The song Joni Mitchell always claimed was too out of tune: “I had a lot of balls!”
There are a lot of moving parts that go into any project Joni Mitchell is working on.
Even though she is one of the greatest songwriters of her generation, it took more than a bunch of clever chords and the right words to put her at the top of the musical mountain alongside the likes of Bob Dylan and The Beatles when she first got started. So when she put out any of her records, she would be mortified when she felt that some of the greatest parts of the song were slightly out of place.
Then again, that’s part of being human as a musician. Everyone knows that not everything is going to come out perfectly on every single take, and even if there are more than a few moments that don’t work, there comes a point where even the mistakes manage to have a little bit of shimmer to them if they are heard in the right context. But usually, she didn’t need to worry about that once she got the best session players in the world next to her.
The LA Express were already a well-oiled machine when they started working with her, and when she was working off of jazz legends like Larry Carlton, there was no sense in arguing about whether they were playing the charts right. These were seasoned veterans of the session scene, and there’s a good chance that she could have thrown them songs that had the most complex jazz chords of all time, and they could still manage to make everything work perfectly.
She wasn’t going to hire any slouch to play on one of her records, but there were moments where she started to wonder what she was getting herself into when she got calls from the greats of the jazz world. It’s one thing to be thought of as a contemporary of someone like Miles Davis, but when someone like Charles Mingus calls you, saying that he would like to work with you, most of us would have wanted to hide away for the rest of our lives rather than trying to match what he could do.
Mingus was already willing to experiment, though, and Mitchell was the perfect person to help offset his ideas. Not everything that they did needed to be absolutely pristine when it came out, but when she heard both of the piano tracks that she was using for the song ‘Paprika Plains’, she was mortified when she found out one of them was out of tune with the rest of the track when it was finished.
Not everyone necessarily hears those indiscrepancies, but Mitchell felt that the whole track felt out of whack every time she heard it, saying, “It was recorded in January, and the piano was tuned many, many times, so by August when I played the verses, which were born much later, the piano had slightly changed. So, somebody was playing this piece for Charles, and Charles is a stickler for true pitch and time, and he kept saying, ‘It’s out of tune, it’s out of tune.’ But when the piece was over he said that I had a lot of balls!”
Then again, being out of tune in this context might not have been a bad thing, either. There are many times where people are going to need youtube up before they even think about working on some of their songs, but when someone has worked that hard to make something that sounds emotional, sometimes those few rough sections where things don’t sound in tune actually add to the eeriness of the rest of the track.
Would she have rather had the piano be played perfectly throughout the entire song? Of course, but that wouldn’t have been the version that anyone would have resonated with. It’s one thing for artists to have a standard for what their music should sound like, but when you have these moments where they capture something a bit out of tune, it can either be one of the most discordant noises of all time or a thing of beauty.
