Review of Joni Mitchell (aka Song to a Seagull)

Paul Williams, from ‘The Way We Are Today’, included in The Age of Rock, ed. Jonathan Eisen (New York: Vintage, 1969)

Joni Mitchell is a young lady from Saskatchewan, simply an adventurer, off to seek her fortune in the States and meeting all these people and living in these places and having things happen to her. She is very much a peer of the young, of you or me who did or didn’t go to college but anyway were looking for something and also finding things out at the same time – ‘I came to the city and lived like old Crusoe’ – and bumping up against people, which is the part that seemed to make a difference.

I describe her as a peer and will do the same for Pete Rowan of Earth Opera, not because I think I know who you are but because it is unusual these days that ‘rock’ people actually sing about themselves and particularly unusual that they do it in a manner so mixing the general and the specific that it is comfortable and natural to ‘identify’ with them in their songs. It is easy to see what and why Pete Rowan sees in the world he encounters in his album; it seems natural to feel how and what Joni feels of the things that happen in her songs. The very best music can be related to as an immediate reflection of the listener’s life (just as the I Ching is the most personal of books), and even better music is that which reflects you and yet tells you of me.

Joni Mitchell’s particular triumph is that girl singers or girl artists of any kind who have really gotten at what it is to be a woman can be counted on the fingers of one hand (if you’re generous, use some fingers twice) and this record is a profound expression of ‘I, a woman’ – I have yet to meet a girl who doesn’t feel that Joni speaks for her. Most girls think and speak on a fairly simple level but feel on a deeply complex one; a song like ‘Cactus Tree’ may say what anyone would be clever enough to say of themselves (‘but she’s so busy being free’), but in its entirety – the mounting impact of the verses and the change in that line as it is repeated, the way the vocal struts and fumbles the defensiveness and pride, the sound of all those notes and thoughts (have you ever noticed how much more important is the sound of a woman’s voice than what she says with it?) – ‘Cactus Tree’ holds all the fullness and complexity of ‘this is where I am now’, this is what I feel I know, a feeling one achieves in an afternoon alone and might not be able to begin to express in a month of conversations.

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Joni, well, she’s a thousand different people and knows it: she understands everything just up to here and knows nothing at all beyond this point, which is just as it should be. She disclaims nothing, demands no credit, spends her present walking unswervingly into the future, in harmony with her world because she has accepted nothing without first understanding it and has never rejected that part of herself that she did understand; what I’m getting at is she hasn’t tried to choose who she is or who she will be. So she writes songs that are simple and straightforward and enormously perceptive, she makes no presumptions, she really likes people and is quite cautious – careful not to like them for the wrong reasons.

In ‘Michael from Mountains’, she really conveys how and sort of why a woman could love a man and desire a man and that’s no everyday achievement. A great many ladies have their heads so full of all they’ve read and heard and seen about why a man loves a woman that they can think of little save how lovable they are. But Joni even knows that a woman can have a will (‘know that I will know you’) without being unfeminine or unyielding herself. She is also most sensitive to other women (‘Marcie’ is not a song about herself; but you can see her seeing herself in her friend – empathy. Wonderful) and she even knows that there’s no one to blame. No one to name as a traitor here. Harmony. Peace and beauty. Five stars for good vibrations.

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Joni Mitchell’s album (which has a name, Song to a Seagull) is divided in two parts – ‘I Came to the City’ and ‘Out of the City and Down to the Seaside’ – and ten parts: her songs. Each song has a consciousness, each has its clockwork, its secrets, its soul. ‘I Had a King’ tells of a particular old man, a particular event in the history of a life and also a general state in the relationship between men and women:

You know my keys won’t fit the door

You know my thoughts won’t fit the man

– and aren’t those words clever and charming and right? ‘He lives in another time.’ She really perceives things; her words are a delight to be hit over the head with. And the games are played so unobtrusively … ‘the queen’s in the [Coconut] Grove till the end of the year’ … everything you want is there – and more – and seldom too much, and for all the words you’re still most impressed by the music.

The songs are singable. The melodies are so specific you know she knew just what she wanted and found it every time and was delighted. Everything is a whole, a painting in which paints and colours and subject matter and movement and forms all are one in the act of creation, united through clarity of vision and will. Phrases return, are altered, sing across each other, simple patterns move their quiet movements and leave the touch of fingers on guitar to make announcements. Embellishment is the work of the performer; the composer has done the jobs of framework and appeal. Joni-as-performer appreciates and makes full use of the achievements of her composing self; as a team, these Jonies are as efficient and effective as any playwright-actor team could be.

She plays guitar like someone smiling at you; she knows the communicating impact of every movement each speaking finger makes. Her singing is not quite so clarion; it is harder to listen to your own voice, it takes more years to know; she is learning; she explores and, oh, so often she succeeds. And she is trying, and knows how to try; where to make the effort which means half the battle won. The listener can hear that, cannot help but be pleased, cannot help feeling more-than-content.

And she is pretty, which means her words and voice and face and music and she’s alive, which means the album; it is something you should welcome in your world.