Word: joni
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...Joni Mitchell...
Since the release of her last album, the Grammy-winning Turbulent Indigo, Joni Mitchell's life has been anything but quiet. She divorced her husband and longtime producer Larry Klein and was reunited with her long-lost daughter, whom she had given up for adoption in the early '60s. Yet on her new, unsatisfying album Taming the Tiger, she seems unable to explore these fields of pain and affection. When she meditates on issues of loss and redemption in the song "Man From Mars," for instance, she doesn't delve at all into this tumult of her recent times. Instead...
...brief moment in the '70s, Joni Mitchell produced a series of remarkable album self-portraits. They spoke with serious and playful poetry about her various loves, her life as a celebrity and her thoughts on society in general. With a palette of jazz-inflected colors and wide, icy lyrics, Mitchell wrote incisive melodies and illuminated phrases that stuck in the mind like rare sunshine. The albums of this period, like Court and Spark or The Hissing of Summer Lawns, were exquisitely composed for midnight listening sessions with intimate friends. Reveling in Joni's sexy jazz piano chords and perfect words...
...loan sharks/are laying America to waste." There are small pleasures to be had on Taming the Tiger, like Mitchell's confidently unconventional melodies, her dark and smoke-ravaged voice and the occasional appearances of deft saxophonist Wayne Shorter. Still, one can't help but wonder what happened to Joni Mitchell since we lost her 20 years ago. On Taming the Tiger, at least, she is nowhere to be found...
...Elvis Presley's pre-eminence, no doubt hoping to turn back the Mongols. It didn't quite work, and in efforts to maintain his commercial viability, Sinatra would eventually record Presley's hit Love Me Tender as well as works by Paul Simon (Mrs. Robinson), George Harrison (Something) and Joni Mitchell (Both Sides Now). The results were often awkward--this is the Sinatra people like me used to make fun of. But listen with more knowing ears: when Sinatra sings "You stick around, Jack, it might show" on Something, you get the feeling not that he's hoking...