Joni Mitchell: Classic or Dud

Bought Mingus yesterday on vinyl and it's great cover is supplemented by a nice book/gatefold type packaging with liner notes and more paintings. It's lovely.

Thread bump reminded me that she's going to die this year

thanks for that comment, really adding value there

Thirty of my favorites.

no paprika plains, no credibility.

i am exaggerating, i know, great list.

when I play "Paprika Plains" it's pleasant. I may have to keep trying.

on Facebook Tim F mused that my Summer Lawns picks bore the biggest similarities w/C&S, which wasn't my intention.

my no. 1 would be "the boho dance" but what do i know

i love blue and it was the first joni record i heard but yea court and spark is what did it for me too. this resonated w/ me:

A vinyl copy of Court and Spark borrowed from the A/V library did it: ten perfect songs that like their creator couldn’t make up their minds about being narratives, autobiography, journal entries, or reasons to flaunt exquisite woodwind arrangements.

the opening minute of the song 'hissing of summer lawns' makes my jaw drop every time. the sort of cool funk of the opening bars and the flute-like sound of her voice over the first few lines

the song that really first really sold me on her though, that doesn't seem to get that much attention, is People's Patties. Something about those harmonies. So bold and stark.

yes, people's parties is an all-timer, brilliant chord changes and the most perfectly recorded acoustic guitar i have ever heard

Prince obv studied the outro "eeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee"

People's Patties

haha just noticed that

Dan Chiasson is a poetry critic for the New Yorker, but/and here his often astute, deftly detailed clarity evokes the musical experience, incl. why artists and listeners bother, so much better than many full-time music writers can manage:
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2017/10/09/joni-mitchells-openhearted-heroism (title and sub a bit much, but may not have been his choice).

Some great reading, I didn't know that "A Case of You" was about Leonard Cohen. Has anyone read that new biography "Reckless Daughter" by David Yaffe already?

drew a map of canada, ooooooh canadaaaaaaaaa

The piece in New Yorker is great. I'd also recommend two more recent ones:

Chords of Inquiry: http://www.bookforum.com/inprint/024_03/18474
The Unknowable Joni Mitchell: https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2017/11/the-unknowable-joni-mitchell/540618/

By the way, the fact that she released a run of Blue > For the Roses > Court and Spark > The Hissing of Summer Lawns > Hejira in just five years never fails to amaze me. What an artist.

i know this comes up every time a 2001-era ilx thread gets bumped, but ilx really was gross and vile back then, wasn't it?

Do you mean the discussion of her hotness?

For the Roses is the one I'm most likely to put on nowadays, partly just because I completely overlooked it before. "Do you wanna con-tact somebody first?"

morning, morgantown
buy your dreams a dollar down

XP - Cold Blue Steel & Sweet Fire is so great, one of my favourites.

I listened to Night Ride Home this morning; album title otm. top shelf album imo

By the way, the fact that she released a run of Blue > For the Roses > Court and Spark > The Hissing of Summer Lawns > Hejira in just five years never fails to amaze me. What an artist.

― ˈʌglɪɪst preɪ, Saturday, October 14, 2017 10:27 AM (two hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

otm

The statement that "A Case of You" is about Cohen is speculation. Mitchell has never said who it's about, and it could just as easily be Graham Nash.

yeah but who would YOU rather bed?

I don't know anything about Nash but the Skakespearean line "I am as constant as the northern star" alone points so much into the direction of Cohen that it hurts. The bitter tasting wine, Canada, the line about love touching souls, it all makes a lot of sense. Thinking about it, it must be Cohen she is singing about.

I thought "A Case of You" was about James Taylor

or maybe she was singing about dr. pepper

Maybe it's one of the great songs of all time and I'm not worried about backstory

thank u ^^^

NV otm

Gotta admit that my stomach flips whenever this thread gets revived.

I've been thinking lately that I feel like there's been a sea change in my lifetime where people finally stopped thinking of her as "great female artist" in that asterisked sort of way and more universally accepted her as just great artist period. Not sure if that's the culture or just the maturing of my own social circles.

