Word: joni
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...JONI MITCHELL does beautiful album covers. She usually has a lot of room for art because all her albums have the lyrics printed out (sometimes hand-written) inside. Because of those lyrics, the records which came with the art and printed words were never very good for background sound. Her music was properly lilting and soothing and all that, but the primary appeal was always her lyrics: the universal qualities of lover relationships she captured in her songs. As background, the words just tumbled over each other in the breathless peal of her voice, and wafted around with the warm...
...least one song from Joni Mitchell's new album, The Hissing of Summer Lawns, will never be relegated to background music, if only because of its insistent growling. "The Jungle Line" combines a National Geographic tape of the warrior drums of Burundi with Mitchell playing Moog synthesizer and guitar. She sings a poem with images such as "Thru I-bars and girders, thru wires and pipes/Thru the mathematic circuits of the modern nights" and allusions to the French primitivist painter Henri Rousseau as well as The African Queen. But "The Jungle Line" drones after the first few lines, and unfortunately...
Most of The Hissing of Summer Lawns, however, is not so clearly defined. Joni Mitchell's despair and cynicism about surburbia, her alluding images, are too easily missed--the words trip over each other and get lost. She rarely succeeds at complementing lyrics with music. The bouncy conga rhythms are often too swift a vehicle for the words; and the synthesizer-chorale approach she takes to the more philosophical poems only makes them pretentious or droning...
...third and most difficult music cover story for which DeVoss has done the major interviews. "Merle Haggard was as straightforward as his country origins, and Joni Mitchell's life is chronicled in her song lyrics. But Elton John is completely different from his image," explains DeVoss, who during four days in London accompanied the pop star on a round of shopping, dinners and post-midnight gambling, where John never bet less than ?100. Cruising around the city in his Rolls-Royce, Elton would spot people connected with his career and stop to say hello while DeVoss garnered quotes. Among...
...stride when critics said he had sold out, edging in toward the musical center line they so deplore -as if there were something deplorable about pop music's actually being popular. They also observed that Elton was derivative-at one moment of the Rolling Stones, at another of Joni Mitchell, Leonard Cohen, whomever. In fact, everyone in pop is influenced by others at one time or another. How can it be otherwise in a tight little world where the assimilation of newer, farther-out musical ideas is an honorable endeavor -one that was once performed by the Beatles? Elton...