Joni Mitchell: Classic or Dud

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

yeah i can't wait to finish the jann wenner bio and get into this

so classic, getting a lot of live vid recommendations on Youtube lately and I'm digging it, stunning guitar work here:

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

that yaffe biog was so so so so good

man that train song could just slip into Hejira

Christ she can just play her ass off and comes out so in control standing alone & unaccompanied with an electric guitar and owns the entire room playing some ridiculous alembic style thing...this is one of those performances where it's like I can't even believe it was broadcast over television. her presentation is completely managed and the lighting was probably to specifics but it comes off so real & present & both unpretentious (because undecorated) and pretentious (because Joni is a little pretentious always)...you can get so lost in the guitar, who knows what that low tuning is but then she hits those chorus lines and you're all the way inside the tune, the story, the moment like it was just happening right in front of you instead of representing a lifetime of growth & practice & discipline.

"Sex Kills" is not, to be clear, at the level of "Just Like This Train," but her performance below slays:

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

I can definitely see how Prince would be inspired by her style

Hence why Joni's always been one of my favourite guitarists - "The Wolf That Lives In Lindsey" should be played loudly anytime someone mistakenly tries to dismiss her for the usual 'Big Yellow Taxi' related assumptions and whatnot. She could've gone into ambient/drone directions and held her own imo - Eno said in an interview once that he liked For The Roses and would've liked to work with her.

In that 'Just Like This Train' clip she's playing a Parker Fly guitar with a Roland synth pickup on it that ran into a processor that would reproduce different tunings without her having to actually re-tune, which is a godsend if you've gone through as many tunings as she has. The tuning is CGDFCE - I've copped tons of tuning ideas and things from her over the years and one of the consistent things she does is to have the low e tuned pretty low to get that heavy percussive accent to her chords.

it's C&S. I didn't know!

Joni Mitchell – Court And Spark

An almost perfect album. Apart from one mistake – there's a joke song on it. I think jokes should never be on records, they just don't last. The record is such an incredibly serious record, it's one of the most grown-up records ever made in that the things she's talking about and thinking about are such serious and complicated emotional situations. It's one of the only records where I actually care about the lyrics. I really listen to the lyrics and think about what she's trying to say. I've always said that country music is grown-up and she came more out of country than out of pop. Whereas pop is always about the problems of adolescence really, hooking up with someone and whether she really likes you or not, when you get to country music it's about mortgages and divorce and things like that [laughs]. It seems to me to be about real-life, grown-up issues and so seems much more interesting to me lyrically.

Yes. In a way this breaks all the other rules of all my other choices [laughs]. It's incredibly complex. I remember buying this album when it came out in 1974 because I know it had a big impact on what I was working on at the time, which was Another Green World. When I heard this record I really thought that I've got to change what I'm doing. But the change was actually to do with recording practices as much as anything else. It is the best engineered album you've ever heard. The engineer Henry Lewy was obviously one of those great engineers like John Wood who just really understood sound and really understood how you could have that frequency there but not that one so you just shave that little bit of frequency off and you leave room for another one. These alchemists of sound. I'm sure he would have been working in the same studio for a long time and knew exactly how it worked and how it sounded. It was a set of circumstances that all came together correctly, her amazing songwriting talent and that gentleness of that Canadian feeling, rather than that American feeling, so there's restraint and slight self-effacement about it, a modesty about it. Then when you mix it with all these super flash session players, it makes it even more modest.

I wish the outro to help me would just keep going, it's a wonderful shift

xp dropping some knowledge right there!

what interview is that from? I never read that before - I was referencing the long Lester Bangs article that was published way after the fact through PSF: http://www.furious.com/perfect/bangseno.html

"had he heard the new Joni Mitchell album of songs co-written with Charlie Mingus? "No, I bought it but immediately gave it away. I'd like to record with Joni Mitchell. I like her in that one period: Blue, For the Roses, Court and Spark. Since then, I don't know--Weather Report strike me as all people who are continually promising with no delivery.""

damn that letterman video! she is such a master

great eno quotes on C&S

I can't really fault that opinion, xp. Weather Report is ridiculously uneven and that Joni Mingus album is, idk, I hate to say "bad" but it's not the most enjoyable listening.