Björk’s favourite album of all time
There is perhaps no musician more singular than Björk. The Icelandic singer and master of the avant-garde seems to have a limitless imagination, infusing each of her projects with the bizarre and the beautiful in equal measure. Her output is so unique that she has almost transcended comparison to her peers or predecessors, a feat few musicians attain.
Although it’s often difficult to trace Björk’s influences amidst her distinctive vocals and ever-experimental electronics, she has previously acknowledged some of her inspirations, one of which might come as a surprise. The offerings of the Icelandic composer may seem worlds away from the soft folk stylings of Joni Mitchell, but Björk has never been predictable.
Discovering Mitchell during her early teens spent in Iceland, Björk was stunned by her 1977 album Don Juan’s Reckless Daughter. One of Mitchell’s slightly more experimental efforts, the album veered into experimental jazz territory and featured a 16-minute track that took up an entire side of the record. It was this eccentricity that endeared the album to a young Björk, who named it as her all-time favourite album during a conversation with Mojo.
“It has probably had the biggest influence on me,” she admitted, “It has the stark, Northern thing where you look out your window and there are no trees. This album is really under-appreciated.” Taking a backseat to the overwhelming and enduring love for Blue or Court and Spark, the experimentalism of Don Juan’s Reckless Daughter certainly has gone under-appreciated, but not by Björk.
“I knew it by heart (still do, every instrument, every noise, every word),” Björk enthused on her official website, “I would love to cover sometime some of the songs of that album but they might be too sacred for me, too immaculate for me even to be able to suggest that they might be done in any other way. At that age my love for her was very intuitive and limitless with total ignorance of her meaning in North America in the hippy era, for example.”
Uninfluenced by the folk image of the singer-songwriter that prevailed in her home country, Björk discovered an experimental gem and one of her favourite albums of all time in Don Juan’s Reckless Daughter. Though she is too scared to impose upon the immaculacy of the record, a sign of just how much she treasures it, Björk has previously paid tribute to Mitchell with a cover of a song she felt slightly less personal connection to, ‘The Boho Dance’.
Though it might be difficult for the average listener to find the stylings of Mitchell on the Icelandic artist’s pop art, the influence of Don Juan’s Reckless Daughter most certainly remains for Björk.
