Joni Mitchell reached her commercial high point with Court and Spark, a remarkably deft fusion of folk, pop, and jazz which stands as her best-selling work to date. While as unified and insightful as Blue, the album -- a concept record exploring the roles of honesty and trust in relationships, romantic and otherwise -- moves away from confessional ...
Ex-husband Larry Klein, who serves as co-producer and musical director, explains in his liner notes that Joni Mitchell intended to tell the story of a "modern" romantic relationship in the songs, most of which come from the '30s and '40s. If so, her concept of a modern relationship is very troubled -- most of the selections are unhappy love songs. ...
This wonderfully varied release shows a number of new tendencies in Joni Mitchell's work, some of which would come to fuller fruition on subsequent albums. "The Arrangement," "Rainy Night House," and "Woodstock" contain lengthy instrumental sections, presaging the extensive non-vocal stretches in later selections such as "Down to You" from Court ...
The album is a long overdue anthology of one of Canada's most celebrated ex-pats, Joni Mitchell. She sanctioned the release only on the condition that she be allowed to compile companion album Misses. While the 15-strong Hits focuses on the her earlier folk-pop crossover successes, many made famous initially by others ("Both Sides Now," "Woodstock ...
Clouds is a stark stunner, a great leap forward for Joni Mitchell. Vocals here are more forthright and assured than on her debut and exhibit a remarkable level of subtle expressiveness. Guitar alone is used in accompaniment, and the variety of playing approaches and sounds gotten here is most impressive. "The Fiddle and the Drum," a protest song ...
Joni Mitchell evolved from the smooth jazz-pop of Court and Spark to the radical Hissing of Summer Lawns, an adventurous work that remains among her most difficult records. After opening with the graceful "In France They Kiss on Main Street," the album veers sharply into "The Jungle Line," an odd, Moog-driven piece backed by the rhythms of the ...
On For the Roses, Joni Mitchell began to explore jazz and other influences in earnest. As one might expect from a transitional album, there is a lot of stylistic ground explored, including straight folk selections using guitar ("For the Roses") and piano ("Banquet," "See You Sometime," "Lesson in Survival") overtly jazzy numbers ("Barangrill," ...
Joni Mitchell's Hejira is the last in an astonishingly long run of top-notch studio albums dating back to her debut. Some vestiges of her old style remain here; "Song for Sharon" utilizes the static, pithy vocal harmonies from Ladies of the Canyon's "Woodstock," "Refuge of the Roads" features woodwind touches reminiscent of those in "Barangrill" ...
Joni Mitchell's debut release is a concept album. Side one, subtitled "I Came to the City," generally exhibits songs about urban subjects that are often dour or repressed in some way. "Out of the City and Down to the Seaside," by contrast, is a celebration of nature and countryside, mostly containing selections of a charming, positive, or more ...
According to Joni Mitchell, Travelogue is her final recorded work, and if that is so, it's a detailed exploration of moments in a career that is as dazzling as it is literally uncompromising. Over 22 tracks and two CDs (and as stunning package featuring a plethora of photographs of Mitchell's paintings), Travelogue is a textured and poetic ...
A big chunk of the pop audience Joni Mitchell had earned with Court and Spark in 1974 deserted her in 1975 and 1976 when the follow-ups, The Hissing of Summer Lawns and Hejira, proved more difficult works. With this pretentious double album, Mitchell lost many of the loyal fans who'd stuck with her from the beginning but who now, as she spread her ...
Shine, recorded and released in 2007, is the sign from the heavens that Joni Mitchell has come out of retirement. She left in the early part of the century, railing against a music industry that only cared about "golf and rappers," accusing it of virtually every artistic crime under the sun. So the irony that she signed to Hear Music, Starbucks' ...
Friends successfully targets the same demographic of the television show -- twentysomethings that have grown too old for the noise and clutter of college life, yet reluctant to give up the commraderie (and, indeed, friendship) that stress creates. So, it's a collection of '80s college rock favorites (R.E.M., Paul Westerberg), '80s college rock ...
