“Bridges and Balloons” opens Joanna Newsom’s debut album to find the young artist, then 22 years old, looking back fondly on the elaborate daydreams of her childhood. She displays a child-like wonder as, line by line, we are drawn into the Narnia-inspired fantasy world she created with her unnamed playmate–her implied listener throughout the song.

Newsom rebuilds this imaginary world for us through colourful imagery of sailboats, airships, and legendary castles, adding to the effect with her eccentric vocabulary and storybook-like use of alliteration and assonance. Her reference to “Cair Paravel” is an obvious nod to the fortress where the Pevensie children take up the throne in C.S. Lewis’s The Chronicles of Narnia, and serves as a neat symbol for the idea of a world formed out of childhood daydreams, where all of Newson and her friend’s most elaborate visions become a reality–but one that only they can see.

Bold, imaginative storytelling lies at the heart of Newsom’s artistry–as does her awareness that the best stories are often born out of the tedium of everyday life. Newsom and her friend may need to escape the world of real things and places, but at the same time, that world is the blank canvas upon which they paint something new. A wicker basket set down in a pond in their backyard becomes a giant beetle-shell ship to carry them across an imaginary ocean. Model airplanes zoom between hand-crafted hot-air balloons and copper-wire bridges in Newsom’s childhood living room, transforming the most ordinary of places into a bustling imaginary city.