Some Get the Marrowbone
Joni Mitchell won't get a formative-album replay post on this blog because, though her music has twined in and out of my life over the years, none of her records have been central to me or the development of my taste. Like most casual listeners, I've cottoned to much of Blue and understood if not quite shared the high esteem, even awe, of many listeners and musical peers for her protean songwriting craft.
That all changed recently, quite dramatically, and entirely thanks to the advocacy of Carl Wilson, a pop critic at Slate and one of the few who writes about the musical content of music as deftly as its lyrical and cultural implications; he's the closest I've found to an Alex Ross of pop. He appeared on the Culture Gabfest recently to talk about his review of a new biography of Mitchell, which was in effect his case for giving her the Olympian due so readily accorded to others in her cohort (Dylan, Stevie Wonder, Neil Young, Lennon/McCartney, et al.). He talked a bit about her infamous guitar tunings and about her somewhat miraculous piano playing, and that was enough to send me back to the records. I'd dipped into many of her albums over the years to see if one stuck, but when I glanced at For the Roses I realized I hadn't really given it a shot.
I've barely stopped playing it since. As with Blue, it has a one-two punch of songs at the start that set the tone, and a high bar, for what's to come, "Banquet" and "Cold Blue Steel and Sweet Fire." Also like Blue, it has a clear, crisp folk-pop sound, minus some of the lite-jazz wash that mucks up some subsequent records (to my ears). And if my favorite Joni song till recently was the angular, assertive piano encomium "My Old Man," my new favorite, by leaps and bounds, has become the similarly constructed but more sweeping masterwork "Banquet." It's got the same polychord smash of piano chords, the same wrenching major-minor shifts, the same sense of swell and surge and ebb.
Its lyrics, which consider both fulsome bounty and grinding inequality, are more broadly philosophical, even wizened, than the defiant/supplicant affection of "My Old Man." But the song twirls on a similar emotional knife's edge whose sharpness, I'd say, is defined by that muscular piano. I've been playing through a transcription of it lately, and it's deeply satisfying; also edifying. Basically, I would posit that one key to Mitchell's unique harmonic language is that she plays the piano a bit like an open-tuned guitar (or dulcimer), and vice versa: strong chords riding over pedal tones, those major-minor shifts, clusters and suspensions. The point, though, is not so much what kind of instrument she writes on; it's that she seems to be using whatever instrument she's on as a divining rod to plumb the weird, questing harmonies she hears in her head. What I'm saying, in other words, that I'm beginning at last to hear her as a composer, and it's a stature her capacious music well deserves.
I'm planning to dive into this academic paper, chiefly about her use of modal harmony, soon. Suffice to say, while I can't retcon my musical development and insert Joni into my pantheon of formative influences alongside Dylan and Simon and Newman and Costello, I'm beginning to grasp the enormity and singularity of her work. I'm even almost grateful to have had this blind spot till now, so sharp and sweet is the feeling of discovery.
That all changed recently, quite dramatically, and entirely thanks to the advocacy of Carl Wilson, a pop critic at Slate and one of the few who writes about the musical content of music as deftly as its lyrical and cultural implications; he's the closest I've found to an Alex Ross of pop. He appeared on the Culture Gabfest recently to talk about his review of a new biography of Mitchell, which was in effect his case for giving her the Olympian due so readily accorded to others in her cohort (Dylan, Stevie Wonder, Neil Young, Lennon/McCartney, et al.). He talked a bit about her infamous guitar tunings and about her somewhat miraculous piano playing, and that was enough to send me back to the records. I'd dipped into many of her albums over the years to see if one stuck, but when I glanced at For the Roses I realized I hadn't really given it a shot.
I've barely stopped playing it since. As with Blue, it has a one-two punch of songs at the start that set the tone, and a high bar, for what's to come, "Banquet" and "Cold Blue Steel and Sweet Fire." Also like Blue, it has a clear, crisp folk-pop sound, minus some of the lite-jazz wash that mucks up some subsequent records (to my ears). And if my favorite Joni song till recently was the angular, assertive piano encomium "My Old Man," my new favorite, by leaps and bounds, has become the similarly constructed but more sweeping masterwork "Banquet." It's got the same polychord smash of piano chords, the same wrenching major-minor shifts, the same sense of swell and surge and ebb.
Its lyrics, which consider both fulsome bounty and grinding inequality, are more broadly philosophical, even wizened, than the defiant/supplicant affection of "My Old Man." But the song twirls on a similar emotional knife's edge whose sharpness, I'd say, is defined by that muscular piano. I've been playing through a transcription of it lately, and it's deeply satisfying; also edifying. Basically, I would posit that one key to Mitchell's unique harmonic language is that she plays the piano a bit like an open-tuned guitar (or dulcimer), and vice versa: strong chords riding over pedal tones, those major-minor shifts, clusters and suspensions. The point, though, is not so much what kind of instrument she writes on; it's that she seems to be using whatever instrument she's on as a divining rod to plumb the weird, questing harmonies she hears in her head. What I'm saying, in other words, that I'm beginning at last to hear her as a composer, and it's a stature her capacious music well deserves.
I'm planning to dive into this academic paper, chiefly about her use of modal harmony, soon. Suffice to say, while I can't retcon my musical development and insert Joni into my pantheon of formative influences alongside Dylan and Simon and Newman and Costello, I'm beginning to grasp the enormity and singularity of her work. I'm even almost grateful to have had this blind spot till now, so sharp and sweet is the feeling of discovery.
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