oni Mitchell - Studio Albums 1968-1979 (2012)
EAC Rip | Flac(Image) + Cue + Log 
~ 2446 or 2453 or 1158 Mb | Scans(png) -> 935 Mb | Box Art -> 60 MB
10CD | 2012 | Warner Music/Rhino Records, 8122797178
Folk-Rock / Folk-Jazz / Jazz / Pop


From Laurel Canyon to jazz-rock's far outposts - the suffragette of sensuality's stunning first decade...

Joni Mitchell may be the most influential female artist in music history. While there have undoubtedly been more impressive singers, from Billie Holiday to Aretha Franklin to Dusty Springfield, prior to Mitchell's emergence female performers were largely restricted to interpretive roles. Even the formidably talented Carole King had to wait until the '70s for significant success as a singer-songwriter with Tapestry.

But Mitchell's wider influence is undeniable, with artists far removed from her initial folk-music scene acknowledging her impact - Prince, famously, is a huge fan, and Madonna has admitted that "of all the women I've heard, she had the most profound effect on me from a lyrical point of view". Not to mention, one imagines, Mitchell's presentation of herself as a sexually self-determining woman at a time when submissive acquiescence was the dominant mode afforded newly "liberated" women; nor her capacity to negotiate some of the most complex and unvarnished emotional analyses ever set to music. Joni Mitchell was a true emancipator, a suffragette of sensuality blessed with a heightened poetic sensibility.

There is no better evocation of the dawn of a new, more questing consciousness than Joni's early albums: the very album title Ladies Of The Canyon is redolent of flaxen-haired damsels in Angeleno hippie paradise. Mitchell had been discovered by David Crosby, who became the first of her Laurel Canyon lovers. As producer of her debut album Songs To A Seagull, Crosby's main aim was to capture her talent as clearly as possible, unencumbered by overweening arrangements. "I didn't do a very good job producing it," Crosby once told me modestly, "but she did make an astounding record."

The opening track "I Came To The City" deals with her early marriage, as if opening the album with a line drawn under her previous life. As such, it presages the strain of confessional honesty that runs throughout her work. Couched in imagery of pirates and seabirds, gems, flowers and fabrics, the rest of the album expresses her driving need for freedom, especially from the anchoring restraints of would-be suitors keen to pin her down. Heard retrospectively, the cold detail of the songs, and the austere purity of her voice, speak volumes about her clear-eyed ambition.

Studded with the early classics "Chelsea Morning" and "Both Sides Now", Clouds is suffused with romantic uncertainty, hope and betrayal, like a ledger of the emotional accounting of the free-love era, profit and loss measured not just in love, but in the restraints and expectations love places upon us: the older woman "left to winter here" in "The Gallery" and the hesitant steps into new territory taken in "Tin Angel" and "I Don't Know Where I Stand". Ladies Of The Canyon added "Big Yellow Taxi", "Woodstock" and "The Circle Game" to her burgeoning canon of classics, while "Willy" - lover Graham Nash's nickname - became one of the earliest examples of the new mode of autobiographical revelation that turned Laurel Canyon scenesters' songs into diaristic soap operas. But Blue was the landmark album, the apotheosis of Joni's early style in which her lyrical strategies, melodies and vocal approaches were handled with a compelling confidence, and sequenced with an intelligent regard for what might be called the album's emotional topography. Even today, there is no better evocation of the light-hearted joy of romance than "Carey", with its see-sawing melody, and a delivery that slips so easily between affectionate yearning and bubbly excitement.
 
http://www.uncut.co.uk/joni-mitchell-the-studio-albums-1968-1979-review

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