Word: albums
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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There is far more variety in the new album than in Hejira. Mitchell and Pastorius play together with remarkable sensitivity. Where Mitchell's guitar is driving and harsh, as it is on "Talk To Me," Pastorius plays mellifluous, moving bass lines. Where a song calls for a solid, almost rock rhythm section, like "Off Night Backstreet," Pastorius and Guerin come through with imagination as well as force...
...that the less apparent the structure of a work, the more underlying framework and discipline it requires if it is to be interesting, or even approachable. Admittedly, this rule is not universal. But in Don Juan's Reckless Daughter, like Hejira before it, Mitchell is reckless. The album lacks discipline, and suffers...
MITCHELL DEALS very closely with her own personality on the new album, as she has on most of her previous efforts. In the past, however, she often created a fictional character, a situation that served as a vehicle for emotional scene-setting. In songs like "Shades of Scarlett" (The Hissing of Summer Lawns) or "Ludwig's Theme" (For the Roses), she created intriguing characters, whom she depicted in strength as well as weakness, and in relation to the world around them...
...Juan's Reckless Daughter is more than a series of uncontrolled, desperate self-portraits. Mitchell does impose some structure on the album, so that it forms a more or less cohesive whole. She is forever the wayfaring stranger of "The Silky Veils of Ardor," moving on, searching for something intangible. She longs to make life click joyously into place. She sees through other people's unsuccessful efforts to "get through this passion play." In "Otis and Marlena," for example, Mitchell depicts a couple visiting Miami Beach, down from somewhere in the north...
...city on a warm summer night. She never says Cotton Avenue is fun--in fact, she describes it as a crowded, coldly sexual scene, where the men are out "hustling," sizing up the women. She goes there out of compulsion, out of the same need that runs through the album: Find something to hold onto, something real, because what I'm doing now isn't making...