Monkey & Bear

The second song on Ys is an animal fable. A monkey and a bear named Ursula leave the farm together, and the monkey loves her only while she performs to earn their keep. At the end she flees her monkey mate and master and swims out to sea, an ending Erik Davis tied to Ursa Major, the Great Bear. Newsom told Davis the song was basically unsingable when she wrote it. It opens on a stack of overdubbed harmonies that he likened to the Andrews Sisters set loose in Oz.

Albini recorded the harp and voice at The Village in December 2005, and the orchestra was added in 2006. Van Dyke Parks's score for it was the only one of his first arrangements that worked for Newsom straight away. Davis points out that Parks's first paying job in Hollywood was scoring Bear Necessities. Treble called it the most unusual story on the album, told over an orchestra in the manner of Peter and the Wolf. In The Solute, John Bruni read it as a tale of conditional love, control and escape, and set it beside Randy Newman's Simon Smith and His Amazing Dancing Bear. Bruni quotes Newsom telling The Wire that the ending is meant to be "scary and strange and disorienting".

Live

She first sang it at the ArthurBall in Los Angeles in February 2006, the night all five Ys songs were heard in full for the first time, and setlist.fm counts 132 performances through 2024. At Walt Disney Concert Hall in November 2007 a 28-piece orchestra conducted by Sean O'Loughlin played Parks's arrangement, and NME found it far fuller than her club versions. Ian Cooke covered it on the Oxfam tribute Versions of Joanna. The upload in the hypersongs web is the official album recording from Ys.