Word: daughter
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...BEGINS "The Silky Veils of Ardor," the last song on Joni Mitchell's newest album, Don Juan's Reckless Daughter. Throughout her career, Mitchell has been traveling--a hitcher, a wanderer, a tourist, a pilgrim with no destination. Her albums are not so much a chronicle of her travels as a portrait of the traveler. And the traveler is slowly, sadly, desperately slipping away...
...Juan's Reckless Daughter is a demanding double album, for it makes few concessions to the exigencies of commercial appeal. It refuses to be tossed into one of the catch-all bins that are labeled folk, jazz or rock. The kind of freedom Mitchell enjoys on this album is rare, and refreshing, but it is also a perilous freedom: Leave the clearly marked paths of standard meter and concise rhyme schemes, and walk the untrammeled, impressionistic woods. But take care you don't get lost. While some of the songs on Don Juan's Reckless Daughter pass through those woods...
Musically the album is creative and rewarding. Like Hejira, her last album, Don Juan's Reckless Daughter continues to move away from the tight jazz-rock style of The Hissing of Summer Lawns. Several of the extraordinary musicians who played on Hejira contribute to the new album, particularly bass player Jaco Pastorius of Weather Report and drummer John Guerin of the L.A. Express...
...earlier albums, Mitchell occasionally explored extended instrumental sections. "Paprika Plains," a 16-minute song that occupies the entire second side of Don Juan's Reckless Daughter, is her longest and most exhausting instrumental effort to date. This song is a reverie, set in a late-night doper's fog, recalling the pain and sweetness of childhood and varied impressionistic scenes of her youth. Mitchell comes close to the warm chords she used in earlier pieces, like the instrumental break in "Down To You," (Court and Spark) but there is a constant tension beneath the surface, a dissonance that colors...
Although the instrumentation succeeds in Mitchell's newer, freer style, many of the songs on Don Juan's Reckless Daughter do not. The general rule in any style of musical composition seems to be 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...