Archive
JONI MITCHELL
The Joni Mitchell Archive Series: The Reprise Albums (1968–1971) RHINO 10/10
Her journey from green and guileless to tough, candid and Blue.
By Laura Barton
Throwing open the windows:
Joni at home in Laurel Canyon, October 1970
JOEL BERNSTEIN
IN 1979, Joni Mitchell gave an interview to Rolling Stone, in which she talked about her album Blue, released eight years previously, and still the high-water mark of her career. “There’s hardly a dishonest note in the vocals,” she told the magazine. “At that period in my life, I had no personal defences. I felt like a cellophane wrapper on a pack of cigarettes. I felt like I had absolutely no secrets from the world and I couldn’t pretend in my life to be strong. Or to be happy. But the advantage of it in the music was that there were no defences there either.”
It is Blue that crowns The Reprise Albums – the latest release from The Joni Mitchell Archive Series – and to listen to it here, as the culmination of its three predecessors, Song To A Seagull, Clouds, Ladies Of The Canyon, is to hear afresh not just the majesty of its songs, but the sound of an artist grown unflinching in her songwriting – as if the previous three records, for all their beauty, were really just Mitchell clearing her throat.