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album reviews

Joni Mitchell



Song To A Seagull 8½ ( 1968 )
I Had a King / Michael from Mountains / Night in the City / Marcie / Nathan La Franeer / Sisotowbell Lane / The Dawntreader / The Pirate of Penance / Song to a Seagull / Cactus Tree

The break-up of a marriage to a defiant, independant first LP. David Crosby was listed as the producer, yet his role was more one of guidance. The album doesn't go for the usual folk-rock trappings you might expect, rather we have acoustic guitar plus vocals. Joni is joined for a few of the songs by Stephen Stills on bass. By choosing not to record and include such songs as 'Both Sides Now', 'Chelsea Morning' 'Eastern Rain' 'Urge for Going' or 'The Circle Game' Mitchell could indeed be said to have been going off in an independant direction, all of the aforementioned Mitchell compositions had already been hits or notable covers for other artists. There's two obvious areas of focus on the LP, her lyrics and her music. To a lesser extent, we can also consider her vocals. Her voice is strangely detached emotionally. She showcases a whisper going to a strong tenor in a few simple swoops, showing dexterity. She doesn't seem to be inside the songs rather a story-teller in the folk tradition. The lyrics are perfectly formed and border on poetry and they do this without overcomplicating the language itself. Some of the phrases border on hippie-ideals of the time, the only facet of the album that actually dates it, yet usually these are fascinating lyrics that paint pictures. Her voice plays the part of an actor, light and delicate where it needs to be, intense and furrowed when the mood calls for it. She was already a more than accomplished singer. The music doesn't initially give us much to grab hold of. Her guitar playing is essentially simple, yet she gets some strange, mysterious sounds out of the thing, no doubt as a result of her love of open-tunings. There's an elegant, classical beauty in the guitar lines that decorate and enrich 'Michael From The Mountains', for instance. The subtle melodies, the pauses and the range of her vocals, the pictures painted by the lyrics eventually all combine to produce a beauty that's hard to describe. 'Micheal From The Mountains', as other songs here do, manages to creep up on you. Once you 'get' these songs, you'll wonder how on earth you weren't able to pick out these melodies the first time around.

'Margie' is a great example of the early Joni Mitchell style. The guitar phrases are subtle and flow like an autumn river gently ebbing just past your range of vision. Depending on which way you look at it, 'Margie' manages to present several melodic phrases to capture your imagination rather than a single, anthemic folk sing-a-long type of melody. 'Dawntreader' is a captivating, fascinating listen lyrically that keeps you coming back for more. The melodies are seemingly an endless repetition of these simple strums and patterns. You want them to be endless, she could do this all day long, picking out the stars from the sky and letting them free once more, it would be nice. 'Cactus Tree' moves in a style more familiar to fans of the next couple of Joni Mitchell LPs. It's an instantly memorable song you can even try and sing-along to, not something the rest of the album really encourages. This is a serious sounding album, sometimes criticized for being too down, yet there's a purity in these songs and a single-minded dedication in the style of performing. I adore 'Cactus Tree' by the way, the way her vocals come in over themselves, the beauty of the vocals and words and the perfectly executed guitar patterns. The album ends with 'Cactus Tree', a moment of light enough to make you journey back to the start to see what you missed first time out, or might just see differently when gazed at again.

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'Clouds' is in many ways a fairly typical 'follow-up' album in that it sees Joni rounding up stray compositions, for whatever reason, left off her debut LP. True, those 'stray' compositions include such memorable songs as 'Chelsea Morning', 'I Don't Know Where I Stand' and 'Both Sides Now' in particular but such songs were written two years previously. What we see therefore is less a step forwards for Joni and rather a glimpse at something else she could do. She still impresses with her voice and acoustic playing, yet 'Clouds' is more of a crowd pleasing LP melodically, containing several songs already covered by others alongside concert crowd-pleasers. The pure acoustic plus voice nature of 'Clouds' can occasionally seem limiting yet this LP is easier to get into and assmilate than her debut LP. It routinely gets hailed as her first step towards the classic 'Blue' and her debut often gets ignored. True, 'Clouds' makes far more 'sense' as an introduction to her works than 'Song To A Seagull' yet I get the impression there is often a little revisionism from the critics going on. 'Songs To Aging Children Come' and 'The Fiddle And The Drum' I must say are songs to forget. The entirely vocal 'The Fiddle And The Drum' is something of a dirge and 'Songs To Ageing Children Come' is entirely missable. Thank heavens then for 'Both Sides Now' closing things off for 'Clouds' in such a pleasing fashion, still one of her best known songs.

