The Joni Mitchell - Best Album POLL

Summer Lawns, easy. Weirdly, I have the exact same top 3 as Geir. Thought I could rely on him to complain about The Jungle Line being "insufficently melodic".

"Hejira" although really there's a few of these records that are so good that rating one over another is kind of pointless.

Blue because it touches my very soul and I know that sounds totally corny.

m@tt, please tell me how you feel about the playing of jaco pastorius purely on joni's mid-period work. including his solo spots on shadows + light tour if you wish:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fOqR84PtctA

jaco shreds

had to double check it wasn't an StS vid..............

Yeah, see, I love Blue -- my first Joni, etc -- but I don't play it as much as C&S, Hissing of Summer Lawns, or Hejira.

Exactly.

Automatic thread bump. This poll is closing tomorrow.

Automatic thread bump. This poll's results are now in.

pffffffff

I don't understand why Ladies & Court are so low. :(

That is the right answer.

i probably would have ended up voting for "hissing of summer lawns" though honestly why choose?

btw what do people think of "both sides now"--the song?

these results still seem surprising.

I love "Both Sides, Now", and think it's the best song on Clouds. Oh, those vocal melodies: I swoon each time (listening now).

i would've thrown "shadows and light" a vote

the Lincoln Center (I think - big public-tv presentation w/orchestra) of "Both Sides Now" took my breath away.

also, thank you this thread for helping me realize what I need to listen to tonight in this faraway place.

YOU KNOW IT SURE IS HARD TO LEAVE YOU CAREY BUT IT'S REALLY NOT MY HOME

HOPE THEY FINALLY FIXED YOUR AUTOMOBILE/HOPE IT'S BETTER WHEN WE MEET AGAIN, BABY

You're gonna come now or you're gonna come later.

i like glen campbell's syrupy version of "both sides, now"

I'M GONNA MAKE A LOT OF MONEY/AND THEN I'M GONNA QUIT THIS CRAZY SCENE

what does it gotta feel like to know that you wrote this album

I guess I seem ungrateful / with my teeth sunk in the hand / that brings me things / I really can't give up just yet

The version of "Both Sides Now" on Joni's (otherwise) covers album with the same name from oh maybe five/ten years ago is pretty amazing. I dunno if there's ever been a song written by someone when they're young that is better suited to a wistful wizened "cover" by the same artist 30+ years on. It simply drips resonance.

My mother, who is not a music snob, became fascinated with that 2000 version of "Both Sides Now" after hearing it in Love Actually; she would play it over and over again, deeply moved. I'm pretty fond of it myself – the best use of Joni's nicotine-scarred pipes.

weird that Clouds got zero votes here... Both Sides Now is an amazing tune

I'll rep for Night Ride Home any day - I get the feeling most hardcore Joni fans will too - the songs are almost all great, the production serves her deepened voice, the groove is really pleasant & great; the album's well-titled in that regard.

it's a little too sting for me

I adore "Come In From The Cold"; the title track's okay.

man thought court and spark would get more votes

was gonna say!

I dunno, Court & Spark is a great album and it's probably a top 3 for lots of people, but I suspect anyone who really digs that vibe and is a big joni fan would like Hissing... more.

Likewise Clouds and Blue, I think.

but I suspect anyone who really digs that vibe and is a big joni fan would like Hissing... more.

I think this is true for me.

Been listening to Night Ride Home a lot - strikes me as an almost archetypal late-career autumnal album, recalling what you love about the artist's earlier work but with a sepia-toned faded elegance. Love the gentle, warm, 80s-into-90s production and the evocation of Hejira's loping jazz feel - esp. on the title track, "Passion Play", "Cherokee Louise", "Slouching Towards Bethlehem" and "Nothing Can Be Done". Not sure how I feel about the recurrent use of vocal vamps on some of the other tracks; Joni always seems to run into trouble when she tries to borrow soul motifs.

I don't have it any more but my memory of Turbulent Indigo was of it being much less pretty than this and much more didactic.

Okay, kinda obsessed with this album now. Been listening on repeat since that last post.

Yes - I went through a period of obsession with Night Ride Home when I got into it. To me one thing about it is that while there's a great range to the songs - some more uptempo, some loping, some lighter & some darker - the overall tone, the shading I guess or coloration?, seems really consistent to me. This single dark and rich tone dominates - to me it's a dense blue-grey maybe. I know of few records better suited to headphones in the middle of the night.

