Joni Mitchell returning
New York/Vulture‘s Tim Murphy attended a soiree the night before last for song painter Joni Mitchell and her album Shine (her first since ’98′s Taming the Tiger) at Soho’s Violet Ray Gallery. Easily the most soulful and influential female poet-composer-performer of the late 20th Century (as well as the most emotionally arresting, elegantly phrased, bravest and saddest), Mitchell spat out the blunt truth when Murphy asked why she’d recorded no new tunes since the days of the Monica Lewiinsky scandal.
“I was angry at the politics. Especially [at Bush]. Angry at the American people. At Christians. At theology — the ignorance of it. And I didn’t want to write about it. I removed myself from society and painted. It was a method of avoiding the anger, not addressing it.
“I couldn’t listen to music for ten years, I hated it all. It all pissed me off. Music just became grotesquely egocentric and made for money. It wasn’t music — there was no muse. Music requires a muse. The producer is not a muse. He’s a manufacturer. Contemporary music made me want to punch people. I couldn’t stand any of it. The whoring, the drive-by shooting of it all. I don’t care how well crafted it is. America is in a runaway-train position and dragging all the world with it. It’s grotesquely mentally ill.”
Mitchell’s reputation as a world-class phraser, searcher and sufferer will last for the next several centuries. She’s a heavy cat among kittens. Nobody has recorded a more touching and transcendent version of “Unchained Melody” than Mitchell. Her early ’70s to early ’80s stuff was rock perfect. Especially The Hissing of Summer Lawns and Hejira. Those “six white vapor trails across the bleak terrain” and ” the hexagram of the heavens.” That “poppy poison-poppy tourniquet [that] slithers away on brass like mouthpiece spit.” I’ll take these lyrics with me into the next life.
I saw Mitchell play at Studio 54 in ’81 or ’82, and I stood fairly close (ten or twelve feet from the mike stand) and just smiled and beamed out every positive-energy combustion I had inside me, and after a couple of songs she caught my eye (or vice versa), and I don’t care if this makes me sound like a fan but I was grovelling at that moment and I couldn’t have felt more rapture. It happened 25 years ago, and I’ll be damned if it doesn’t feel now like that Everett Sloane moment on the Staten Island ferry in Citizen Kane when he saw the girl in a white dress with a parasol.
I just checked the lyrics to “Refuge of the Road,” and all this time I thought the line went “hard of humor and humility,” as in “hard of hearing.” I loved that line! But apparently Mitchell actually sings “heart and humor and humility.” Very disappointing…very.
I’d rather not see Joni Mitchell on the starbucks label, but she is the grand dame of modern american music. I love the moment in MESSAGE TO LOVE when she chastises the vast, rowdy audience with “You’re acting like tourists, man.” And then she wins them over with music.
So glad to hear you’re a Joni fan, Wells, and a fantastic post, one of your best. I’m sure we’re going to hear the cliched “shut up hippie” critcisism, but this woman’s lyrics and songwriting are matched only by Dylan, and I’d argue she may be more consistent. That she turned her back on mainstream radio acceptance and followed her own path through collaborations with jazz musicians, unconventional song structure and chord changes, etc. set an example that too few musicians have taken heed of.
Her new album might not be on the level of the recent Dylan masterpieces, and I disagree that music has been completely worthless for the last 10 years, but she’s clearly someone who still has something to say with a unique way of saying it.
I think christian was inhaling bong hit when he wrote that post.
D.Z. had that same Everett Sloane moment back in ’99 when the Toys`RUs finally opened and he got his hands on that Darth Maul doll.
“I think christian was inhaling bong hit”
UH huh. Whateva stoner.
I bought the first Joni Mitchell album after seeing “A Walk on the Moon.”
I bought Shine on Tuesday. The Lyrics are excellent but I can’t seem to get into the music. A little too messy, too much sax, it reminds me of her 80′s work which I am not a fan of. Not enough guitar; Joni plays guitar unlike anyone else and I really wanted to hear more of it. I REALLY dislike the new version of Big Yellow Taxi. I’m hoping the new album grows on me, I really love Joni.
Up to Hejira, her music was flawless. I haven’t heard too much of her stuff post-Hejira that I’ve liked. I listened to Dog Eat Dog once before shelving it.
The one exception in my mind is Both Sides Now, which I really love.
“I’d rather not see Joni Mitchell on the starbucks label, but she is the grand dame of modern american music”
I hate to be territorial, Christian, but Mitchell is Canadian.
Like Neil Young she lives in the States and spouts about American stuff every now and then but I think we can still safely claim her as our own.
(Personally I have not been able to get my mind totally in sync with her music but I still think she’s a genius and one of the all-time greats.)
Didn’t she hook up with Neil in Thunder Bay back in ’66? What beautiful children they’d have had.
Great post.
“Contemporary music made me want to punch people.” Heh heh.
Short answer: The times passed me by, and I sound just like the bitter old people sounded like to me when I was starting out. I might as well be Mitch Miller.
