![]() Both missed their mark until now, the song never made it to record.Īnd in a moment of vulnerability, Mitchell admits during her Carnegie Hall debut she’s “just begun to pick out a few tunes on the piano” but has only one finished. She tries two different strumming patterns (including one clearly indebted to her old friend Neil Young) for “Midnight Cowboy,” an early character study of a cosplaying and hopeless urban outlaw. During two home-recording sessions in her New York apartment, for instance, Mitchell sits at the piano or guitar to play or sing, searching for a phrase that might spark a new tune. Like the Beatles’ Get Back, these moments on Volume 2 illustrate the ordinary labor involved in making something that ultimately seems extraordinary. Mitchell would continue teasing out phrases and contractions before recording “A Case of You” that winter, but at least she had found the mot juste for the song’s devastating premise. “If you want me, I’ll be in the bar.” It’s a snapshot of a breakup so crisp and raw you long to stick around to see the wreckage. There are no more fish in the first verse, only a scathing rebuke to the lover’s swagger: “Constantly in the darkness-where is that at?” she sings, the withering glare almost audible. “I’m not gonna be singing right away, but I might breathe heavy,” mutters Taylor as he tunes, just before they unveil the near-finished version of this song about her ex. They were smitten-in a few weeks, she’d pass the holidays with his family in North Carolina, caroling, buying records, and painting his portrait. Just three months later, Mitchell shared the stage of London’s Paris Theatre with Taylor. “You’re just as silly as a northern fish,” she sings, replying to the lover who says he’s “constant as a Northern Star.” She laughs self-consciously at this speck of juvenilia. The song is mostly there-its staccato dulcimer sway, its “Oh, Canada!” outburst, its defenseless moment where she prepares to bleed. It debuts here as part of the Blue demos cut in Los Angeles’ A&M Studios in the summer of 1970. Nowhere is this clearer than “A Case of You,” her unsparing portrait of love’s sweet poison that’s so canonical it’s been covered nearly 500 times. Spanning the three years between her debut, Song to a Seagull, and her landmark fourth album, Blue, Volume 2 is a monument to real effort. Indeed, these 122 tracks capture Mitchell at the moment she went from hitting singles and the occasional triple to clearing the bases with routine grand slams. It’s delightful to see Mitchell put truth to that festering lie. We are haunted by the illusion of their presumed untouchability even now, still elevating gifts and grifts as opposed to craft and commitment. They have revealed themselves as working craftspeople, made “divine” only by a fawning music press and rapacious record companies. With these Archives, Mitchell joins the recent ranks of Bob Dylan and Neil Young, songwriters who have been reductively deified as touched geniuses for far too long and who are showing their work through massive troves of old recordings that dispel those notions of effortless perfection. Meanwhile, onstage, she emerges as a chameleonic charmer, able to adapt to any night’s assorted demands. She tries complicated arrangements only to clear them away like brambles. She wrestles with minuscule but monumental shifts in language. She toils over tunes just to discard them. ![]() It, instead, documents Mitchell’s deliberate, determined progress as both songwriter and performer. It’s as if her preternaturally graceful playing and singing on record meant she were simply some blessed conduit, not a serious craftsperson off record.Īt its best, the second volume of the Joni Mitchell Archives-a titanic effort to sort through six decades of her musical dustbin, beginning last year with the innocence-losing early days of Volume 1-dispels such notions of effortless grace or any other divine spark. Enchanted, inspired, divine, genius: Mitchell has invariably been portrayed as such during her era of intense personal upheaval, her own moment of putting blood on the tracks. ![]() That sense of ease is a pernicious theme in discussions of Mitchell’s first six or so albums, as though their songs just arrived as gifts. “It was so easy, because Joni is such an amazing rhythm player,” he told me. When he arrived in the studio months later, he again followed her cool lead. Her confidence and control, however, calmed him as he drummed along on his knees and bongos. But as he told me in April 2021-just over 50 years since he first heard the tunes that would become Blue-he was a touch starstruck, dumbfounded that Mitchell would not only deign to perform for him but also ask him to join in.
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