Joni Mitchell: Classic or Dud

^this

I think it's almost inevitable and will get worse: people my age for example read about Blue but aren't aware of any other JM "must haves", we check it out and like it but maybe don't feel the need to sample the rest of JM's back catalogue, then we recommend Blue to our friends or smugly reference it in a review of a more recent female singer-songwriter (e.g. "x is basically mining the same territory as Joni Mitchell did on Blue")...

I think it'd also be easy to read about how Joni went soft-jazz-pop subsequently and just assume that the material wouldn't be as strong - if only because there's still a bit of a prejudice against the kind of thing.

For critics, Blue is the point of comparison when it comes to spare, relatively confessional female singer-songwriter music.

So it's not just Blue standing in for other JM albums, but for a whole genre - a lot of the time the artists the comparison gets applied to sound a lot more like (e.g.) early Suzanne Vega.

having inherited my mother-in-law's near-complete collection of Joni Mitchell vinyl over the last year... Blue isn't even in like my top 3 fave albums of hers. I've never understood why its so canonical, it doesn't seem all that different from her other albums of that period/style.

I'm not saying it's deserving vis a vis her other albusm, but the canonisation makes sense:

1) The songwriting is better than on the previous albums

2) It's the point where she completed the shift away from a folk-storytelling lyrical style into a confessional lyrical style (I get the feeling it was also the first album where she wasn't using songs already several years old)

3) After that her material became too obtuse (For The Roses), jazz-pop (Court & Spark) or both (Hissing of Summer Lawns) to have across-the-board appeal to people into the style that album represents (confessional folk-pop).

The shift to For The Roses is pretty dramatic I think - even the relatively confessional songs ("See You Sometime", "Lessons In Survival", "Let The Wind Carry Me") are very oddly structured and filled with sudden disruptive jumps, as if the jittery nervousness of Joni's mind had breached the boundaries of her vocals and lyrics and started to distort the song-structures themselves.

e.g. in "Lessons In Survival" when, early on, she suddenly bursts out, "YouNEEDtobelieveinsomethingonceIcouldinOUUUUUUUURlove" - this is fabulous but probably a bit of a challenge for people looking for classic singalong songs like "River" or "A Case of You".

Lately I just steer people towards Hejira or Court and Spark (which, despite being her best-seller, is weirdly underrated).

Second side of Court and Spark lets it down a bit, for me. I've been playing Blue a lot this week, not because I don't know her other stuff but because it really is that good.

JM is great, despite the preoccupation people seem to have with Blue and nothing else (not that Blue isn't great and all, but its getting that weird over-cannonized vibe these days)

― moved to the Home of Rest For Horses at Speen (jjjusten), Wednesday, May 13, 2009 11:49 PM (Yesterday)

I came to Blue not expecting anything. The only reason I had it in the first place was that two people bought me Psychocandy for my birthday one year and a girl who shares my birthday told me that two people had bought her Blue for hers and that we should trade. It is the album I have successfully turned the most people onto but I became so obsessed with it that it has made me completely uninterested in hearing anything else by her in case it breaks the spell somehow. Usually I am super obsessive about bands or whatever when I enjoy anything as much as I have in the past enjoyed this. Also it is so tied in my head to the last few months of school and the guys I used to hang out with and play guitar.

Blue and, say, Hejira could be from two different artists - over a short period of time she'd changed vocally, lyrically, in terms of song structure (the songs on Hejira rarely have choruses, often just a single-line refrain and sometimes not even that), and in terms of musical style.

I love both albums (particularly Hejira) but in many ways I don't think of them as relating to one another very much.

Jesus, I just got Court & Spark + Summer Lawns & one of those infrequent but pleasant 'how the fuck did I not find out about this sooner?' moments.

I had that same experience maybe two years ago.

2003 was my wake up year, crunched Summer Lawns / Hejira / Don Juan's Reckless Daughter down to one cassette and it never left the car

I assumed for years Joni Mitchell wld be some chick solo w/an acoustic which I'm sure there are good examples of but not a thing I dig at all generally. I heard 'Help Me' on the radio a few weeks ago and thought 'hey maybe that was Joni Mitchell,' lord knows how. And it was, and today I am happy for it. She's got so much stuff going on in each song, so good, like if Kate Bush was a creepy old lady who made you eat dusty circus peanuts when you visited her house as opposed to K8 who would, I don't know, let you paint her dog or something.

wait till you hear the last minute of side 1 of 'Mingus', that's when I got to feeling like I trusted her

I mean, that album's kind of awkward, and probably not the next best stop, but the weird parts are so weird & by the time 'Dry Cleaner From Des Moines' comes on...

'Don Juan's' is the one where she really lets it hang out.

I sometimes have a daydream that 10 years out of law school I'm the guy in Free Man in Paris.

I guess it's sort of weird to fantasize about being unhappy in your future job, but that's the kind of guy I am.

