View album Hejira Released November View album Mingus Released June View album Shadows and Light Released September View album Turbulent Indigo Released October 25, View album Hits Released October 29, View album Misses Released October 29, View album Taming the Tiger Released September 29, View album Travelogue Released November 19, The meandering melodies and layered voiceovers can be discombobulating.
But there is enough lyrical reflection to keep the mega fans happy. Pre-Mingus, Mitchell said she was just dipping her big toe into the lake of jazz. When she met the jazz giant, he pushed her in. It may not be as compelling as Hejira, but there is still a lot here to admire.
The percussive rhythms and jazz inflections are there — but the melodies are softer and her vocals are tender. More self-assured and at ease with where she is. Said to be inspired by environmental catastrophe and the Iraq war, Blue-era piano on its opening track, One Week Last Summer, gave fans exactly what they were waiting for.
Revisionist albums tend to fail miserably. Not this one — her orchestral reworking of her earlier classics soar with ascending strings and bittersweet tenderness.
Stand-out tracks are Hejira and Amelia — stirring, soulful retellings of introspection and exploration that wash over you. Even compared with Hejira from the year before, this double album is a leap ahead in terms of abstraction and improvisation.
And although not everyone is a jazzed-up Joni fan, it is impossible to listen to the epic Paprika Plains all 16 minutes and 21 seconds of it and not marvel at the breadth and scope of her ambitious transformation. Mitchell once remarked that her chords are depictions of emotions, that there is always a question mark to be found within them. To understand what she means, begin with her searing debut — a record that questions far more than it answers.
The opening track, I Had a King, is an ethereal lament that depicts her disastrous marriage to Chuck Mitchell with devastating lyrical honesty. The joke was on Mitchell — it became her first top 40 hit in the US.
Which aptly sums up this outing. And she is on the move. There is a reason why Prince referenced it as a major influence in the 80s. Rejecting the traditional structure of her previous work, Mitchell continued to embrace a fuller band sound, exploring a wild and roaming jazz score that finally severed ties with her folk past.
It is a confident and celebratory break-out. Yet, despite the melodic abandon, it is a record that still wrestles with core Mitchell themes: alienation and isolation; transient relationships; the need for love; the desire to escape. This is definitely one for the road, evoking a hunger for movement, a sense of yearning and restlessness, that permeates every track.
Taut, sparse and exposed, listening to Clouds is a magical, immersive experience. Widely considered to be the greatest relationship record of all time if not the greatest record of all time , Blue expresses a refined truthfulness that permanently etches itself on to the listener, to quote Mitchell, like a tattoo. Actors playing nightmarish versions of themselves in cinema - ranked!
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Maggie Smith's 20 best films — ranked! Despite the firepower, unfortunately Chalk Mark feels more like the aged Muzak you might hear on the loudspeaker at the grocery store than timeless experimentation. Sometime in the mids I saw Joni Mitchell, sort of, from the upper deck of a basketball arena in Columbus, Ohio. She was a tiny figure in the distance who may or may not have been hunched over a piano; it was hard to tell.
By then I had been listening to her music for a long time. But she found me again on albums like Chalk Mark in a Rain Storm and Turbulent Indigo , when she rediscovered the uncharted territories of the heart.
When Mitchell released her 16th studio album Taming the Tiger in , it was touted as her last. It can be a little disorienting at times, but, ultimately, Mitchell still offers enough enticing lyrical material to keep me satisfied throughout the whole listen. Full of her token woodwinds and some beautiful piano arrangements, Shine was supposedly inspired by ongoing events in the early s like violence in the Middle East and uproar over climate change. Similar to her beginnings in folk and protest music, Mitchell was once again charting history.
I have always had an ecological overview. Usually, nobody knows what I am talking about, and they call me an alarmist. Night Ride Home begins with rhythmic cricket noises, which is a telling sign of the whimsy that follows in the next 50 minutes of this album. After quartet of free-form jazz albums in , Mitchell returned to short, even lines and recurring, memorable melodies on this project.
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