Joni Mitchell |
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Artist:
Joni Mitchell
Court and Spark had earned Joni Mitchell mainstream pop acceptance but its underlying spirit of discovery pushed her to risk new-found success with this edgier, experimental sequel released in 1975. Although the session crew is largely the same, and sleek jazz elements again abound, these songs find her introducing Burundi drums (on "The Jungle Line"), layering magisterial but forbidding vocal harmonies ("Shadows and Light") and casting rueful shadows across the sun-dazed Southern California of the title song. Her daring promptly earned critical scorn and halted her commercial expansion, but the album's confident eclecticism and dark beauty have outlived that reception; from the safety of hindsight, Hissing was a promise to stay hungry and creatively adventurous, a promise kept then and now. --Sam Sutherland
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Artist:
Joni Mitchell
Formally extricated from the grubbiness of the music industry--her farewell speeches eluded to cesspools, no less--and now officially retired from songwriting, "Dreamland" is a valedictory glance back at Joni Mitchell's uniquely distinguished oeuvre featuring choice tracks selected by the lady herself. Received wisdom has it that Mitchell began as a folkie in the Sixties, turned to jazz in the mid-Seventies and that somewhere along the way her music became a stranger to the charts and incrementally impregnable to all but a diehard coterie of chin-stroking pseuds. While partially true, this basic premise is rumbled by the vexingly non-chronological track selection which highlights just how much Mitchell blurred boundaries ( "Carey" and "California" from 1971's Blue, for example) way before the chattering rock classes argued the toss over her categorisation. There's no "Woodstock" but the album's scansion ( the ethnic pairing of "Dreamland" and "The Jungle Line", the revolutionary finale of Travelogue's "Both Sides Now" and the original "The Circle Game") works perfectly. Polished peaches abound; "Come In From The Cold", addressing post-war socio-sexial etiquette and female emancipat...
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Artist:
Joni Mitchell
Painter-turned-folksinger Joni Mitchell had slipped stark saxophone solos into her prior album, For the Roses, and her singing had often hinted at a capacity for bluesier fare than her guitar- and piano-framed confessional ballads offered. None of those hints prepared fans for this sudden, expansive shift towards a much larger canvas--a sleeker, orchestrated pop style pulsating with jazz elements. Court & Spark found Mitchell casting aside her earth mother affectations and revealing herself as the thoroughly modern, thoroughly complicated woman she is; the songs sustained familiar preoccupations with relationships but replaced courtly settings and naturalistic imagery with recognisably modern locales. Deeply romantic, constantly questioning, classic tracks like the title song, "Help Me", "Free Man in Paris", "Same Situation" and "Raised on Robbery" display a more liberated Mitchell, ready to rumble with unbridled electric guitars (guest Robbie Robertson on "...Robbery"), even willing to poke fun at her own oh-so-sensitive rep with a hip cover of Annie Ross's hilarious "Twisted". --Sam Sutherland
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Artist:
Joni Mitchell
Joni Mitchell's third album offers a bridge between the artful but sometimes dour meditations of her earlier work and the more mature, confessional revelations of the classics that would follow. Voice and guitar still hew to the pretty filigree of a folk poet, but there's the giggling rush of rock & roll freedom in "Big Yellow Taxi", and the formal metaphor of her older songs ("The Circle Game", already oft-covered by the time of this recording) yields to the more impressionistic images of the new ones ("Woodstock"). The dark lyricism of her earliest ballads is intact (on "For Free" and "Rainy Night House"), yet there's a prevailing idealism here that sounds poignant alongside the warier, more mature songs to come on Blue and Court And Spark. --Sam Sutherland
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Artist:
Joni Mitchell
Joni Mitchell would go on from this 1971 recording to make more popular, more ambitious and more challenging albums, but she's never made a better one. Working with minimal accompaniment (Stephen Stills and James Taylor are two of the four sidemen), the Canadian songbird summoned an involving song cycle of romance found and lost. Though Blue is an uncommonly intimate representation, it's also astonishingly open and gracious. Songs such as "All I Want", "Carey", "California" and "A Case of You" work equally well as poetry and pop music. --Steve Stolder
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Artist:
Joni Mitchell & James Taylor
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Artist:
Joni Mitchell
Joni Mitchell's second album contains the first manifestations of her artistic brilliance. Where her debut, Song to a Seagull, has hints of greatness, Clouds displays the real thing. With her newfound control on melody and lyrical economy, she delivers songs that are readily accessible, instantly hummable, and virtually timeless. Her hippie excesses are still in view ("Songs to Aging Children Come" is untamed), but, for the most part, she has found her voice. "Both Sides Now" has become a lite-FM staple (thanks to Judy Collins's cover). While songs such as the incredibly idyllic "Tin Angel" (nicely covered by Tom Rush on his classic Circle Game), "Chelsea Morning", and "I Don't Know Where I Stand" have become modern folk standards. --Rob O'Connor
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Artist:
Joni Mitchell
Taking its title from one of Joni Mitchell's best-known songs, this atmospheric album traces the arc of a relationship: from first excited flush, through resigned closure, to the next real thing. Two of the tracks are re-recordings of early Mitchell songs--the title track and the lesser-known "A Case Of You", but otherwise the tales are told in the words of others. The self-painted cover gives a clue to the album's mood: lush and lavish, with a 70-piece orchestra accompanying songs popularised by Sinatra, Billie Holiday and Ella Fitzgerald. This is Joni Mitchell as torch singer, with well-chosen songs ("Stormy Weather", "Don't Go To Strangers", "Answer Me My Love") brightly arranged and beautifully sung. But from a singer whose reputation as one of rock's most respected songwriters was established by early, folk-influenced albums such as Clouds and Blue and the crowd-pleasing Court And Spark, the lack of new material on Both Sides Now is inevitably disappointing. --Patrick Humphries
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Artist:
Joni Mitchell
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Artist:
Joni Mitchell
She has only had a few bona fide hits, but after almost 30 years, she's finally delivered a 15-song compilation of her signature songs that will be a CD point-of-departure for casual fans and newcomers well into the new millennium. The companion Misses volume is an intriguing curio that might rather more generously have been marketed as a bonus disc. --Jeff Bateman
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