Joni Mitchell s/d

[koganbot]

I'm probably the only person in this joint who bought the first Joni Mitchell album when it came out (bought it for my brother, but it was so I could listen too). As I recall, it had warm moments but was relatively decorous, with lyrics that one could describe as "well-formed." I didn't stick with her. Did hear the hits, of course, "Woodstock" and "Big Yellow Taxi"; think I appreciated her going weird with her voice on "Taxi," but the hippy-dippy sentimentality of those songs made me sneer. I've heard bits and pieces of her other stuff - the only Joni I have in the house right now is Nazareth's cover of "This Flight Tonight" - and have the impression that they're more idiosyncratically her than the first album was, whatever version of herself she's displaying at the time, no longer tied to decorum or someone else's idea of the well-formed. But she still seems quiet, you know?

So, what of Joni's has made you care, what's made you think? What's she about? What's the good and the bad?

I'm asking because, despite not knowing her music all that well, I'm certain she's GIANT in her impact on whole hunks of what I've been loving this decade, the whole teen confessional thing; she's there in the music whether or not the performer has ever had Joni in her heart or hearing. Anyway, that's what I claimed when I joined this excellent discussion of Taylor Swift and princess pop:

As for what [Taylor's] music is funneling together, princess pop is only a piece. Part of what Taylor does comes from a line stretching back to Dylan (or, OK, to Byron and such) and feminized by the likes of Joni Mitchell and Stevie Nicks, which is the romantic search for female self by way of love relationships good and bad. So Taylor gets as fans the six-year-old princesses with pictures of unicorns on their walls but also their older sisters who might be science nerds or working on the lit magazine (the lit girls who don't go for La Roux types, that is, but my guess is that Elly La Roux has a lot in common with Taylor without knowing it), and a whole hunk of adults as well. The country stream that feeds into her ocean also has a history of busted romance songs and also has her including songs about siblings and intergenerational continuity and cross-generational commonality. My jaw hasn't completely lifted itself up from where it dropped in 2006 when I learned that the performer/co-writer of "Tim McGraw," a bittersweet reminiscence of teen love, a country staple at least since "Strawberry Wine" (performed in 1996 by 30-year-old Deana Carter on an album called Did I Shave My Legs For This?), was a 16-year-old girl named Taylor Swift.

(For further reading, try Sea partakes of ocean.)

Comments

[dubdobdee.livejournal.com]

the period i was fascinated is the "collision" years (75-79), where she counterposed her "quietness" with increasingly "big" material generated "outside" her: musicianship or sensibility she could invite in but not really direct or micro-control

viz: The Hissing of Summer Lawns/Hejira/Don Juan's Reckless Daughter/Mingus: the outsiders to her folkie mimsiness included wayne shorter and jaco pastorius of weather report, the burundi drummers, and of course mingus

it was all very out of step with punk -- as was her exiled quirk-queen in laurel canyon persona -- and seems to have run into the sand a bit by the mid-80s: but i don't know any of her work after mingus

[dubdobdee.livejournal.com]

"folkie mimsiness" -- i mean this less as a description of her than as a description of how she perhaps felt people saw/heard her

[alexmacpherson.livejournal.com]

the first two, definitely - those are my favourite Joni albums. never heard Don Juan and think Mingus is...a failed experiment. LOVE a lot of her sharp singer-songwriter stuff pre-collision era: Blue, obviously, also Court & Spark. Ladies Of The Canyon has some amazing songs ("Rainy Night House") but I could live without ever hearing "Big Yellow Taxi" again.

sorry can't go into more detail, grabbing some moments before conference madness kicks off! i need to be somewhere in 45 minutes, i don't know where it is or where the place i need to register is (or if they're the same or not) and at some point i need to caffeinate myself. GET OFF THE INTERNET LEX

[dubdobdee.livejournal.com]

i dl-ed blue back awhile when you were celebrating it: i have a tape that i made back when i was at college, which i played a lot -- i had two slightly hippyish friends who worshipped her -- and i really am fond of it but have always been a bit meh on the basic "singer-songwriter-with-guitar" format: i like bands, l ike arrangements, i like the interraction of more than one mind and body (and world) i guess

wll have to re-listen to mingus: think i only ever heard it when i got t out of hackney library briefly in the late 80s

[http://users.livejournal.com/xyzzzz__/]

Don't know why I never got round her records - really like the one/two performances of hers I've caught on TV. aargh!

[sm-woods.livejournal.com]

Love her incredible sense of rhythm in so much of the early stuff. It's hard to explain, but all over Blue, especially, she does this strange rhythm thing with her guitar, where it sounds like inward breathing or something (I don't hear quite the same thing in other folkies from the era). I wonder if that's what attracted Prince to her music, because there's something similar in some of his beats from the 1999/Purple Rain period.

Anyway, I love two or three of the early 70s albums, plus a few cuts here and there ("Morning Morgantown" is maybe her prettiest song, though is not in the mold discussed above), but the only band thing I've really liked by her is Court and Spark... could never hear my way into the stuff after that, though I intend to try again.

[chuckeddy.livejournal.com]

Haven't read these other comments yet, but [i]Court And Spark[/i] was the only album of hers that was ever hooky, funny (Cheech & Chong are on it! And there's stuff about betting on the Maple Leafs!), and un-amorphous to me to connect with all the way through, rhythmically or otherwise; never got [i]Blue[/i] or [i]Hejira[/i] (and, to be honest, never much tried for many of the other ones, so there's a good chance I missed something.) What I actually tend to listen to, though (and what I put on the other morning, after I saw Frank's post) was a 15-song one-disc 1991 Reprise retrospective called [i]Hits[/i]. I've assumed I'd never need anything else, but maybe somebody will convince me otherwise yet.