{"id":4444,"date":"2021-11-10T08:20:00","date_gmt":"2021-11-10T08:20:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.sebpalmer.com\/blog\/?p=4444"},"modified":"2022-12-18T12:08:03","modified_gmt":"2022-12-18T12:08:03","slug":"music-song-to-a-seagull-1967-8","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.sebpalmer.com\/blog\/?p=4444","title":{"rendered":"MUSiC: Song To A Seagull, 1967-8"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
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Holy-guacamole! What an astonishing debut. Joni Mitchell just knocks me off my feet. I\u2019m winded, as if with a hefty punch to the solar plexus. And tears come. The music is just so<\/em> powerful. The swift one-two combination of I Had A King and Michael From Mountains is a pair of knockout blows right from the get go.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The other and most notable thing, for me, is the emotional register of it all. It\u2019s beautifully and very powerfully melancholy. Even Night In The City, the most overtly or ostensibly \u2018jolly\u2019 song – track three (a perfectly good song, but the weakest here, for my money) – has an inescapable element of that Joni blue. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

After the slight anomaly of Night In The City, come Marcie and Nathan La Franeer, and we\u2019re plunged back into the cold icy waters of Joni\u2019s oceanic Northern consciousness. When we get to Sisotowbell Lane, any dam on my constipated emotions is obliterated. I love the entire album. But Sisotowbell Lane is a snowy peak of Himalayan stratosphere piercing sublimity. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

But, as if to confound my gushing hyperbole, she follows this with the magnificence of The Dawntreader. This album could easily be the dictionary or Brewer\u2019s definition of the phrase \u2018an embarrassment of riches\u2019.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Mercifully the intensity let\u2019s up a fraction with the slightly strident mildly experimental Pirate of Penance, and remains at a lower ebb for the title track. Every single track, save perhaps Night In The City, gives the lie to the \u2018female folkie\u2019 label occasionally applied to Joni (esp. in her early days*), as they are all far more richly complex, more \u2018compositional\u2019\u2026<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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And so we come to journey\u2019s end, with Cactus Tree. And once again we\u2019re stood atop a mountain, or are we riding the crest of an emotional wave of titanic oceanic proportions? How could such a slight willowy polio afflicted young woman become the lightning rod for such powerful elemental forces?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

As long as I live I will love Joni with an unrequited passion. Who was it – Woody Allen, perhaps? – that said unrequited love was the only kind that really lasts! Song to a Seagull <\/em>is an astonishing album. A masterpiece. And that it was Joni\u2019s debut is even more astounding. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

The version I\u2019ve just listened to, which ended with uncanny Joni-esque perfection just as I arrived at work (how will I explain my puffy red teary eyes?), is the recent 2021 remaster, from the Reprise Records reissue box. It\u2019s been \u2018improved\u2019, from the original David Crosby produced sessions, apparently. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

I have to confess that I don\u2019t find the engineering or production interventions particularly noteworthy, or even very noticeable (mind, this particular listen was whilst driving, so the music was competing with all the noises associated with that). Although STAS<\/em> is sonically different to the following albums, that\u2019s also part it\u2019s period charm. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

The remaster certainly doesn\u2019t spoil that. But nor, so far at any rate, to my ears, does it radically alter or improve it. STAS<\/em> simply remains a sublime slice of early Joni. Totally essential, in my world. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

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* One has to go back to her pre album caf\u00e9 gig era, some of which is documented on the terrific Volume 1, The Early Years, 1963-1967<\/em>, from the marvellous Joni Mitchell Archives series, to find her sounding like a more typical \u201860s folkster.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Holy-guacamole! What an astonishing debut. Joni Mitchell just knocks me off my feet. I\u2019m winded, as if with a hefty punch to the solar plexus. And tears come. The music is just so powerful. The swift one-two combination of I Had A King and Michael From Mountains is a pair of knockout blows right from … <\/p>\n

Continue reading “MUSiC: Song To A Seagull, 1967-8”<\/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":[68,10,58],"tags":[],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/paGwUa-19G","_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.sebpalmer.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4444"}],"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=4444"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"http:\/\/www.sebpalmer.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4444\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":7617,"href":"http:\/\/www.sebpalmer.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4444\/revisions\/7617"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.sebpalmer.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=4444"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.sebpalmer.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=4444"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.sebpalmer.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=4444"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}