TS: Joni Mitchell v. Carole King

Alfred admit that you were high when you wrote this

I mean, I love the shit outta WYLMT, perfect song no question about it, but Joni Mitchell is a fuckin' emotional ninja - that first track on Hejira for example smokes WYLMT on its own turf, it's just a little oblique about it

If not, I'll choose Carole.

I think there's a different type of emotional manipulation (of the listener) at work in all three (Laura and Carole closer to eachother than either is to Joni, I think). Very little of Joni's stuff is directly sonically affecting in the way that "Will You Still Love Me Tomorrow" is (parts of Blue and a few of the soppy jazz flourishes in Hissing aside) - and certainly Laura is just on another planet when it comes to this sort of stuff.

With Joni it's very much about getting inside the persona of the songs, such that the more understated emotional-sonic effects Joni deploys generate more intensity than they otherwise would because you get a very specific sense of the meaning they're attached to. (e.g. in "Coyote" when she sings "now he's got a woman at home/he's got another woman down the hall/and he seems to want me anyway" - the self-deprecating surprise inflecting her voice in that last line just goes over your head a bit if you're not paying attention to the words she's singing, the story she's constructing).

(in other words, Joni "works" in a way that is much more "rockist")

joni mitchell is, i think, a far more effective performer than carole king. i find that i love carole king songs more as, i dunno, some assumed part of the pop-culture ether, standards which everyone knows and which sound best when they come on in the pub on a sunday afternoon - but i hardly ever listen to tapestry. whereas joni's performances are too distractingly intimate to be commonly held standards in the same way.

(just heard Bryan Ferry's cover of "Will You Still Love Me Tomorrow?" – WOW).

hence, Carole King is better...

literally can't