Joni Mitchell Deserves a Better Introduction
Being handed a masterpiece can feel like being given homework. Your friend loves it, the critics love it, and you are supposed to have a life-changing experience before the kettle boils. Joni Mitchell is particularly vulnerable to this kind of recommendation. Admirers can make listening to her sound like a test of your emotional intelligence.
The usual starting point is Blue. The enthusiast may reach for Hejira. Both recommendations make sense, but we would begin with Court and Spark. You get the wit as well as the seriousness, and a band worth following even before you have caught every word. It is easier to fall for a musician when nobody is hovering over your shoulder, waiting for you to cry.
This is a route through six records, with permission to linger. Give the first one a second play before moving on. If a single arrangement makes you want to turn it up, that is a much better beginning than dutiful admiration.
Start where the band gets interesting
Court and Spark, released in 1974, has the advantage of sounding sociable. Mitchell's voice can tease, hurry and double back inside arrangements that give it something to push against. You can enjoy that exchange before you have any idea who a song might be about.
Finding those musicians took work. The album history on her official site describes sessions in which the players struggled with the songs' demands and Mitchell struggled to surrender some of the space she had occupied alone. The eventual partnership with jazz players helps explain the record's ease. The ease was made, sometimes with considerable difficulty.
On a first listen, follow the instruments whenever the lyrics get away from you. There is no need to pause and decode. Notice how much character the voice keeps while sharing the room: a line can sound amused, then wary, without the whole arrangement stopping to announce the change.
Calling this her welcoming record hardly makes it lightweight. We recommend it because its musical pleasures arrive before its reputation does. You can put it on while making dinner and find yourself abandoning the chopping board to listen. Let that happen. The biographical reading can wait.
Come back for the close-up
Blue, from 1971, brings the voice much closer. After the company of the band, the smaller arrangements can feel startlingly exposed. There is less sound to wander into when a performance makes you uncomfortable.
Mitchell spoke about that exposure in her 1979 Rolling Stone interview. She remembered a period when maintaining a brave public face had become impossible. Her description below is striking partly because she talks about the vocals themselves. The emotion survives through the way she sings.
That is where to put your attention. Listen for a held note, a sudden change of emphasis, the amount of space around a phrase. It is easy to get so interested in the relationships behind the record that you stop hearing the decisions in front of you. Treating a singer's pain as the explanation for an album does her musicianship a disservice.
Hearing Blue second also lets it be one version of Mitchell. You already know she can enjoy a crowded arrangement and a joke. You are less likely to mistake intimacy for the entire job description, or to demand the same kind of disclosure from everything she made afterwards.
Give the next record a whole walk
Hejira, from 1976, would be our next stop. Mitchell told Rolling Stone that she wrote much of it while travelling in a car. The guitar-led arrangements and roaming bass parts make that an unusually helpful piece of background. The music seems comfortable being in transit.
Take it for a long walk. Leave the running order alone and resist the urge to decide, after thirty seconds, which tracks belong in a playlist. The pleasure often lies in following a thought longer than a conventional pop song might allow. A phrase that seems to have passed without a hook can turn out to be the one you remember later.
The bass deserves a listen of its own. Follow its movement beneath the guitar and notice how much room there is for another voice besides the singer's. This is why describing the album only as a collection of beautifully written songs feels inadequate. The instruments are a large part of the reason to return.
If that sounds more inviting than either of our first two choices, start here. A listening guide is allowed to have an exit. The point of this order is to get you interested enough to make your own.
The albums between the landmarks
Go back to For the Roses, released in 1972. It sits between Blue and Court and Spark, but hearing it fourth saves it from being reduced to a bridge. You can enjoy the balance it finds between the close voice and the expanding arrangements without waiting for it to become the later record.
Try it on a quieter evening, when you have stopped trying to get acquainted and can afford to be surprised. An album can suffer from having famous neighbours. Returning to it after those neighbours is a useful way to hear what you missed while keeping an eye on the next milestone.
Then play The Hissing of Summer Lawns, from 1975. Its observations of other lives complicate the image of Mitchell as someone chiefly reporting on her own. We would listen for the distance between the singer and the people she describes. Intimacy need not mean that the narrator is confessing.
After Blue, it is tempting to ask how much of every song really happened to her. This record is a good reason to retire that question for an evening. Pay attention to the scene, the voices and the social unease. A songwriter can be a sharp observer without submitting a diary as evidence.
Let her grow older
Finish with Joni Mitchell at Newport, the 2023 release of her 2022 festival appearance. After the studio albums, the shared stage changes the terms of listening. Other singers and musicians gather around songs that have already had long lives away from their maker.
The occasion matters, but listen past the applause. An older voice changes the weight of a familiar thought. There is no reason to judge every phrase by how closely it resembles a recording made decades earlier. That would turn a living singer into her own tribute act.
Keep the studio versions nearby and try the comparison for yourself. Which passages gain something from the new voice? Where do you miss the earlier performance? Affection need not prevent a preference, and a preference need not become a verdict on whether she should still be singing.
Our first choice remains Court and Spark. Play it twice, then let whatever caught your ear choose the next record. The six albums will still be there next week. You have no listening exam to pass.
