Joni Mitchell Comes In From The Cold

by Steve Matteo
CD Review
July 1991

Back in 1975, Rolling Stone mercilessly slammed Joni Mitchell's The Hissing of Summer Lawns charging the singer/songwriter with adapting styles of music - jazz and African - with which she had no right tinkering. Years later, in the same magazine Prince cited The Hissing of Summer Lawns as the last album he bought, and he went on to say how much of an influence Mitchell's music had on him. Further vindication came in the mid 1980s when Sting and Paul Simon received wide critical acclaim for their forays into jazz and African music, respectively.

Mitchell's boldness in experimenting rather than simply re-creating her most successful albums, Blue (1971) and Court and Spark (1974), was not without its drawbacks. She's frequently come under attack by critics, while the public, for the most part, has ignored her recent work.

But Night Ride Home, Mitchell's latest, is turning the tide. The CD, at this writing, was headed into Top 40 territory on Billboard's album chart, thanks in part to the breezy single "Come in from the Cold." Ironically, some of the recordings she made over the past 15 years - the same ones that critics blasted - laid the groundwork for this unanimously praised, fascinating album, the singer/songwriter's fourth for Geffen and 16th overall (including two live releases). While some may interpret Night Ride Home as a return to Mitchell's earlier, more musically sparse sounds, the recording is actually a refinement, both lyrically and musically that involved long years of searching for new sounds, melodies, vocal arrangements, and poetry.

Joni Mitchell, nee Roberta Joan Anderson, was born on November 7, 1943, in Fort McLeod, Alberta Canada. Growing up on the plains of Canada, she acquired a keen sense of ancient tradition - through the area's Indians - while also watching the birth of rock 'n' roll. The influences were complementary at a time when she was developing as a musician and songwriter. In the mid 1960s, she moved to Toronto and played in small clubs. She married folk singer Chuck Mitchell in '65 (they later separated), and relocated to Detroit a year later. Her stellar performances at folk clubs in that city led to national attention and caught the ear of Byrds guitarist David Crosby, who discovered her playing in a club.

In 1967, Mitchell signed with Reprise and began work on her debut, Joni Mitchell (also called Song to a Seagull). Produced by Crosby, the album featured beautiful, poetic songs filled with vivid imagery of love and the fear and wonder of a young woman. Her voice was as clear as a blue sky at the beach on a summer day. Quickly, a host of the era's most well-known folk singers began covering her songs. Judy Collins made "Both Sides Now" a hit in '68. Tom Rush recorded "The Circle Game." "Woodstock" - covered by Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young as well as Ian Matthews' Southern Comfort - became the anthem of the hippie counter-culture.

In the years that followed, Mitchell's ups and downs have been chronicled extensively. Her celebrity relationships (rumors have linked her with such stars as Graham Nash and James Taylor; she's now happily married to producer/musician Larry Klein) and her need for privacy and for change have sometimes received more ink than her music. Still, Blue and Court and Spark became instant classics. The former may be the album by which all singer/songwriter works are compared. It boasts a stark simplicity and brutal honesty that are impossible to duplicate. Court, meanwhile spawned Mitchell's biggest single, "Help Me."

Other career highlights include her performance in the filmed documentary of the Band's The Last Waltz; her jazzy 1976 release Hejira - "an album obsessed with lonesome revelry on a mythic and romantic highway," as The New Rolling Stone Record Guide put it; Mingus, recorded in 1979 as a tribute to the jazz legend; and Dog Eat Dog, cited in these pages as "one of the unheralded triumphs of 1985."

Mitchell always has exhibited a duality to herself and to her work. She can be a songwriter of the confessional type; yet she can also play the role of reporter, as on her '80s releases. She can be very shy; yet she is also, by her own admission, a real ham and loves to get up and "wreck her stockings in some jukebox dive." She is very private and rarely gives interviews; yet when she does she is open and honest, and it seems she loves to talk. In an interview from her home in California, Mitchell - despite slight hoarseness developed from five hours on the phone with another music writer - chatted for nearly three more hours about everything from her music, her painting, and her photography (that's her self-portrait on Night Ride Home) to pinball, politics, and "stoking the star-maker machinery behind the popular song."

CD Review: How much difference is there between the way one of your songs evolves today and the way you used to write?


Joni: A lot. My early work was almost semi-classical, but my first couple of releases were mistaken for folk albums. At the same time, being around Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young and Jimi Hendrix made me crave a bolder kind of music. I was being exposed to very bold and raunchy, loud, wonderful music that wasn't my predilection to create and that I didn't really want to create, even if I wanted to incorporate things that I loved about it. At the time, I was developing this slapping kind of style of hitting the guitar, and lyrically, the adjectives fell away and a lot of the grace notes fell away.

