The Joni Mitchell - Best Album POLL

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.

a promo mint condition copy of Don Juan's Reckless Daughter

For some reason this makes me smile. Isn't DJRD one of the most available second-hand records out there? Not disparaging the purchase, just amused, i.e. "I found a promo mint copy of The Final Cut"

agreed with poxen, those things are all over the place! Still nice to find an unplayed copy though.

Its immaculate condition – I doubt it'd been played once – is telling.

"Paprika Plains" has revealed its secrets to me.

SPOILER ALERT

after another long session with night ride home i decided to listen to her '80s records for the first time. wild things run fast feels slight but could also grow deeper the more i listen to it. dog eat dog, though! this is great! i love all of these synth textures

I suppose I should finally listen to Dog Eat Dog

I bought DED on cassette for $3 at a Best Buy in the summer of '98. "Fiction" is my favorite of the didactic songs, and the single "Good Friends" folds the Thomas Dolby filigrees into a fraught, shimmering minor classic. "Impossible Dreamer" isn't bad. The rest is failed experimentation. You can also hear her voice beginning to change.

how do you feel about chalk mark in a rain storm alfred? was going to listen to that one today

too many guests, not enough songs.

NRH is where she realizes that sound.

listening to it now i can definitely see that. still enjoying the explicitly '80s touches. dog eat dog in retrospect is a pretty big outlier in her catalogue

"lakota" is both embarrassing and gorgeous

hahahahahahahahahahahahahahaha "dancin' clown"

Night Ride Home is so good it's not possible. I feel like i'll even need to listen to Shine at some point on the off chance it's an unrecognised minor classic.

yeah night ride home kills me. been listening to it around 1 am every night for the past week and it goes so many places without moving very much at all

meanwhile clear standout of chalk mark is "the beat of black wings" which is fucking unbelievable

also janet jackson's favourite song

I like the Peter Gabriel duet.

My friend Inskeep wrote this for Stylus years ago:

http://www.stylusmagazine.com/articles/on_second_thought/joni-mitchell-chalk-mark-in-a-rain-storm.htm

Interesting take but he makes it sound as if Joni went straight from folkie to overproduced aging boomer

her politics are pretty simpleminded on those late records; she's casting aspersions all over the place. it's tiresome, even when the music is occasionally seductive. although it's pretty obvious her melodic facility nearly dried up some time around 1979.

Thanks to Tim F and John D's efforts, I've come round to the entirety of Night Ride Home, one of my favorite autumnal releases.

Yeah, Night Ride Home is a wonderful record.

So the whole time I've been in New York I've had "Song For Sharon" in my head on and off (though haven't actually listened to it). Only Joni could so deeply and indelibly imprint herself in my brain that I can be standing on a subway platform and suddenly think, "A woman I knew just drowned herself / the well was deep and muddy / she was just shaking off futility / or punishing somebody / my friends were calling up all day yesterday / all emotions and abstraction / it seems we all live so close to that line, and / so far from satisfaction..."

i had "free man in paris" in my head all day today

although it's pretty obvious her melodic facility nearly dried up some time around 1979.

given that some of the best melodies she ever wrote are on night ride home, lol

"come in from the cold" is so good

One of her best ever.