Music

Divers by Joanna Newsom. I could've picked about ten different albums as my all time best, but you said you liked great lyrics and this album has them. The basic question of the album is 'How is love possible when death is inevitable?' and Newsom spends forty minutes giving various answers to that question, drawing on Percy Shelley, James Joyce and Albert Einstein, among others.

If that sounds more like an essay than an album, that's because you need the music, too, to fully appreciate what Newsom does. The lyrics aren't arbitrary; they always speak to the lyrics and vice-versa. This includes fairly obvious audio-verbal puns, as when she hits a sustained chord on the piano as she sings the word 'sustains', and also more recondite use of motifs and key changes that complement the complex lyrical ideas that she's exploring. The upshot is that I think you'd know this album was about love and loss even if you didn't understand a word of the lyrics.