We continue our look back at the music of 50 years ago…..
Perhaps no artist of that time (or any other time for that matter) delivered material that was a better melding of heart and mind (or heart and brain, if you will) than Joni Mitchell.
Her 1972 LP “For The Roses” saw an artist in transition between the devastating personal folk songs of ‘Blue” and the beginning of her journey into jazz with “Court & Spark”.
That’s not to say the songs are not as personal as any artist has put on vinyl. Many of them having to do with her doomed relationship with a heroin addicted James Taylor that ended earlier in the year. That Taylor married Carly Simon just as this LP was released seems perfectly symetrical.
The tunes that are clearly about Taylor include “See You Sometime”, Blonde In The Bleachers”, and the desolate “Cold Blue Steel & Sweet Fire which deals with the heroin problem.
Few people also could write about the dichotomy of the artist vs the music business better than Mitchell. The title track looks at the problem clearly including lines like “In some office sits a poet, and he trembles as he sings, and he asks some guy, to circulate his soul around”.
“Woman of Heart & Mind” is another beautiful relationship song even if the relationship wasn’t.
The song you might recognize from this LP is the tongue in cheek though still ascerbic “You Turn me On, I’m A Radio”. She wrote it after the record company demanded a song that radio stations would play. That she could just deliver something so good and funny on demand is a true skill.
Most of these songs are piano or acoustic guitar based and she just dips her toe in the water of a more jazz tinged style with Tom Scott and Wilton Felder on board. She would fully embrace it next time with “Court & Spark”, which I found much more listenable than this. Although this is still head and shoulders above where most singer-songwriters were working at the time.