Shorter answer: I couldn’t get a recording contract.
Shorter Larry: “My Dockers don’t have enough ball room, Goddammit!”
Isn’t “My Name is Larry” a Wild Man Fischer song?
Both Joni Mitchell and Neil Young contracted polio as young children in 1952, the year before the Salk vaccine became widely available. This Canadian outbreak was the last polio epidemic in North America. Mitchell was 9 and Young was 6. They both recovered fully, but walk with a slight limp.
I don’t know anything about Joni Mitchell’s struggles with or criticisms of the recording industry. But it would certainly be a benefit to music and mankind if the existing recording industry would wither and die.
The record companies certainly seem to be in the process of killing themselves off, since they still seem to have difficulty wrapping their minds around the idea that their audience won’t pay $16 for a CD anymore.
Congratulations George, you’re the first person who got the reference!
Joni Mitchell has a great moment in Scorsese’s “The Last Waltz” where she sings backup on Neil Young’s VERY GREAT “Helpless.” She’s right about music having changed. It’s now pre-packaged shit. You have to go alternative to get any good stuff. IMO.
Blue and Hejira are my two favorite albums of hers but I also liked that Night Ride Home. Court and Spark isn’t bad…
The woman is a genius.
For a while there was some talk about Michelle Pfeiffer playing her in a movie. They both paint, they both have those cheekbones.
Night Ride Home is one of my favorite discs of the 90′s. Actually, it’s one of Joni’s best.
Good call on The Hissing of Summer Lawns, Jeff. It’s often overlooked in favour of Blue (also a terrific album), but I’m partial to the bizarre, spacy unconventionality of The Hissing of Summer Lawns. Definitely one of the great self-indulgent albums of the seventies.
Poor Joni. I think she just needs a quality lay.
“You have to go alternative to get any good stuff. IMO.”
Is this a bad thing? How is it different from any other form of art? Everyone knows that you actually have to work to find the great stuff. It is the same with movies and paintings. A huge majority of people like pedestrian, easily accessible tripe. Otherwise Brett Rattner, Dan Brown, Thomas Kinkaide, and Fergie would not be as hugely successful as they are.
If great art was as accessible as the common faire, it would be cheapened.
I’ll bet Wells still has the Mitchell LP with the nude shot.
actually i still have the album. it’s a piece of work. and joni’s naked in her 70′s prime.
Mitchell is great, but her comments about modern music are silly. There are plenty of great acts out there, and if one does not make the effort to find it, ones opinion is worthless. The major record labels are in it for the money… How surprising! This has ALWAYS been the case.
Great post, Wells. Yet, I take issue with Mitchell putting ALL music of the last decade under a blanket of egocentric commercialism. That might be true of 95% of the drivel released on the majors, but major labels only account for a fraction of releases today. Independently distributed music has more than filled the redundant left by commercial radio and MTV. I don’t think you can consider yourself a true music lover and simply write off ten years of amazing independent music. I have the ultimate respect for Mitchell and am a huge fan of her work, yet this comment comes across as out of touch with what’s REALLY important in music today. Bob Dylan made a similar comment a while back, and it pangs me to think that two of my favorite songwriters are completely oblivious to a constantly changing musical revolution that is happening right now. All you need to do is invest a little more time to find it.
That’s fair, but you can’t expect a couple of artists in their mid-60′s (Joni’s only 2 years younger than Dylan!) to be hanging out on Pitchfork looking for cool new bands.
Most of the major labels used to be independent labels. Columbia, Warner Bros., Elektra, Asylum, Atlantic, etc. — all independent labels. You could record for them for years and years. Then they were bought up by corporations. Now you need a single or you’ll be dropped. The thing to to these days is record a song that an associate producer of “One Tree Hill” hears at a Starbucks while waiting in line for his decaf vente nonfat sugar free hazelnut dry cappucino (you can picture him can’t you? An Ian Sinclair type without the giant head and ass).
A couple of things … first, if you’re scrounging for good late Joni Mitchell records, don’t forget the best one, “Wild Things Run Fast”. She had just fallen in love when she wrote that one, and it shows. Love was always her muse; her political songs naturally fall short. CitizenKanedforchewinggum is right — she does need to get laid, but that’s the least of it. My mother fell in love at 65, so it’s possible. The other factor is her kid. She gave up a child when she was very young and that loss has been the engine under a lot of her music. When she was reunited with her daughter that seemed to fill the hole she had been pouring songs into. She’s happy now: a mother and a grandmother,it turns out. Until some new romance turns her life upside down the music will be an unispired ghost of its former self. And also, someone has to say it, her voice is shot. That gorgeous five octave range collapsed to a hoarse whisper by cigarettes. What a shame.
I don’t think her voice is shot. It has been ravaged by her addictions, but she is still an excellent singer, and she does amazing things with the voice that she has left. She uses the grit and the hoarseness quite effectively in my opinion.
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