JONI MITCHELL
The Joni Mitchell Archives Volume 2: The Reprise Albums (1968–1971) WARNER BROTHERS
By Rob Young
JOEL BERNSTEIN
8/10
Extras from pop’s moment of possibility.
WHAT a time it was, 50 years ago and more, when Joni strode to power, part of a musical royalty whose clarions shouted dominion over a broad Earth. Fans waited, breath bated, for the latest album/bulletin from lives lived in luxurious wonder. Hearth ballads for McLuhan’s global campfire. Picaresques and intrigues from the fabled Canyon came alive in the music she made between 1968 and ’71, as the poet collapsed sideways into the pop star. Songs are barely concealed public missives (pigeon-posted tweets?) between friends and lovers, minstrels-inarms and the hopelessly love-smitten.
This moment of possibility for the pop song – when it held the world’s attention on a scale unimaginable today – is when Joni Mitchell’s music, with its passions and its probings, came alive. The fifth disc of this boxset – five CDs or 10 LPs totalling six hours of home tapes, studio outtakes and live recordings – finds her at London’s Paris Theatre in December 1970 in duo with James Taylor, performing “A Case Of You”, inspired by her previous affair with Leonard Cohen, and “California”, about a fling with another man on Ibiza. As she and Taylor dovetail and harmonise, we know the couple are romantically involved, although we’re also aware that, three months hence, the relationship is toast. This second volume flows from the compilation, released earlier this year, of the freshly stirred early run of Joni albums, Song To A Seagull (1968), Clouds (1969), Ladies Of The Canyon (1970) and Blue (1971). Where those remasters largely enhanced the originals’ meltwater clarity, Volume 2 cherrypicks from Mitchell’s extensive archive of informal recordings, demos and experiments from the same time frame. It plays like a sketchpad and commonplace book, but hangs together much better than the grab-bag of doodles it could have been.