The Joni Mitchell - Best Album POLL

I figure folks like Iovine are really good “project managers” and music biz schmoozers who know all the right technical ppl, musicians to hire? And keep things “on track” or whatever

But it’s funny when you read about Kreator or The Eagles hating their relatively clean cut by-the-book producers and getting along better when they switched to producers as rowdy as themselves

Get over it!

To be fair to Jimmy Iovine he definitely took the teaboy/ assistant engineer-Engineer-Producer path and ascended it pretty quickly but there are plenty of producers who lucked out probably because they’re a ‘good hang’. Never been entirely sure what Rick Rubin does exactly but probably just me…

I think he produced "Reign In Blood" and some hip-hop in the 80s, iirc

Yeah but he doesn’t come from an engineering or musician background…he admitted it in an interview

:) I was being cheeky

I bristled last year when there was a media blip about that Rubin interview, whereby people were claiming he was some kind of a fraud. (If only people know what role movie producers play in the creation of films, people who are basically organizers and bookkeepers and bankrollers more than directors/actors/writers/editors!)

The fact too that Eno got sideswiped by some commentators as if the only thing he does in studio is sit in a corner with his box of cards; ridiculous!

Rubin may be known, at his most detached, for being “the producer who doesn’t even come into the studio, just stays home getting blazed and listens to the day’s mixes on MP3s through stock Mac headphones and replies ‘yes’ or ‘no’,” but he does do much more than that; at the very least, he owns a fantastic studio filled with fantastic gear and staffed by fantastic techs. (I haven’t worked with him, though I’ve met him, and immediately wanted to spend all my days in the same room with him; I have worked at his studio with his gear and his techs and it was “all that”, as promised.)

It’s true that there is little-to-no comparison between a Rubin and, say, a Rundgren (or a Timbaland or an Antonoff) but that doesn’t mean his production style is illegitimate or fraudulent imo

yeah Eno's almost always played instruments with his clients.

I may have related this story before, because it’s one of my favourites, but, Laurie Anderson on Eno, paraphrased from memory:

“We only worked together once, I believe, but it was a memorable experience. Eno was at the board, and we were recording. Suddenly one of the channels started acting up. Eno got so excited, like, “ooooh! A PROBLEM!” That something like a channel failing would not compromise the recording experience, but rather enrich it.”

whereby people were claiming he was some kind of a fraud

still inexhaustibly making that claim wherever & whenever his name arises

if I die and you want to talk to me after just stand over my grave and praise Rick Rubin, I'll be right up

rubin's also gone out of his way to cultivate this red hot chili peppers yoda ~vibe sherpa~ bullshit, like claiming on 60 minutes he doesn't know how to operate a board which is verifiably false

https://povmagazine.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/03/Tom_Petty-scaled.jpg

i mostly hate the fact that he's this modern day buddha when in actuality during the 80s he was a coked up little shit, as kate schellenbach attested to in the beastie boys book

Maybe he "he doesn't know how to operate a board" the way Eno claims he "doesn't play an instrument" - he's a talented amateur rather than a technician.

Sorry I sidetracked the thread…The Thomas Dolby interview is great though

Wish that Dolby interview was available somewhere other than Spotify. I ain't goin' there.

his autobio (The Speed Of Sound) has all the details, his summary is "despite all that, I cannot fault Joni"

-TD otm

Inspired by this thread I have been going back thru Joni's 80s and 90s work, Night Ride Home towers over the 80s stuff, but I had not stopped to appreciate how much "Passion Play" is a direct reworking of "Hejira", even down to the arrangement, and of course riffs on a lyric from "Coyote". Has she ever talked about the decision to revisit that song?

also - great cover fgti, nailed it

omg you saw that? Thank you. Honestly my fave Joni song after “…Richard”

Yeah I love fgti's version too.

This thread always makes me return to Dog Eat Dog to try to engage with it more/better, but I always founder. I discussed this some time ago upthread, but it's not the production that I have an issue with (in fact I really like the production), but the approach to songwriting. The songs feel fragmented, a series of disconnected vamps assembled at almost random - this sounds like an interesting quality in theory, but it leans hard away from one of Joni's key strengths as a songwriter, which is how she can use the connective tissue within her songs to build intensity and momentum, whereas these songs don't have much in the way of connective tissue (maybe one reason for the heavy-handed subject matter is to provide a narrative through line to make up for the arrangements and performances).

Using "Passion Play" as a counterexample, the first half of the song is structured very repetitively melodically, so that when she first introduces the variation on the chorus ("Oh, enter the multitudes / the walking wounded / they come to this diver of the heart of the multitudes") it's like a sudden deepening and intensification of what was already there, even though the shift is quite subtle.

And - a quality Night Ride Home shares with Hejira - because of the sheer density of her lyrics, each iteration of a verse melody needs to be slightly different to accommodate the syllables and phrasing, the stresses falling on different words and notes in order to tell the story effectively.

Both albums capture this very evocative sense of changing same.

"Fiction" strikes me as the DED song whose arrangement matches the synths.

Yes definitely has the Dolby touch…’Shiny Toys’ and ‘Lucky Girl’ also both have an unmistakable Dolby vibe…hadn’t listened to DED in years but surprised by how well it stands up…possibly my fave of her 80’s output

because of the sheer density of her lyrics, each iteration of a verse melody _needs_ to be slightly different to accommodate the syllables and phrasing, the stresses falling on different words and notes