In the months prior to the passing of legendary jazz bassist Charles Mingus, Joni Mitchell had been personally summoned by the bop pioneer to collaborate on a musical version of T.S. Eliot's Four Quartets. The project would entail Mitchell to condense the text for Mingus to score instrumentally. He planned on utilizing a full orchestra, as well as ...
Long before Frank Sinatra made his Duets album, Joni Mitchell cast a variety of name singers in prominent roles for the songs on Chalk Mark in a Rainstorm. Peter Gabriel sings with her on the leadoff track, "My Secret Place," and Don Henley is heard on "Lakota" and "Snakes and Ladders," Billy Idol and Tom Petty have roles in "Dancin' Clown," and ...
Joni Mitchell here turned to guests like Michael McDonald, Thomas Dolby, Don Henley, James Taylor, and Wayne Shorter, continuing to straddle the worlds of California folk/pop and jazz fusion. Musically, it worked, although as a lyricist, Mitchell again took off after abstractions (one song railed against "The three great stimulants of the ...
Sad, spare, and beautiful, Blue is the quintessential confessional singer/songwriter album. Forthright and poetic, Joni Mitchell's songs are raw nerves, tales of love and loss (two words with relative meaning here) etched with stunning complexity; even tracks like "All I Want," "My Old Man," and "Carey" -- the brightest, most hopeful moments on ...
Like most live albums, this two-record set was a profit-taking release on which the artist re-presented many of her old songs for a new acceptance now that she had a larger pop audience. Backed by the pop-jazz ensemble the L.A. Express Mitchell reprised the best from her first five albums, pointedly ignoring Court and Spark, and including two new ...
Dreamland is the second volume in Joni Mitchell's self-compiled series of "theme" retrospectives. The first, issued on the Geffen label, was entitled The Beginning of Survival. It focused on songs that dug deep into social, cultural, political, and environmental themes, as "commentaries on the world in which we live." Dreamland was compiled from ...
The Beginning of Survival is a whopping 16-track collection from Joni Mitchell's Geffen period, recorded between 1985-1998, and carefully chosen by the artist as "commentaries on the world in which we live." One has to wonder about the title: if by saying this is "the beginning of survival," Mitchell is referring to her own retirement strategy -- ...
This 1998 disc from Joni Mitchell harks back to the days when she heard the hissing of summer lawns and the jazzier essays of her Hejira days. The only difference between then and now is her use of a guitar synthesizer for her aural textures and melody templates. Always employing the best of musicians to help her out, Mitchell takes off on a trip ...
Joni Mitchell returned to the relatively spare style of albums like Hejira and her early folk collections on Turbulent Indigo, emphasizing her acoustic guitar strumming and singing on a series of songs that detail the political and social discontent she had previously explored on Dog Eat Dog and Chalk Mark in a Rain Storm. In the brief opener, ...
Considering the weighty fame of some of artists on this second volume of live sessions from L.A.'s KCRW's Morning Becomes Eclectic show, such as Joni Mitchell, the Cranberries, Jackson Browne, and Philip Glass, wouldn't you know it, it's Lou Barlow who makes off with this collection. After apologizing for a scratchy voice due to being a bad boy ...
On her first new studio album of original material in five years and her debut for Geffen Records, Joni Mitchell achieved more of a balance between her pop abilities and her jazz aspirations, meanwhile rediscovering a more direct, emotional lyric approach. The result was her best album since the mid-'70s. ~ William Ruhlmann, All Music Guide
OK, Hear Music's Artist's Choice series is eclectic and has been engaging in previous volumes. This one, assembled by beloved pop iconoclast Joni Mitchell is simply head-scratching. While there are obvious choices in the "music that matters to her" department, some of the more telling ones are Miles Davis' "It Never Entered My Mind," Billie ...
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