How does it figure in terms of producton as a sticking point, I haven't heard it really since it's release and have a hard time finding a way through the other eigties albums mainly for that reason.

i haven't listened to it for ages. of course i haven't got here in berlin (i have moved). if my memory serves me well i preferred it to the one before, which was dull. but i think i liked "turbulent indigo", the one after better. i should definitely rip my vinyl albums asap to find out.

I know of few records better suited to headphones in the middle of the night.

Yes. I just bought some new headphones and just walking home on a wintry night (lol southern hemisphere) is perfect for this.

How does it figure in terms of producton as a sticking point, I haven't heard it really since it's release and have a hard time finding a way through the other eigties albums mainly for that reason.

Bits of the 80s inhere: there's some subtle tribal (or quasi-tribal) percussion on some tracks ("Slouching Towards Bethlehem"; "Nothing Can Be Done"), like a really quiet adult-contemporary version of The Commodores' "Night Shift" or Fleetwood Mac's "Caroline" - but much softer and warmer (which I think is as much a sign of the broader swing towards naturalism generally as the 80s turned into the 90s as a conscious decision) - but mostly the sound is built on spacey guitar, ghostly insubstantial keyboards and some jazz horns - very much what you'd expect Hejira to sound like if produced in 1991 rather than 1976.

But at any rate although it sounds like a 1991 record, it's very much a not the kind of record where the production overpowers the songwriting or singing - my word for all of it would be "sympathetic". The songs I like a bit less ("The Windfall", "Ray's Dad's Cadillac" - and this is relative) are more because of the vocals or the lyrics than the productions/arrangements.

I thought "Come In From The Cold" was too reliant on its chorus at first, but it's one of those tunes that seems (oddly) less tuneful the more you listen to it, and more exploratory and just... Is there a single word to describe that sense you get from some songs where subtle reiterations and shifts build on themselves to create a sense of... not intensity, but rather of sweep, like watching a person's face change through timelapse photography (actually this is almost the subject matter of the song so maybe that's not so odd). It's got that same sense of a sweep through a person's life and emotional landscape that makes "Amelia" and "Hejira" and "Song For Sharon" and "Refuge of the Roads" - this kind of thing feels perhaps uniquely Joni to me.

Those really amorphous, gauzy 1991 keyboards actually work so well for this, the way they seem to echo and shimmer around Joni's guitar to create a vibe of emotional waxing and waning, a subtle accenting more affecting for its lack of solidity.

I agree -- you get a sense that she's shaped the music to respond to the pull of memories.

Re Turbulent Indigo vs Night Ride Home:

I'm the opposite I guess in that I used to have Turbulent Indigo like 15 years ago but never took to it much - stuff like "Sex Kills" and "Not Too Blame" were too didactic and embittered, too much like Joni in interviews. On Night Ride Home the early stages of the nicotine thickening of her voice gives it this fabulous sense of regret and persistence through sorrow, but with none of that bitterness, it's a really gentle portrayal of middle-aged wisdom. Even "Cherokee Louise", which you'd expect to be kind of browbeating, is so evocative and empathetic. That bit where she sings "... I know where she is..." gives me chills.

It's been years since I've heard "sex Kills" (I owned Misses), but I remember its arrangement as a chillier iteration of the NRH sound; its plain-spoken didacticism is closer to Dog Eat Dog, actually, and is maybe a more successful attempt at capturing that ethos and sound.

I should probably track the album down again, it's over ten years since I last heard it.

Bits of the 80s inhere: there's some subtle tribal (or quasi-tribal) percussion on some tracks ("Slouching Towards Bethlehem"; "Nothing Can Be Done"), like a really quiet adult-contemporary version of The Commodores' "Night Shift" or Fleetwood Mac's "Caroline"

Really feel like starting a thread about this sorta stuff...

Add: George Michael's "One More Try"

"Passion Play" is one of my favourite songs ever right now. SO GOOD. Could anyone else right this kind of song?

ugh write.

Thanks to steep discounts on Record Store Day, I got a promo mint condition copy of Don Juan's Reckless Daughter yesterday. I've accepted the received wisdom that this thing is an outlier in Mitchell's oeuvre but a few tracks sound like Hejira outtakes only this time Pastorious is mixed too high or his playing is too busy.

I'd love some commentary as I absorb this thing.

Cotton Avenue and Paprika Plains are all time, really. It's interesting, but not a failing that the bass is the second most prominent instrument after Joni's voice, there are also sections where ether are two basslines.

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