Outside of the best known songs 'Clouds' contains ( 'I Don't Know Where I Stand', memorably covered by Fairport Convention and the eternal joy of 'Chelsea Morning' ) we get such solidly written material as 'Roses Blue', really fascinating structually and the guitar playing is impeccably done. The seemingly reflective 'I Think I Understand' is Joni finding her voice and finding it well. Switching to the album opener we get something dark and unnerving, quite unlike the majority of the rest of the LP. 'Tin Angel' for me is all the better for being shrouded in darkness. Indeed, her vocals take on deeper hues, she paints pictures with her lyrics and her voice is very powerful in such an incarnation. Can I sum up then? Er, not really. 'Clouds' is no kind of concept LP, it's merely a showcase of unrelated songs in acoustic and voice fashion. She still uses some fascinating open-tunings to get unusual guitar sounds and patterns, quite cleverly. Her writing is certainly upto par, especially lyrically. 'Clouds' is a good release for her, placed her firmly on the map and on the road to brighter things. Transistional then? Well, yes, probably transistional. She confused us a little by having songs on her debut that were actually no older than the songs here.

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Joni takes us back to a late Sixties vibe, sunshine merging into autumn, late nights in the great outdoors spent socialising. She also fits in more oblique settings and 'Ladies Of The Canyon', her third LP, was also her best at this point in her career. She continues to use odd voicings and tunings to lend her material a distinctive feel. She gets in plenty of lyrical, vocal and musical hooks as the songs form a cohesive whole yet also display variety. It could be argued that this is her first complete LP and also her first masterpiece. It hints both backwards and forwards and is likely to be the best place to start for anyone not familiar with Joni. She uses a lot more piano here than she previously did and she proves herself a somewhat sparse piano player, melodies to the fore rather than any kind of showing off, yet her piano lines have been so beautifully recorded. On a song such as 'For Free', we have just the two elements, vocals and piano. Her vocals are up front, they sit in front of you. The piano is in the background yet sounds like it's literally right behind you, in the same room. She plays these lovely flowing phrases and the lyrics on 'For Free' are some of her best. It's a fine, hypnotic song, utterly gorgeous and one of her finest to this day. 'Conversation' and 'Morning Morgantown' both reveal some kind of contentment flowing through Joni emotionally. She sounds happy and indeed, her relationship with Graham Nash was fully in bloom by now, so perhaps that's not so unusual. 'The Arrangement' stands out - she uses jazzy phrases, mellow melody lines whilst vocally she sings fairly unusually. Her voice is sparkling throughout the entire album, incidentally. Her voice is still that of a young woman yet points towards future maturity, she can do both equally as well here.

Three of the most enduring Mitchell compositions of all feature on 'Ladies Of The Canyon', the sing-song 'Circle Game' which almost has a nursery rhyme feel. 'Big Yellow Taxi' sees her in idealistic protest singer/songwriter mode, yet she's not preaching to you, just telling tales and stories and thoughts. Perhaps most impressively of all, she gives us 'Woodstock', which is one of her most covered songs. I'm familiar with Ian Matthews ( ex-fairport convention ) and his Matthews Southern Comfort, which although wasn't a hit in the US, was a chart topped in the UK. Joni's version doesn't accentuate the commercial lyrics or the idealism, she sings the song in a serious manner and stresses certain lyrics. Lyrics as poetry by the way, even with the hippie trappings surrounding them. All in all, it's clear 'Ladies Of The Canyon' is a serious work, yet the fun elements and the happy elements balance out the serious side. 'The Circle Game' leaves you smiling and this is just a beautifully rounded work of art.

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