Yes and no. We can't ignore what our simple male minds can just glimpse sometimes, like Chiasson squinting hard at some of the experiences she dealt with in her songs, incl. what it was like to be a woman on stage in The Age of Rock---a litte tyme trip here, brace yourselves (though that won't really work, I just tried it before re-reading this)
http://www.robertchristgau.com/xg/bk-aow/airplane.php

Agree with man alive - great artist period

great piece: https://www.theringer.com/music/2017/10/16/16476254/joni-mitchell-pop-music-canon

https://pitchfork.com/thepitch/joni-mitchell-rarities-are-just-that-rare-here-are-some-of-the-best/

digging this tyler

i had never heard "hunter" - so good!

and that acoustic "edith," wow

thanks, man — yeah there is not a ton of unreleased Joni, but what's out there is pretty great. "Hunter" should really be better known.
you can get all of those hissing demos here: http://www.ousterhout.net/mp3/jm.html

yeah those Hissing demos are great

this obviously never came out ...

In November 2009, Rhino Entertainment will be releasing a Joni Mitchell box set. The 4CD/1DVD-package will have over 85 songs, from the mid-sixties up to Joni's last album "Shine". Several unreleased songs and alternate versions will be included, plus very rare and previously unissued video performances spanning Joni's incomparable career. Joni will be contributing notes to the package and overseeing the photo edit and design.

Instead of traditional liner notes, Joni would like to invite the online Joni Mitchell-community to send in a statement of why they enjoy the music. It can be one sentence or a short paragraph and the best will be chosen for the liner notes for the project. It can be a personal experience with the music or why in general you like it.

Here are some notes from Joni herself on working the box set :

"The tapes from my first record have been in David Crosby's possession all these years - it's like a miracle that they didn't go up in smoke or something. And there are a lot of [unreleased] songs from back then that would be impossible for me to sing now - they're really ingenue works. There also are some bits of banter between Crosby and me on the first record. And there is in existence the fledgling flight of 'Both Sides Now' at the Second Fret in Philadelphia.

There are tracks from the Mingus album, which was cut with four of five different bands; with some of them I do better vocal performances. I wanted to come into jazz and take it somewhere. There are some tracks where I don't take it anywhere, that are just straight meat-and-potatoes jazz where I'm actually singing better than I did [on the commercially released tracks]. The album I put out is a little more out there.

There's a lot of other stuff back there as well. For instance, the first album was a conceptual album. I had so much material that the first side is called 'I Came To The City' and the second side is called 'Out Of The City & Down To The Seaside'. It's that same recurring theme: What are cities doing to nature? There are [unreleased] songs from that era, one of them called 'Jeremy', which is a nice song about a kid thrown into prison for pot.

There also are [unreleased songs with] pretty melodies and 'tunesmithy' lyrics. I've always been called a folk singer, from the time I made my first record. I've only recorded two folk songs in my whole career, but I used to sing folk songs before I began to write, and there are [tapes] of those - and that's kind of interesting. It's a piece of the evolution that's missing from [my] records."

wow, that Edith demo is fantastic

was there ever a Joni poll?

indeed

Oh I Wish I Had a POLL, I Could Skate Away On: The Joni Mitchell Tracks/Albums Results Thread (ILM ARTIST POLL #26)

nice, thanks!

maybe some time we can do another where Hejira wins

More cogent quotes and intriguing glosses from the new bio, incl. addiction and "her career-crippling love of jazz", so more than one addiction, maybe (sure, blame jazz, Rolling Stone). Zings of male stars, natch---I gotta get thishttp://www.rollingstone.com/music/news/joni-mitchell-on-exes-addictions-music-in-candid-biography-w511165
Maybe all these conversations w biographer give some plausibility to the flickering hope that she's recovered powers of speech, or was xpost scamming The Croz and others she didn't wanna talk to anymore.

Looks good. I’m not super versed in her career but she has some damn good songs and reading about rock stars and drugs in the 70s is always fun.

it really is