More like have three on me, amirite? Defensive sarcasm was an easy first response to Joanna Newsom’s Have One on Me, released last February by Drag City. Spread over two hours and three discs, on paper it sounded even more sprawling than it was. The 28-year-old singer, songwriter, harpist, and pianist already had a reputation for excess, which detractors and devotees agreed upon but interpreted differently: immoderation or ambition? The Milk-Eyed Mender featured extravagantly cracked vocals, while Ys indulged in epic track-lengths and Van Dyke Parks’ lush orchestral arrangements. Both albums were exotically spiced with many, many arcane lyrics. You either relished every bit or spat out the mouthful. I relished, and still winced a little upon hearing about the triple disc. It was hard to comprehend how the demands of Newsom’s craft, both emotional and technical, could be sustained on her end—and withstood, on ours—at such length.

After the rumor and apprehension, the music arrived quietly, leaking only a week before its release date, and it instantly quelled my own reservations with the crystalline opening sounds of “Easy”:  Newsom’s voice, high and fluted, against an atomized cloud of instrumentation. You only had to browse through the first disc to realize that the album was not some rambling mess—that it was, in fact, Newsom’s most careful and charted-feeling work to date—and that most of the excesses which had been a magnet for both adoration and criticism were gone.

Newsom’s voice is still veined with glass and wire, though it doesn’t chirp and squawk so much any more. The idiosyncrasies of her style are settling into more traditional, rigorous modes of jazz and blues, evoking Joni Mitchell by way of Ella Fitzgerald more often than the fairy-tale creature of her prior work (although the decorative, essential imagery of fairy tales still abounds). The songs remain long, but the arrangements (by Ryan Francesconi) are compact and wispy; less fussy and battering than those of Ys, with a lot of space around Newsom’s piano, harp, and voice. The length is justified by the subtlety of her writing, which draws you in slowly, and makes her prior work seem ingratiating and exhausting by comparison.

Those opening lines—“Easy, easy/ My man and me”—are somewhat deceptive, although ease is the dominant impression left by Newsom’s pliant phrasings and plentiful but tamped-down lyrics. She floats in from courtyards; tills the dirt of Eden with her bare hands; sleeps for forty years; gently dies over and over; all at a dreamy, breeze-borne pace. The emotional register is one of gracious friendship: the elegiac compassion that can bloom at the end of romantic struggle. It is a music of second chances, new beginnings, affectionate recriminations; of lost moments preserved in amber. First-person confessions lurk like shadows on a brightly wrought backdrop of musical puppetry: Funny animals, mincing aristocrats, explorers, saints, dragons and more all dance on strings. Newsom, as the puppet-master, operates beyond the realm where stories end unambiguously well or poorly, and longs for it. She plays fated archetypes against tactile sense memories of “the sound of you shaving—the scrape of your razor, the dully-abrading black hair,” the stubble drifting away like the moment itself, the image clinging. The lyrics turn excoriating at times, but always get back to tenderness quickly. It is a world of “terrible hardship,” she confides on “Esme”—the hardship of changing and dealing with changes in others. But “kindness prevails.”