{"id":2325,"date":"2021-06-21T19:58:00","date_gmt":"2021-06-21T19:58:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.sebpalmer.com\/blog\/?p=2325"},"modified":"2022-12-18T12:18:10","modified_gmt":"2022-12-18T12:18:10","slug":"music-joni-mitchell-blue-50th-anniversary","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.sebpalmer.com\/blog\/?p=2325","title":{"rendered":"MUSiC: Joni Mitchell, Blue, 50th Anniversary"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
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I often feel somewhat peeved at the adulation that Blue is regularly accorded, to my mind very much at the expense of other equally great Joni albums, from her mind-blowing ’68 debut, Song To A Seagull<\/em>, to one of my personal favourites, For The Roses<\/em> (1972). As Brandi Carlisle puts it in the liner notes to the recently released The Reprise Albums, 1968-71<\/em>, whatever else might be right or wrong about the times we live in, we can at least say we lived in the era of Joni Mitchell. Amen to that.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Anyway, having got that out of the way, here are some notes I made whilst listening to the 50th Anniversary re-release of the Joni Mitchell Archives Demos And Outtakes<\/em> release…<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Wow! This is what we want. Or at least it\u2019s what I want. I\u2019ve been a bit of an ornery curmudgeon regarding the recent 50th anniversary celebrations of Blue<\/em>. Sure, it\u2019s a brilliant album, by the best female singer songwriter that\u2019s ever lived. But it\u2019s also the most talked about and lionised of her albums. And I always<\/em> have issues with such adulation.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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So, rather than joining the (very justified) hallelujah chorus singing the praises of the album itself, I find it far more interesting to discover new sounds from the period. And that\u2019s exactly what these demos and outtakes provide. Okay, there are only five tracks, and of those only one – Hunter – is out and out new to me. And even this track is familiar, parts of the guitar sounding very like another Joni track I can\u2019t quite put my finger on.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The full track listing is Case of You, California, Hunter, River, Urge For Going. What I love is that these recordings are absolutely superb in quality – however they were recorded, they could easily be on any album – and yet they feel to me like they capture that perennial image of Joni as the girl with guitar and portable reel to reel, continually \u2018sketching\u2019 (\u2018I am a lonely painter\u2019).<\/p>\n\n\n\n

And, even better, these aren\u2019t just track-x take #whatever, i.e. very like the tracks we know. They all have certain aspects that mark them out as significantly different. This is most obviously so on Case of You, which kicks things off. It\u2019s a more staccato take, instrumentally, with quite a bit of difference in the lyrics. California is perhaps the closest to what you hear on Blue<\/em>. But it\u2019s still audibly different, if only quite subtly. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Hunter is – to me – completely new. Although, as already noted, it sounds like she may have recycled some of the guitar elsewhere. River is very like the version in Blue, except that at the end there are added horns, riffing on the Christmassy vibe Joni evokes by quoting that familiar seasonal melody I can’t name right now. And then there\u2019s Urge For Going, which wasn\u2019t on Blue, but is widely known, having been released elsewhere on numerous occasions. Again there\u2019s a new element, this time overdubbed strings.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In conclusion, these recent archival releases are absolutely terrific! And these demos and outtakes partake of that grooviness. If you\u2019re a Joni devotee, as I most unashamedly am, then this undeniably essential.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I often feel somewhat peeved at the adulation that Blue is regularly accorded, to my mind very much at the expense of other equally great Joni albums, from her mind-blowing ’68 debut, Song To A Seagull, to one of my personal favourites, For The Roses (1972). As Brandi Carlisle puts it in the liner notes … <\/p>\n

Continue reading “MUSiC: Joni Mitchell, Blue, 50th Anniversary”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_is_tweetstorm":false,"jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","enabled":false}}},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/paGwUa-Bv","_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.sebpalmer.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2325"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.sebpalmer.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.sebpalmer.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.sebpalmer.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.sebpalmer.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=2325"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"http:\/\/www.sebpalmer.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2325\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":7653,"href":"http:\/\/www.sebpalmer.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2325\/revisions\/7653"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.sebpalmer.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2325"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.sebpalmer.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2325"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.sebpalmer.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2325"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}