Joni Mitchell in brief-ish review

Joni Mitchell, Ladies of the Canyon
Blue
For the Roses
Court and Spark
The Hissing of Summer Lawns
Hejira

Joni Mitchell has always existed on the edges of the music I listen to. Court and Spark was commonly played as I finished my dissertation; I liked Blue sometimes very much. But that was 15 years ago when my life was very different. In the spirit of giving things that have fallen out of my favor another chance, and in the grad school spirit of ingesting a lot to get the arc of a career or a mind, I've listened to all of the classic-ish Joni Mitchell albums in order over the last couple of days.

We should take as a starting point and a given that the musicianship is excellent and the compositions intricate. It also is a world unto itself--a Joni Mitchell song announces itself immediately and could be nothing else. You can listen to a lot of modern shoegaze or hip-hop producers in the vein of The Alchemist and think, not unfairly, that it all kind of runs together after awhile. (A standard I have long had for a Good Album is that each of the songs should be independently identifiable very early in your listening history; a song being a discrete unit with an identity is a sign of a higher level of artistry.) 

And as something of a recovering contrarian, it's important to note that her best known songs are known best for a reason: they are all very good, if not always an emotionally easy listen. You'll get no argument from me on "Big Yellow Taxi", "Woodstock", "River", "Both Sides Now", "A Case of You" etc. 

There's a directness to the lyricism whose appeal is pretty clear and meant a lot more to me when my own feelings were less readily available to me, but now it reads to me as a precision of observation that excludes as much as it opens up. "The Last Time I Saw Richard" is exactly what a song named that would lead you to believe it is. Like reading a short story, in a way: if it is for you, then it's a world; if it's not for you, the specificity ruins the ability for it to mean much.

On the music, one can say that the most important thing is the reminder that an acoustic guitar is as much a percussion instrument as anything else: other instrumentation comes and goes, but the songs have an internal structure that doesn't require anything else to move, and in this it separates itself out from a lot of other singer-songwriter albums that have trouble maintaining a pulse.

In the end, these days, I require a little more heft and variation. The most intriguing song on any of these albums, by a lot, is "The Jungle Line", where the synthesizer creates a more dynamic world than the rest of her music allows. It has no sequel. Hejira also rang in an interesting way, the songs being longer than normal and with more presence of bass and groove than in some of the other albums. 

Time passes, things change: I could not find in Court and Spark whatever I once did, and Joni Mitchell's music as a whole feels flatter than it has in the past. Whether that's a phase or not, I don't know. I don't think it's a "female singer-songwriter" thing, since Allegra Krieger's Art of the Unseen Infinity Machine and Faye Webster's Underdressed at the Symphony have gotten plenty of play in the last year.