The project Joni Mitchell said would feature her most unpopular songs ever
To some surprise, Joni Mitchell ostensibly had left the music business for good in 2002.
Creativity seemed to have ebbed as the 21st century arrived. 2000’s Both Sides Now was a jazzy covers album of mostly orchestral standards of the stage, and Travelogue two years later eked out a double-album of reimaginations from her vast songbook. While both interesting pursuits, the nag of ‘contractual obligations’ could never quite be shifted from her then final LP bow.
Yet, Mitchell’s hiatus wouldn’t last long. The joys of her grandmotherly duties and retired lifestyle clashed with the decade’s political turmoil, President George W Bush’s Republican administration and the disastrous Iraq War, too calamitous to ignore, plus the economic breakdown she’d spent her entire life rallying against seemed to escalate with grim certitude. While never explicitly lambasting the day’s social ills, Mitchell returned to the studio with a charged renewal, ushering what for many fans was her first real comeback since 1998’s Taming the Tiger.
Smattered with sparse arrangements and atmospheric swirls of percussion and keys, 2007’s Shine gleamed as her most vital effort in years, beaming as a record she wanted to make rather than going through the obligatory motions on her previous LP efforts. Imbued with a certain resolution, a rerecord of ‘Big Yellow Taxi’ comes full circle with her fight against big business’s waste of the natural world, less sprightly than the original and cutting a little deeper with her aged voice and lessons stubbornly unlearned in the intervening 27-odd years.
Sharing Shine‘s political anxieties was The Fiddler and the Drum. Dreamed up by Alberta Ballet artistic director Jean Grand-Maître, the performing arts dance project was initially conceived as a retrospective celebration of Mitchell’s life and work, and she was less than thrilled, but instead, Mitchell agreed on the condition that the work explores the fraught themes that appear throughout her songbook, chiefly environmentalism, war, and a cautiously hopeful view of humanity’s trajectory.
Mitchell and Grand-Maître began crafting songs to serve the stage for The Fiddler and the Drum’s narrative. Overlooking a miniature of the stage gallery on her pool table, Mitchell pushed for the songs to face off her political subject matter, at any cost, as well as touching on the corporate invasion of her old Canadian haunt from years ago.
“I’ll give you a war ballet,” Mitchell recalled telling Grand-Maître on PBS’ Charlie Rose at the time. “However, it’ll be my most unpopular material. Your sponsors will probably pull out. I’m assuming that there are Texas oil men, because Calgary is invaded with Texas oil men, you know. They’re not gonna like this, you know.”
She furthered the creative gamble put to Grand-Maître that The Fiddler and the Drum posed. “And maybe people will walk on it. I said, ‘You know, are you willing to take that risk?’ And he went, ‘Yes.’ So he was so wonderfully fearless.”
She needn’t have worried. Meeting her artistic ethos and political principles, Mitchell’s music and set design, coupled with Grand-Maître’s choreography, received positive reviews, and The Fiddler and the Drum and the spiritual twin Shine were the last time fans were gifted with Mitchell’s unerring creative spark.
