The 1980s musician Joni Mitchell could never agree with: “We’d be stalemated”
One of the biggest rules of working with Joni Mitchell should normally be to stay the hell out of the way.
Mitchell was always going to do things the way she wanted, and even if she had a few hiccups in her career here and there, the point was that she was doing everything that she wanted to do whenever working on one of her records. Whether she succeeded or failed didn’t matter as long as she expressed herself, and the last thing that she wanted was someone trying to tell her how her music was supposed to be.
Because, really, how do you correct one of the greatest songwriters of all time? Are you going to be the one to tell her that one of her songs is absolute garbage and that she should start from scratch? I mean, you can certainly try, but there’s no real point in trying to make that argument unless you have something better to work with, and even on her lesser albums, Mitchell was still working with something much more nuanced than anyone else was doing.
Most pop producers in the 1980s wouldn’t have known the first thing about working with Mitchell and Charles Mingus on one of their albums, and even when she started to change with the times, a lot of those changes were done in-house. She didn’t need to have everyone on her side to be one of the biggest jazz-adjacent rock and roll artists, and a lot of the greatest parts of her lowlights is that they don’t tend to sound dated.
That is, until you reach an album like Dog Eat Dog. It wouldn’t be fair to call it one of the worst albums that she’s ever made by any stretch, but compared to the rest of her discography, it does feel like a bit of an odd duck in her catalogue. And a lot of that might have come down to her working with Thomas Dolby on the production end of things throughout most of this record. Because, of course, everyone was preparing for Mitchell’s answer to ‘She Blinded me With Science’, right?
That’s not really fair, either, though. Dolby had proven himself to be one of the greatest pioneers of synth sounds, and for someone who wanted to take advantage of new sounds all the time, it’s not like Mitchell was ever afraid to work outside her comfort zone. But when you hear about the way that Mitchell and Dolby played off each other, they clearly weren’t ready to be the same kind of musical partners that everyone would have hoped.
Mitchell was steadfast in her ideas, and even if Dolby had a keen ear for what the charts wanted, she wasn’t going to budge an inch if it meant sacrificing what she wanted to hear, saying, “Well, I’m very fond of him, but man! He was very quiet – and stubborn – and when we disagreed, we’d have these discussions, and he’d say, ‘Well, I’m not getting anything out of these adult talks, Joan,’ and then I’d say, ‘Well, then, neither am I,’ and we’d be stalemated.”
Kudos to both of them for being honest, but the fact that they were tense in between sessions can really be felt on this record. Not every song is a complete dud, but it’s clear that we’re listening to one of the most compromised Mitchell records that ever got made, especially when the keyboards get a little too overbearing across the project and leave little room for Mitchell’s poetry to seep through.
And for any Joni Mitchell project, that’s normally a recipe for disaster. Here is one of the greatest performers that anyone has ever seen trying to make something new, and if she’s being pushed into the background because her contribution doesn’t serve the song well, it’s time to really start straightening out your priorities.
