do right by her darling—are the only place in the whole album where she just made stuff up, where the song steps away from poetic autobiography. 'I was hoping for a good resolution, but I felt helpless and foundering at the end. And so I reached for this fiction, because I didn’t know how to end the song in full truth. Otherwise, it would go on forever.'"