John Thomas
2017-09-09 16:02:16 UTC
Considering all the OT talk here when Dylan won I have no hesitation opening an OT thread with this article from Bookforum.
Chords of Inquiry
How Joni Mitchell created her own tradition
CARL WILSON
It’s 1984 or 1985, Prince and the Revolution are in California, and they decide to drive out to Joni Mitchell’s house in Malibu for dinner. All devotees—Prince says his favorite album ever is 1975’s The Hissing of Summer Lawns—they chat and admire her paintings, and then Prince wanders to the piano and starts teasing out some chords. “Joni says, ‘Oh wow! That’s really pretty. What song are you playing?’” as band member Wendy Melvoin later recalls. “We all yelled, ‘It’s your song!’” Prince will perform his gorgeous arrangement of Mitchell’s “A Case of You” in concerts up to the final month of his life.
This anecdote from David Yaffe’s Reckless Daughter: A Portrait of Joni Mitchell is rare for being sweet and funny, not sad or rancorous. It’s endearingly humbling, while still hinting at her ample ego: She really does love her own stuff, even when she doesn’t know it’s hers. And why shouldn’t she? For more than a decade, the singer from Saskatchewan bounded from masterpiece to masterpiece, her second-string songs superior to almost anyone else’s best. Yet, among her generation’s legends, she is the most persistently sidelined.
Mitchell is easy to pigeonhole as that “poetic, confessional female singer-songwriter,” provided you overlook half her work and the fact that, before her, there really was no such thing. Even on her earliest, overly demure albums, she’d taken Bob Dylan’s cue that pop songs could say anything (she often named “Positively Fourth Street” as her bat signal) and was using it to dismantle the pedestal she was placed on: The ingenue was gazing back and seeing through her watchers, keeping charts of power plays in a fine calligraphic hand. The girl all the pop songs were about was stepping up to tell them what they got wrong.
She shared with her Canadian compatriots Neil Young and Leonard Cohen the distanced perspective that gave their voices a stark autonomy. (As Margaret Atwood once said in a tribute to Mitchell, in their day you were told you were a lunatic if you thought you could be an artist in Canada.) But because she couldn’t be one of the boys like her pal Neil or a keeper of the poetic patrimony like her onetime paramour Leonard, she built her own distinct lexicon, part journal and sketchbook jottings, part intimate conversation, part wry postwar fiction, and part barroom jive. In 1971, Blue (which includes “A Case of You,” a song about Cohen, as it happens) kicked off a six- or seven-album streak that stands beside Stevie Wonder’s of the same time or Dylan’s mid-’60s run. Each record was unlike the last, each with fresh aesthetic propositions to test, each ready to die trying. Listen to the right one at the right time in your life, and you feel like a doctor just handed you an ultrasound of your soul (more: http://tinyw.in/tgwR)
Chords of Inquiry
How Joni Mitchell created her own tradition
CARL WILSON
It’s 1984 or 1985, Prince and the Revolution are in California, and they decide to drive out to Joni Mitchell’s house in Malibu for dinner. All devotees—Prince says his favorite album ever is 1975’s The Hissing of Summer Lawns—they chat and admire her paintings, and then Prince wanders to the piano and starts teasing out some chords. “Joni says, ‘Oh wow! That’s really pretty. What song are you playing?’” as band member Wendy Melvoin later recalls. “We all yelled, ‘It’s your song!’” Prince will perform his gorgeous arrangement of Mitchell’s “A Case of You” in concerts up to the final month of his life.
This anecdote from David Yaffe’s Reckless Daughter: A Portrait of Joni Mitchell is rare for being sweet and funny, not sad or rancorous. It’s endearingly humbling, while still hinting at her ample ego: She really does love her own stuff, even when she doesn’t know it’s hers. And why shouldn’t she? For more than a decade, the singer from Saskatchewan bounded from masterpiece to masterpiece, her second-string songs superior to almost anyone else’s best. Yet, among her generation’s legends, she is the most persistently sidelined.
Mitchell is easy to pigeonhole as that “poetic, confessional female singer-songwriter,” provided you overlook half her work and the fact that, before her, there really was no such thing. Even on her earliest, overly demure albums, she’d taken Bob Dylan’s cue that pop songs could say anything (she often named “Positively Fourth Street” as her bat signal) and was using it to dismantle the pedestal she was placed on: The ingenue was gazing back and seeing through her watchers, keeping charts of power plays in a fine calligraphic hand. The girl all the pop songs were about was stepping up to tell them what they got wrong.
She shared with her Canadian compatriots Neil Young and Leonard Cohen the distanced perspective that gave their voices a stark autonomy. (As Margaret Atwood once said in a tribute to Mitchell, in their day you were told you were a lunatic if you thought you could be an artist in Canada.) But because she couldn’t be one of the boys like her pal Neil or a keeper of the poetic patrimony like her onetime paramour Leonard, she built her own distinct lexicon, part journal and sketchbook jottings, part intimate conversation, part wry postwar fiction, and part barroom jive. In 1971, Blue (which includes “A Case of You,” a song about Cohen, as it happens) kicked off a six- or seven-album streak that stands beside Stevie Wonder’s of the same time or Dylan’s mid-’60s run. Each record was unlike the last, each with fresh aesthetic propositions to test, each ready to die trying. Listen to the right one at the right time in your life, and you feel like a doctor just handed you an ultrasound of your soul (more: http://tinyw.in/tgwR)