Joni Mitchell delays concert until fall

Saskatoon StarPhoenix
January 25, 1974

A singing homecoming by Joni Mitchell, once in the wind for February, has been delayed and it now looks like Saskatoons favourite folk-singer wont be available until the fall.

Joni, who now lives in Los Angeles, is working with a backup band, which means moving equipment by truck and foregoing any fly-in dates. She is to work in Eastern Canada within the next month.

In the meantime, her Saskatoon following will have to content themselves with the newest album, Court and Spark, released on the Asylum label.

Loraine Alterman of the New York Times is among the critics in ecstasy over the release:

Joni Mitchell doesnt write love songs. She writes songs about love. And she is the premier explorer of the terrain. Romance and reality both work within her sensibility so that her songs honestly express the range of feelings involved in love. In Court and Spark (Asylum 5072), her sixth album in as many years, Mitchell continues to probe this vital life force, and as always she couches her keen insights in poetry that moves both the heart and the mind.

Although she is wise enough to know there can be no final answers, she understands the tensions between love and freedom, something every thinking person feels but cant  or wont  always articulate with honesty.

What makes Mitchells work so fascinating is how perfectly she expresses the continuing psychic struggle. By now she has had her share of the downs as well as the ups of love. She knows that shes got to find fulfillment as a person in her art  and indeed she wants to  yet shes still looking for that one love, that one man who will court and spark her even though she realizes that the spark probably wont last for long. There are no double standards for her because she knows that both women and men feel that urge to be unfettered just as much as both have the desire for commitment.

The New York writer praises Mitchell particularly for Twisted, by Annie Ross and Wardell Gray, which she says is much better than Bette Midlers version.

She also praises the arrangements and productions which have become more sophisticated with each album: the drama of the soul that unfolds in her lyrics is now matched by the drama of the music.

In conclusion, she says:

Mitchells songs are very personal in that they have roots within her own experience. Its impossible to fake the intense reality of her perceptions, but that doesnt mean that each song is to be interpreted as strict autobiography. Like all great artists she can turn her own experiences into truths that touch everyone.