Divers (album)
album by Joanna Newsom
Divers is the fourth studio album by American musician Joanna Newsom, released on October 23, 2015, on Drag City.
The album was revealed on August 10, 2015, along with its first song, "Sapokanikan", which was released digitally as the first single. The cover art, album packaging, and music video for the album's title track feature the work of artist Kim Keever. The music video was directed by Paul Thomas Anderson with whom Newsom worked for the film Inherent Vice.
Speaking about the album's creative process in an interview with Entertainment Weekly, she said "I ... spent a year or two on the instrumental arrangements and overdubs. I wanted the character and colors of the instrumentation to shift definitively, from song to song, which entailed a wide pool of collaborators and a lengthy collaborative process with each person." She further described the process of making the album as "probably the most fun I’ve had making a record". Entertainment Weekly also reported Newsom "as using an arsenal of nearly a dozen keyboards and synths including clavichords, Mellotrons and Marxophones" for the album while members of the City of Prague Philharmonic Orchestra feature as players on the album.
Critical reception
Divers received widespread critical acclaim, achieving an aggregate score of 88 on Metacritic based upon 33 reviews. It receives a similarly high score of 8.6 on AnyDecentMusic?, with the collated scores of thirty-five reviews.
Begin with the source’s own compact description: “Divers (album)” is album by Joanna Newsom. The dossier treats that line as a proposition to test through Divers, album and Joanna, not as a finished interpretation.
Why this record matters
The phrase “album by Joanna Newsom” supplies a clear boundary for inquiry. It also exposes the unanswered questions: who defined that boundary, when it became stable and which sources sit outside it.
Object files, edition statements, performance records and contemporary criticism preserve different stages of the work’s history. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 14, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q20813336. 1 of 1 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 2015.
Rights, attribution and provenance may remain disputed even when a general reference summary presents a stable account. The lead is largely declarative, so disagreement and counter-evidence require a deliberate search beyond the opening account. Authority statements aid reconciliation but still require their own references, qualifiers and ranks to be checked.
How to read it
Separate the work, its editions or performances, and its later reception. Catalogue records, publication histories and object files often preserve different parts of that story.
- Identifying works and editions
- Tracing reception history
- Finding collection records
The original object or edition, catalogue raisonné, performance record, rights file and holding institution.
Three-step research path
- Establish the record: confirm the title “Divers (album)”, its source revision and the description used here.
- Expand the search: follow Divers (album) primary sources, Divers (album) archive and Divers research across catalogues and specialist indexes.
- Test the account: compare the strongest cited source with the responsible institution’s current record and note any disagreement.
Questions for further research
- Which source most directly establishes the central claim about “Divers (album)”?
- Which edition, object, performance or recording is being described?
- Where is authorship, date or provenance documented?
Search terms from this dossier
This entry incorporates text from “Divers (album)” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.