Then I went through a period where I didn't want to limit the text. Oddly enough, check out Paul Simon's latest album, because he seems to be going through this now. Instead of parqueting your words to a melody, which always has consistent symmetry, you allow the English to be more literate and more colloquial at the same time. If you were writing it out, you'd have to write out each verse independently because the lines don't match and link. On Hejira, for instance, there are long sentences - the second line might be short in one verse and very long in the next.

The criticism at the time was that that style was too wordy. That's probably when people started thinking it was too jazzy. Take the Mingus song "Goodbye Pork Pie Hat" - there's a piece in there where I had to parquet to a saxophone solo and Charles [Mingus] played me a lot of different versions, each one with a sax solo in the middle, and I chose one. Each one was different, of course, but I chose the solo I liked best to be the melody and parqueted the words to that. And that had a more abstract form.

So there's been a lot of different ways that I've worked over the years. Now [my writing] is kind of tightening up, reeling in again.

You once said that if you didn't sell a certain amount of records, your label was going to put out a greatest hits album, and you didn't want to see that happen.


The record company [Geffen] had it in my contract. It was something I didn't really notice. Records cost such a tremendous amount of money to make now. But we did my early records in two weeks and they cost very little, so I didn't have to sell very much for the company to make their profit. This is an accountant's world, as we know.

Records now take longer and longer to make because your options are multiplied by hundreds. And your studio expenses have radically increased - although we now have the studio in the house, and that helps. But recording takes time, and the time costs money and the money makes your overhead. None of my [Geffen] albums has broken even, so I'm in debt to the company store at this point. And by contract, if they don't recoup, then they have the ability to release a greatest hits album, which to me is the kiss of death because it's a synopsis - it kills [the sales of] your back catalog. I wouldn't mind doing my own synopsis, where I would edit down some of these things and perhaps group them down into themes and find some way to repackage the old work. One reason for doing [a compilation] would be to break down the myth that's been perpetrated by the press en masse that all my good work lies behind me, that I've done nothing for 20 years.

That's ridiculous.


But I see it again and again. So perhaps I'd organize the [compilation] with a mixture of periods, so that they can see that there is beauty in the later work.

Are you thinking in terms of a boxed set? Record labels are putting a lot of care into these collections.


That definitely makes it more attractive than the old greatest hits albums. If it's done with care and a presentation of graphics inside, it could be a beautiful package. As a matter of fact, we've already begun. The tapes from my first record have been in David Crosby's possession all these years - it's like a miracle that they didn't go up in smoke or something. And there are a lot of [unreleased] songs from back then that would be impossible for me to sing now - they're really ingenue works.

There also are some bits of banter between Crosby and me on the first record. And there is in existence the fledgling flight of "Both Sides Now" at the Second Fret in Philadelphia. Those things are archival, and they have value if you're preparing a boxed set package. But if someone makes a collection of songs that were hits or single releases but are not the best of what I do, that's the nightmare - to miss the best performances.

How much work have you done on the boxed set so far?


We've begun the process of saving tapes. Old master tapes, like film, are deteriorating now - we've lived that long that they're beginning to go. So we're transferring over the early albums onto digital. In the process, we're looking at the raw footage, the uncut footage, and there's a lot that's salvageable there.

What kinds of material have you uncovered?


There are tracks from the Mingus album, which was cut with four of five different bands; with some of them I do better vocal performances. I wanted to come into jazz and take it somewhere. There are some tracks where I don't take it anywhere, that are just straight meat-and-potatoes jazz where I'm actually singing better than I did [on the commercially released tracks]. The album I put out is a little more out there.

There's a lot of other stuff back there as well. For instance, the first album was a conceptual album. I had so much material that the first side is called "I Came to the City'' and the second side is called "Out of the City and Down to the Seaside." It's that same recurring theme: What are cities doing to nature? There are [unreleased] songs from that era, one of them called "Jeremy,'' which is a nice song about a kid thrown into prison for pot.

There also are [unreleased songs with] pretty melodies and 'tunesmithy" lyrics. I've always been called a folk singer, from the time I made my first record. I've only recorded two folk songs in my whole career, but I used to sing folk songs before I began to write, and there are [tapes] of those - and that's kind of interesting. It's a piece of the evolution that's missing from [my] records.

I once read an interview where you were talking about keeping journals. Do you still do that?


Not as much as I did when I was just beginning and life was simpler. Back then, I didn't have a big organization around me. I was just a kid with a guitar, traveling around. My responsibility basically was to the art, and I had extra time on my hands. There is no extra time now. There isn’t enough time.

