Here's something you won't be able to argue with.
Joanna Newsom is not a songwriter, but she can play and write music.
Joanna Newsom is not a lyricist.
Joanna Newsom is a poet that can play the harp.
No offense, but I think it would be productive for you to spend a little more time thinking about both song lyrics and Newsom's lyrics. First, what you wrote makes no sense. There is no distinction between a lyrics and poetry set to music. Setting your poetry to music is the
very definition of lyrics.
2 : writing that formulates a concentrated imaginative awareness of experience in language chosen and arranged to create a specific emotional response through meaning, sound, and rhythm
1 : a lyric composition; specifically : a lyric poem
2 : the words of a song -- often used in plural
But to step away from semantics, Johnny and Inlander are right about the qualities of Newsom's lyrics. She's not repetitive at all. She may use allusions more subtle than your average Iron Maiden song, but almost every line carries its weight, be it concrete or metaphorical.
Compare, for instance Only Skin, in which Joanna talks about herself, her gender identity, and her music, against Monkey & Bear, a tale about (wait for it!) a monkey and a bear.
I have washed a thousand spiders down the drain
Spiders ghosts hang soaked and dangelin'
Silently from all the blooming cherry trees
In tiny nooses, safe from everyone
- nothing but a nusiance; gone now, dead and done
Be a woman, be woman!
From a poetical (and therefore a lyrical) point of view, this verse is very expressive and (especially compared to a lot of modern poetry) very accessible. We can understand the spiders as past decisions and past memories, that haunt in the present, distract, but ultimately are n the past and shouldn't be overly belabored lest they incapacitate. But the images Newsom uses are haunting, quite literally, and hew back to a series of poetical references thousands of years old, back to ancient Greek mythology in fact (the fates at their loom, Ariadne being turned into a spider for hubris, etc.)
Then on the other hand we have:
So
My bride
Here is my hand, where is your paw?
Try and understand my plan, Ursala
My heart is a furnace
Full of love that's just, and earnest
Now; you know that we must unlearn this
Allegiance to a life of service
And no longer answer to that heartless
Hay-monger, nor be his accomplice
(that charlatan, with artless hustling!)
But; Ursala, we've got to eat something
And earn our keep, while still within
The borders of the land that man has girded
(all double-bolted and tight-fisted!)
Until we reach the open country
A-steeped in milk and honey
Seems pretty straightforward to me. The monkey's trying to convince the bear to leave. Now the monkey and bear may serve as
metaphors,
symbols, or
allegory, but the actual happenings in the song are easy enough to follow.
The idea of saying that Newsom, an artist that regularly omits a chorus or refrain from her music, uses unnecessary verbiage seems absurd to me. On the contrary, it's almost every other artist who has perhaps 5-10 original lines of lyrics per song repeated ad nauseum who loads down her songs with fluff. I would love to see a hundred more Newsom's crafting gemlike prismatic lyrical verse -- but I doubt it would ever happen because taking that path is so much harder.