The “irritating” album Joni Mitchell couldn’t bear listening to
Nothing that Joni Mitchell ever touched ever felt thrown together.
Even if songs didn’t resonate as much with everyone, all of her greatest works felt like finely-crafted oil paintings that have had every trace of colour meticulously crafted throughout its runtime. The standards she had for herself were always incredibly high, but that didn’t mean that everything that she released was up to that standard, either.
Because as much as Mitchell had fond memories of her best songs, she could also be one of the most ruthless critics of her own work as well. She knew that he had the potential to make fantastic music, but that also came at a cost most of the time, whether that was losing Charles Mingus before she got finished with her final collaboration with him or having her heart ripped to pieces when working on the tracks on Blue.
But never through her songwriting process did she ever feel like she was phoning it in, either. The best music that she ever made always came from her quoting her own heart or trying tour something new, and even if a record like Dog Eat Dog might not resonate the same way that her classic material does, it was worth it for her to take a chance on a new sound rather than remaining stagnant throughout her career.
Then again, it’s helpful for any artist to get their foot in the door with a sound that the people like. Mitchell was never going to break into the industry strictly by playing by her own rules, and while she did carve out a place in history unlike any of her peers, she felt that working around bands like Crosby, Stills, and Nash gave her a perfect incubator to work on a lot of her first great records.
And listening to her first steps, the music speaks for itself half the time. Songs like ‘Both Sides Now’ had the potential to sound incredibly naive coming from a woman in her 20s, but when looking at it through a modern lens, her performances of the tune in later life come from someone that has seen years of musical experience and wants to share that wisdom with anyone willing to listen.
But even then, Mitchell was never all that fond of the original album that the tune came off of, Clouds, saying later, “Clouds has some honest moments on it, but at the time, I was singing a lot with Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young, and they had a style, out of necessity, to blend with one another. They had a way of affecting vowel sounds so that when they sang together, they would sing like a unit. I picked up on that, and there’s a lot of that on the album. I find it now kind of irritating to listen to. It always seems ridiculous to me.”
And while there are certain aspects of tunes like ‘Chelsea Morning’ that have a fair bit of that sound, it’s not like it’s a huge detriment to what the music sounds like. All of the songs at the root of the album are as compact as possible and with every other tune, you can hear Mitchell slowly building towards making some of her other classics like Court and Spark in the future.
Not every artist has to have fond memories of their first outings, and even if Mitchell doesn’t have the same fondness for Clouds as her fans, it’s worth it to hear her going through the deep recesses of her musical mind to make these classics. There are some rough edges, but any other singer-songwriter around that time would have killed to make an album even a little bit close to this.