Today, everything's a journal in a certain way. I take photographs, and that's a journal - it's what I see in a given period of time. It's a document of where my eyes have come to rest. My songs to a certain degree contain a document of incidents that happened. Sometimes it takes many years to write about them - they're not necessarily chronological. I think I'm a habitual documenter, visually and [sonically]. I think the chords I choose are a document of where I'm at at any given time, that they depict - if not the state I'm in at the time that I create it - at least the companion for the story.

Is there ever a time that there's something you 're trying to communicate in a song, or even in your paintings or photography, and you can 't do it?


Oh, sure - that's when you try to force it. But you have to be really patient. And it's easy for me to be patient in that I have a lot of balls in the air. So at the point where I'm trying to force something, and it's not happening and I'm getting frustrated with, say, writing a poem, I can go and pick up the brushes and start painting. At the point where the painting seems to not be going anywhere, I go and pick up the guitar. And if it seems like all I'm coughing up on the guitar is the same-old-same-old, I just twiddle. I've got 50 different tunings in the guitar.

You seem to have a lot of energy, considering that you're active in music, painting, and photography.


At best, it's all child's play, isn't it? It's pleasurable and agonizing.

Where does the agonizing part come from?


It mostly seems to be external. It probably comes from misunderstanding - especially when [your work] is high-spirited, and when you're trying to pass on the best of the stuff you're culling to what should be a hungry culture but you have it diminished [by the media]. That's kind of disappointing. You think, "It's too bad this guy just backhanded this thing in a really stupid, negative way. He thinks he's smart." And unfortunately, because of him, a certain amount of sheep are going to [follow].

What do you think gave you the drive to do what you do?


I assume there must be some kind of genetic thrust. My two grandmothers were very different, but both of them were frustrated musicians. My paternal grandmother had a hard life - baby after baby after baby. She was not a martyr, but she was a total self-sacrificing animal to her many babies. She cried for the last time in her life when she was 14, I'm told. The last thing she cried for was that she wanted a piano, and she told herself, "You silly girl. You'll never have a piano. Dry your eyes." I forget which aunt told me this, but to me it's incredible that if that was the main turning point in her life - "I want to play this thing so bad, but I can't; it's not my destiny" - then there's a possibility that that urge went into the genetic pool. She had a lot of children who then had smaller families... maybe three or four children. One of them has got to get that gene, don't you think?

On the other side, my mother's mother, Sadie, came from a line of classical musicians. She came east with a homesteader to the prairie; they were the first farmers on that plain after the buffalo and the Indians. That's how young that country [central Canada] is. She had an organ in the farmhouse and she played classical piano and wrote poetry, mostly celebrating her father. And she was a tempest. She always felt she was the opposite of the other long-suffering, good-natured ones. She was always having fiery fits that she was too good, that she was a poet and a musician stuck on a farm. Perhaps [I inherited] the thrust of those two women.

The other thing I would say is that I would have been an athlete, but I had a lot of childhood illnesses that developed a solitude and a deepening and fostered "artisticness." I had polio when I was 9, and I remember that there was a boy in the bed next to mine in the polio ward who was really depressed. He didn't even have polio as bad as I did, but he wasn't fighting it - he wasn't fighting to go on with what he had left. Polio is the disease that eats muscles. If it eats the muscle of your heart, it kills you; if it eats the muscles that control the flexing of your lungs, you end up in an iron lung; if it eats the muscle of your leg, it withers, or of your arm, it withers. In my case it ate muscles in my back - the same thing happened with Neil Young. I had to learn to stand, and then to walk. Through all of this I drew like crazy and sang Christmas carols. I think that the creative process was an urgency then, that it was a survival instinct.

I left that ward long before that boy, who had a mild case of polio in one leg. He lay with his back to the wall, sulking. When the spirit of child's play enters into the creative process, it's a wonderful force and something to be nurtured.

Having survived those experiences - not to mention your years in the music business - how do you feel at this point about going on the road to tour ?


I've got mixed feelings about it. On one hand, I'm allergic to air conditioning and strange things, and planes tend to make me sick, exposing me to the dehydration that goes on. On another level, I would really enjoy it. When I think of the camaraderie and the music and putting together a collection of things from a lot of different projects, and when I think about the physical thing of playing and singing, then I'd love to tour. So I'm still weighing it. It'll be a few months before I'll be strong enough to even think about it - my health is fragile at this time. I'm not dying or anything. It's not something that can't be cured, but it's not a good time, to put myself in the position of touring - it's very I stressful.

But we should tour, really, because Night Ride Home has got a tail-wind, and people tend to like it. Everything points to the fact that there's a favorable disposition for this project.


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