FEATURE:
A Buyer’s Guide
Part Three: Joni Mitchell
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IN the third part…
IN THIS PHOTO: Joni Mitchell in 2019/PHOTO CREDIT: Mark Seliger
of this feature, I wanted to feature a legendary artist who has inspired numerous other artists. Joni Mitchell is one of my favourite artists ever, and she has produced so many tremendous albums. If you are new to her or have not dipped into her catalogue in a while, I have compiled a list of her essential albums that you need to own; one that is underrated and worth new respect, and her final/latest studio album – in addition to a definitive Joni Mitchell book. Have a look through the rundown, and I know you will discover some real gems! Joni Mitchell is a true musical genius, and it has been great celebrating…
IN THIS PHOTO: Joni Mitchell in 1968/PHOTO CREDIT: Jack Robinson/Hulton Archive/Getty Images
HER wonderful work.
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The Four Essential Albums
Ladies of the Canyon
Release Date: 2nd March, 1970
Labels: Reprise/Warner Bros.
Producer: Joni Mitchell
Standout Tracks: For Free/The Arrangement/Big Yellow Taxi
Buy: https://jonimitchell.com/Music/album.cfm?id=4
Stream: https://open.spotify.com/album/7JOdtLDLyXJIppDRB7kxr9
Review:
“This wonderfully varied release shows a number of new tendencies in Joni Mitchell's work, some of which would come to fuller fruition on subsequent albums. "The Arrangement," "Rainy Night House," and "Woodstock" contain lengthy instrumental sections, presaging the extensive non-vocal stretches in later selections such as "Down to You" from Court and Spark. Jazz elements are noticeable in the wind solos of "For Free" and "Conversation," exhibiting an important influence that would extend as late as Mingus. The unusually poignant desolation of "The Arrangement" would surface more strongly in Blue. A number of the selections here ("Willy" and "Blue Boy") use piano rather than guitar accompaniment; arrangements here are often more colorful and complex than before, utilizing cello, clarinet, flute, saxophone, and percussion. Mitchell sings more clearly and expressively than on prior albums, most strikingly so on "Woodstock," her celebration of the pivotal 1960s New York rock festival. This number, given a haunting electric piano accompaniment, is sung in a gutsy, raw, soulful manner; the selection proves amply that pop music anthems don't all have to be loud production numbers. Songs here take many moods, ranging from the sunny, easygoing "Morning Morgantown" (a charming small-town portrait) to the nervously energetic "Conversation" (about a love triangle in the making) to the cryptically spooky "The Priest" (presenting the speaker's love for a Spartan man) to the sweetly sentimental classic "The Circle Game" (denoting the passage of time in touching terms) to the bouncy and vibrant single "Big Yellow Taxi" (with humorous lyrics on ecological matters) to the plummy, sumptuous title track (a celebration of creativity in all its manifestations). This album is yet another essential listen in Mitchell's recorded canon” – AllMusic
Choice Cut: Woodstock
Blue
Release Date: 22nd June, 1971
Label: Reprise
Producer: Joni Mitchell
Standout Tracks: Little Green/Blue/River
Buy: https://jonimitchell.com/Music/album.cfm?id=5
Stream: https://open.spotify.com/album/1vz94WpXDVYIEGja8cjFNa
Review:
“About that follow-up: 1971's Blue is possibly the most gutting break-up album ever made. After Mitchell's relationship with Nash dissolved, she headed to Europe to lose the tether of her fame, eventually taking exile in a cave on the Greek island Crete. The trip would inspire the how-Joni-got-her-groove-back ditties "Carey" and "California". The album is suffused with melancholy for all that is missing: her daughter ("Little Green"), innocence ("The Last Time I Saw Richard"), and connection ("All I Want"). Mitchell bleeds diffidence and highlights it with spare notes plucked out on her Appalachian dulcimer. While her pals Neil Young, Leonard Cohen, and Laura Nyro were also pushing the singer-songwriter genre forward, none of them managed to stride the distance that Mitchell did here in a single album.
"Will you take me as I am/ Strung out on another man?" Mitchell pleads on "California". She was (in)famously strung out on other talents that were as mercurial as hers, fueling constant speculation as to whether this song was about Leonard Cohen, or that one about James Taylor or Nash or that puerile heartbreaker Jackson Browne. The year Mitchell issued Blue, an album that would be a landmark in any artist's career, Rolling Stone named her "Old Lady of the Year," a dismissal effectively saying her import was as a girlfriend or muse to the men around her more than as an artist in her own right. Worse still, they called her "Queen of El Lay," and offered a diagram of her supposed affairs and conquests. She'd made the best album of her career and in exchange she got slut-shamed in the biggest music magazine in America” – Pitchfork
Choice Cut: Carey
For the Roses
Release Date: November 1972
Label: Asylum
Producer: Joni Mitchell
Standout Tracks: Banquet/For the Roses/Blonde in the Bleachers
Buy: https://jonimitchell.com/Music/album.cfm?id=6
Stream: https://open.spotify.com/album/1yyPagl5Z7wE6rmJoqv8wj
Review:
“Joni’s lyrics are meaningful and self-reflective, like on ‘For The Roses’: “In some office sits a poet/And he trembles as he sings/And he asks some guy/To circulate his soul around/On your mark red ribbon runner.