I think post-Blue Joni Mitchell and Steely Dan have been my big -- "Oh, there really is great music that you don't appreciate until you're older" discoveries.

She's got so much stuff going on in each song, so good, like if Kate Bush was a creepy old lady who made you eat dusty circus peanuts when you visited her house as opposed to K8 who would, I don't know, let you paint her dog or something.

Do you mean Joni is the creepy old lady?

yeah I do

ok so vh1 classic is airing/just aired something called "BBC Crown Jewels" that is a just pre-blue live show w/joni mitchell and i am all aflutter and stunned. jesus christ, what an amazing mind-blowing singer/writer/performer.

In an interview, says she is ill and "fighting for her life."

==================================
Sun: Are you working on anything right now? You say you're probably canning the idea of a box set, but are you working on a new record right now?
Mitchell: I'm very ill, I'm fighting for my life.
Grand-Maitre: We're talking about a new ballet maybe, eh, Joni?
Mitchell: Yeah. We intend to do another one. But I've been very ill, so mainly I'm just trying to survive.
Sun: Oh really? I didn't know that, sorry. How are you doing?
Mitchell: Well, nobody knows.
Grand-Maitre: Let's stick to the ballet, John, ah?
Sun: Sorry about that. So what's the new ballet?
Mitchell: We don't know yet.
==================================

What a disheartening exchange. "Let's stick to the ballet, John, ah?"...sure, Joni's dying, but let's talk about this ballet!

Yeah, and then she comes back to the "I'm dying" bit several times but it's like she's in a whole different conversation. (She also identifies her ailment as Morgellons -- the Wikipedia entry on this is seriously o_O ...)

wikipedia page doesn't sound fatal...?

this is very upsetting news!

hang in there joni

Jesus. Joni is one of those litmus tests for me, if you don't like (some of) her stuff, then I think you probably don't have a very developed sense of music. Especially her period from Clouds to Mingus, though she's had some wonderful stuff later. I was listening to Summer Lawns last night and was reminded of just how fantastic a songwriter she is, musically adventurous and lyrically evocative. There's still about a third of that album I'm ambivalent about, but I appreciate what she's doing. My favorite song on the album would have to be "Harry's House/Centerpiece", which is a song with another song in it. I used to be bothered by the emergence of the cover of "Centerpiece" in the middle of such a fantastic song as Harry's House, but I appreciate it more now; she segues into it in a musical breakdown equivalent of a flashback on television to signify the earlier era in a relationship blah blah blah I'm sorry, did I ramble on there?

Anyway. Classic.

Like a dragonfly on a tomb - Those lyrics paint such a clear and strong -albiet imagined on my part- picture of the corporate 70s

http://www.tvsquad.com/2011/02/22/tina-fey-joni-mitchell-song-paints-and-brushes/

Travelogue is so damn good, but for some reason it's overwhelmingly plaintive and sad and it becomes really difficult to listen to more than a few songs at once.

Travelogue always seemed better in my mind that in reality - whenever I put it on, I remember how corny it often sounds

http://www.tvsquad.com/2011/02/22/tina-fey-joni-mitchell-song-paints-and-brushes/

lol I totally missed this. awesome. "Saskatchewwaaaaaaaaan"

I heard “Woodstock” the song again the other day. I found it very sad, both her plaintive voice over that tense, minor-key melody and the childlike optimism of her lyrics, which I imagine would be burned alive by audiences if they were written today. The bombers turning into butterflies image, a lot of listeners today would find laughably naive, and there’s something of that song’s bare hopefulness lost to today’s reflexive cynicism, my own included, that I find depressing.

She does some of her spookiest background vocals on that song. I love 'em.

She tapes her regrets / To the microphone stand

oh man oh man.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y9KyBdPeKHg

looool

oh look it's let's-revive-seventies-songwriters-threads day

it is? i was just listening to for the roses and was struck (again) by that line.

the song kills me btw

1. The completely unique sound she gets out of an acoustic guitar on "Blue". 'A Case Of You' = classic.

--That's because it's a dulcimer overdubbed over acoustic guitar.

i have been reluctant to listen beyond the 70s albums, but night ride home is great.

P4k's review of the new boxset. Pretty good piece, I think.

http://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/17269-the-studio-albums-1968-1979/

Man, are we going to have to wait for her to peg-out before they can release the big 70's box set with all the juicy demos and unreleased songs that *must* be locked away? I've only ever heard the Blue era track 'Hunter' and the Demo's Of Summer Lawns bootleg and they are both ace.

I would assume she's been careful to destroy as much of the stuff she doesn't want released as she can, and good for her.

^^^ every artist shd torch everything they don't want some archive-grubber dragging out when they're dead

...bbbut the Summer Lawns demos are great.

Are you assuming she cares about such things, what's so henious about putting out unreleased material?