Review Summary: Early Joni album, polished performances throughout showing different aspects of her character - charming, sensitive and insightful but also narcissistic and irritating.
This is Joni Mitchell’s third album and it’s something of a mixed bag – a few quaint rustic hippy numbers mixed with more sophisticated-sounding mood pieces. The couple of hits included ( ‘Big Yellow Taxi’ and ‘Woodstock’) are not particularly representative, which may be good news if like me you can’t stand them.
Measured just in terms of the quality of the songwriting and playing, the album is consistently good, but I find my reactions to each song vary wildly. I can’t get a fix on Joni here (and to be clear I’m not talking about Joni Mitchell as a real person but rather the character she presents herself on this album). Sometimes she’s charmingly innocent, sometimes smart and serious, sometimes just fake and narcissistic. This complexity in itself is no bad thing, it just feels like she hasn’t learned at this stage in her career how to play off these different sides of her character within her songs.
Morning Morgantown – Gentle opener extolling the joys of the faux-rustic, hippy life. As twee as it comes but I like it. Maybe because I have a high tolerance for twee, but it is a very pretty tune and Joni’s singing has real sense of purity about it, like water trickling down from a mountain spring, pretending that she’s part of a farming community. (7)
For Free – Sounds like someone has been taking piano lessons. Actually, a song about going on a city break, staying in a fancy hotel and shopping for ‘jewels’. But Joni doesn’t sound too excited, why is that? There’s a busker playing the clarinet who is ‘real good’ and this seems to be making her feel guilty given that (humble-brag alert) she gets paid a fortune and is driven everywhere in limousines. At least she’s better than the stupid passers-by who can’t even recognise what’s good unless they’ve seen it on TV (mentioning no names…), but still it makes her sad. She considers maybe going up and harmonising along with him, which doesn’t sound like such a good idea if you ask me. But then the clarinet starts playing in the background and you realise she asked him to come and harmonise with her on her record. A happy ending! (That is if she actually did get the busker to play and didn’t just get someone to impersonate him - that would be mean!) (2)
Conversation – Lively number which is superficially appealing but is essentially about Joni moving in on a guy by sympathising with him as he moans about his girlfriend. One obviously needs to be careful about confusing the writer with character, but while the narrator of the song seems to me like a rather manipulative character, it doesn’t feel like Mitchell is presenting a critical portrait. Another reading is that the song is just expressing ugly emotions (narcissism, jealousy) from a feminine perspective. There are plenty of singer-songwriters in the rock canon who do exactly this from a male perspective and so I may be operating a double standard when I recoil here. I don’t know, maybe it’s just because the guy in this song sounds like such a drip! (3)
Ladies of the Canyon – Back in twees-ville, describing what women got up to back in hippy times: baking, sewing, looking after the kids – sounds about right. What saves the song is the slightly medieval-sounding instrumentation and Mitchell’s eccentric delivery, particularly deranged when she starts a semi-chant about the babies in this idyll: ‘none are thin and all are fat’. The doo-doo-doo harmonies are awesome as well. (8)
Willy –You’re never going to live down a title like that. So perhaps it’s for the best that this is just a rather soppy ode to Graham Nash (why didn’t she call it Graham?). No great loss, it’s not like when the Bee Gees named one of their best songs Fanny. (4)
The Arrangement – This piano-led number establishes and sustains an ominous tone behind some pretty Laura Nyro style singing. Best not to listen too closely to the rather juvenile lyrics - a patronising lecture to a middle-aged businessman, delivered in tones eager to convey understanding about his terrible, empty existence oblivious to the fact that the poor sod probably thinks he’s doingverywellthankyouverymuch. (5)
Rainy Night House – A wintry atmosphere pervades this song about a visit to the family home of a new lover. The mother has abandoned the house for a holiday in Florida; his father, also absent, is implied to have committed suicide. The lyrical details (the mother’s ‘small white bed’) and the use of a choir in the background give the song a sharp, cinematic feel. Mitchell’s singing really is excellent here, sensitive and intense, conveying well the tentative beginning of a relationship with all its combined feelings of intimacy and mystery. (9)
The Priest – I tried hard with this one, I really did – an urgent, folk-y number with a great title, it promised a lot. The first line – ‘The priest sat in the airport lounge, he was wearing his father’s tie’ – suggests the promise is going to be delivered but after that we just get a bunch of riddles. Now, I’m not averse to meaningless lyrics per se, not even if they’re dressed up to seem profound, but this exercise is so deliberately serious and dour, the effort of trying to work out what it means sends me to sleep every time. (4)
Blue Boy – A song about how we make fixed idols of the ones we love which prevents there being any true communication. The imagery used is quite striking but somewhat undermined by the overly ‘sensitive’ performance which gives the impression of a different, soppier song. (6)
Big Yellow Taxi – Janet Jackson had the right idea, just take the great hook and loop it. The rest of the song has a fundamental smugness baked in which makes it pretty hard to stomach. At least it’s short and the “goofing around” at the end is cut off before they go the full Barbara Ann. (3)
Woodstock – I heard a great version of this song by Nanaco before I heard Joni’s. I’m sure there a lot of other great versions – it’s an excellent song – but this isn’t one of them. Rather than singing it straight, Joni keeps jumping up and down octaves for no apparent reason and it does nothing but detract from the hallucinatory power of the song. (4)
The Circle Game - And we’re back with a final cosy little homily to the natural order of things. Very pretty, quite trite, a bit boring but there’s no denying its appeal. (6)
While Mitchell delivers a polished performance, highlighting different aspects of her personality, some of those traits make for a grating listen.
