Soft as Chalk

It opens the third disc of Have One on Me and is one of the album's piano songs. It was also made differently from most of the record. Dana Gumbiner recorded Newsom's piano and voice and Neal Morgan's drums and percussion together at Station To Station in Grass Valley, Morgan added more percussion himself in Portland, and Noah Georgeson mixed it in Laurel Canyon. Newsom wrote the words and music, and Morgan wrote his own parts.

Matthew Perpetua of Fluxblog heard just piano, percussion and voice with no apparent overdubs, closer to Laura Nyro, Joni Mitchell, Carole King and Judee Sill than to her harp records, with touches of R&B, gospel and saloon country. He noted Morgan's percussion echoing the words, shaken metal for the crickets, and took its subject to be love pushed so hard it turns to terror. The Austin Chronicle found her more seductive than sweet in it.

Live

She played it in Brisbane in January 2010, weeks before the album came out, and 74 times that year. setlist.fm counts 139 performances through 2024, the sixth most of any of her songs. An abridged version on Late Night with Jimmy Fallon in 2010 was her first US network television appearance since 2005, and it was in NPR's broadcast of her concert at the Sixth & I synagogue in Washington. David Miele covered it on Versions of Joanna. The upload in the hypersongs web is a fan video of the studio recording from Have One on Me, with the lyrics on screen.