Lyrically, she was pushing past contemporary pop and folk without giving in to female stereotypes surrounding “relationship songs” (or whatever you want to call them) in rock music. The defiant ‘Woman of Heart and Mind’ is an admission of personal flaws and at the same an ode to independence: “I’m looking for affection and respect, a little passion…you want stimulation, nothing more.
A quick look at online lists of 1972’s top chart hits should make us even more thankful for this album. There was the sticky patriotism of ‘American Pie’ and the excruciating electronic instrumental ‘Popcorn,’ which was covered by about a million different bands that year (why, why, WHY??) Amongst that ridiculousness Joni and Neil’s honesty, perhaps even naivety, of expression must’ve been refreshing. There were also Nilsson’s pukey/strangely-catchy ‘Without You,’ Derek & the Dominos’ great/self-indulgent ‘Layla’ and Young’s wonderful ‘Heart of Gold’. Shoot me for writing this, but all that manly philosophising about love and women and stuff can get annoying (yes, that reason for revisiting For The Roses is a tad biased). The boldness and brilliance of Joni’s lyricism should be considered in its own right, not simply categorised with Young, Dylan, etc. The way it recasts folk music in classical terms is beautiful, original, and…well, listen to the album…” – For Folk’s Sake
Choice Cut: You Turn Me On, I’m a Radio
The Hissing of Summer Lawns
Release Date: November 1975
Label: Asylum
Producer: Joni Mitchell
Standout Tracks: Edith and the Kingpin/The Hissing of Summer Lawns/Shadows and Light
Buy: https://jonimitchell.com/music/album.cfm?id=9
Stream: https://open.spotify.com/album/3gUlFM3azK6ZIkKz1zK7Nj
Review:
“Mitchell never makes things simple. Nor needlessly complex. The music on these songs flows like water running downhill, switching this way or that not for the sake of it but because it must. Its course is unpredictable and ineluctable; once followed, it could not, you sense , have gone any other way. The same is true of the feelings and images it carries along. They are as plain and as complicated as the lives they invoke. So there is no easy dichotomy whereby women at liberty are happier than women trapped by men, or by themselves. Freedom has its own hazards. “Since I was seventeen/I’ve had no one over me,” snarls the narrator of ‘Don’t Interrupt The Sorrow’, the scene of a fierce and terse battle of the sexes in which ancient, Abrahamic patterns of domineering and resistance play out via the mores of the day. Religion clutches at everything. ‘Out of the fire like Catholic saints/Comes Scarlett and her deep complaint.” Woman as something wounded. Woman as something bloody and unbowed. Woman as something red, aflame and dangerous. This is ‘Shades of Scarlett Conquering’. A lambent piano ballad, invoking Gone With The Wind and depicting a creature of unblinking will: ‘It is not easy to be brave/Walking around in so much need... Cast iron and frail/With her impossibly gentle hands/and her blood-red fingernails.’ Mitchell unfolds the femme fatale from the inside, in the most delicate and ingenious reverse origami, and makes you quiver at the truth of it.
The Hissing Of Summer Lawns closes even more anomalously than it opens, with ‘Shadows And Light’, a breathtaking choral and synth meditation; a Gregorian chant made so modern that, after 45 years and countless hommages, it still sounds as if it is beaming in on a mainline from the future, in a steady rush of ideas and sound. Again, Mitchell pulls in and juxtaposes images, this time creating a gorgeously tempered aural collage. It is a song about meaning, about the futility of the binary, about the way meaning itself hides in shades and creases. It is among the most extraordinary four minutes in the history of popular music. You can take it as an epilogue for the album; a commentary on all that’s gone before; a guide to how to hear it. It certainly works that way. It also stands entirely alone. As, amid her hordes of disciples and imitators, does Joni Mitchell - and never in more enrapturing fashion than on this subtle marvel of an album” – The Quietus
Choice Cut: In France They Kiss on Main Street
The Underrated Gem
Clouds
Release Date: 1st May, 1969
Label: Reprise
Producers: Joni Mitchell, Paul A. Rothchild
Standout Tracks: Tin Angel/Roses Blue/Shadows and Light
Buy: https://jonimitchell.com/music/album.cfm?id=3
Stream: https://open.spotify.com/album/03iFLgmgkLT7X5gnXVPID5
Review:
“Clouds is a stark stunner, a great leap forward for Joni Mitchell. Vocals here are more forthright and assured than on her debut and exhibit a remarkable level of subtle expressiveness. Guitar alone is used in accompaniment, and the variety of playing approaches and sounds gotten here is most impressive. "The Fiddle and the Drum," a protest song that imaginatively compares the Vietnam-era warmongering U.S. government to a bitter friend, dispenses with instrumental accompaniment altogether. The sketches presented of lovers by turns depressive ("Tin Angel"), roguish ("That Song About the Midway"), and faithless ("The Gallery") are vividly memorable. Forthright lyrics about the unsureness of new love ("I Don't Know Where I Stand"), misuse of the occult ("Roses Blue"), and mental illness ("I Think I Understand") are very striking. Mitchell's classic singer/songwriter standards "Chelsea Morning" and "Both Sides Now" respectively receive energetically vibrant and warmly thoughtful performances. Imaginatively unusual and subtle harmonies abound here, never more so in her body of work than on the remarkable "Songs to Aging Children Come," which sets floridly impressionistic lyrics to a lovely tune that is supported by perhaps the most remarkably sophisticated chord sequence in all of pop music. Mitchell's riveting self-portrait on the album's cover is a further asset. This essential release is a must-listen.- and never in more enrapturing fashion than on this subtle marvel of an album” – AllMusic
Choice Cut: Chelsea Morning
The Latest/Final Album
Shine
Release Date: 25th September, 2007
Labels: Hear Music/Universal
Producer: Joni Mitchell
Standout Tracks: One Week Last Summer/Bad Dreams/Shine
Buy: https://jonimitchell.com/music/album.cfm?id=28
Stream: https://open.spotify.com/album/2U5MjSQ07NGHV7rCLfSU6G
Review:
“Meditative, graceful and becalmed are surprising adjectives, given the prevailing subject matter. Mitchell has said she was provoked out of retirement by the war on terror and looming ecological catastrophe, and a sense of impending doom is never far away. She's hardly the first artist in recent times to make with the End Is Nigh sign, but her response is the diametric opposite of the Arcade Fire's sturm-und-drang or Thom Yorke's anguished finger-pointing. In Hana she suggests we "tackle the beast alone with its tenacious teeth", and there's a sense of fight about the closing rewrite of Rudyard Kipling's If, but more often the tone is not so much one of defiance as a disquieting acceptance of fate. You hear it in the beautiful ballad If I Had A Heart in its chilling refrain of "bad dreams are good in the great plan", and in the echoing drift of the title track, which comes up with a litany of modern-day ills, but never raises its voice in anger.
The sense of an artist roused by the fear that we're all going to hell in a handcart, only to discover that it may be too late and there's nothing we can do to avert disaster, gives much of Shine its emotional heft.
Sanctimony is a condition to which the musical denizens of Laurel Canyon were always prone - in his twenties, Graham Nash was already loftily instructing the world how to Teach their Children - but the urge to wag fingers arises only once. There's a hint of I-told-you-so smugness about revisiting her 1970 eco-anthem Big Yellow Taxi, but that's not the reason the re-recording backfires. Listening to it, you notice there's a sparkiness about the lyric - "they took all the trees, put 'em in a tree museum" - noticeably absent elsewhere: This Place's "money makes the trees come down" suddenly sounds a bit clunky and laboured.
Ultimately, that's a minor quibble in the face of a strange, intoxicating and unsettling album, idiosyncratic enough to make you glad Joni Mitchell put her retirement on hold. Shine is an album worth spoiling the greatest flounce-out in rock history for” – The Guardian
Choice Cut: If I Had a Heart
The Joni Mitchell Book
Reckless Daughter: A Protective Biography of Joni Mitchell
Author: David Yaffe
Publication Date: 13th June, 2017
Publisher: Sarah Crichton Books
Review:
“Yaffe staunchly defends his subject from criticism; Rickie Lee Jones’s accusation that Mitchell “didn’t walk on the jazz side of life,” Yaffe writes, prompts an outraged rebuttal: “Rickie Lee Jones sang with a fake black accent. Wasn’t that pretentious?” Only at rare moments does the biographer let Mitchell’s dark side — evident, for example, in how pitiless she can be toward former lovers and spouses — speak for itself. Chuck Mitchell was a “major exploiter,” Leonard Cohen a “phony Buddhist” and “the high prince of envy.” Mitchell’s second husband, Larry Klein, was one of several “puffed-up dwarfs.” James Taylor “was incapable of affection. He was just a mess.”
Uncritical admiration can make “Reckless Daughter” seem like a 400-page fan letter, though one certainly prefers Yaffe’s approach to that of biographers who despise their subjects. Championing Mitchell, right or wrong, and trying to stay on her good side is not exactly the same as taking her seriously as a composer and performer. Ultimately, it hardly matters. The person who wrote and sang “Blue,” “Court and Spark” and “Hejira” doesn’t need protection from readers who, decades after those albums appeared, remember Mitchell’s songs. Anthems not only of restlessness and heartbreak but also of intelligence, insight and courage, they are tributes to the power of music to imprint itself indelibly on the consciousness of its listeners” – The New York Times
Buy: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/31450894-reckless-daughter