Simone Appolloni's Album Reviews
Most fans and music critics agree that Joni Mitchell’s best and most complete albums are Blue and Count and Spark: all of them seem to ignore fanatically the singer’s first album Song to a Seagull (originally titled as the singer, but some found a second title watching the birds forming the second title), which probably deserves the same praise if not more. The two albums were hypnotic and seducing, but were slurred and their melodies sometimes confused, revealing the artist’s struggle to write consistent and fully-formed songs. Instead, on Song of a Seagull, Mitchell’s personality was already fully formed and all the songs uniformly terrific! “I Had a King”, one of the very few songs recorded in standard tuning, anticipates a good chunk of Gothic Rock’s fixation with minor and seventh chords, and most of the other songs feature similarly explorative melodies accentuated by the constant change of dynamics and sudden raises of volume. The flat mix, caused by erroneous recording (in order to take most of the tape hiss) is incredibly suited to the solo-guitar structure of the album, adding up to the album’s up-lifting mysticism and its spiritual nature.
And have we to talk about the lyrics? At the age of 25, Mitchell was writing lyrics that seemed transcendental of an older age, and reflect her personal experience avoiding any explicit name linked to her life. On “I Had a King”, she voluntarily references the despotic nature of her father and her forced marriage with someone who couldn’t care; “Michael from Mountains” references a similarly seducing individual which manages to impress her woman and making her forgetting she wants to discover something else, and the title track personalizes the protagonist’s desire to leave off the concrete and greedy human world. Elsewhere, Mitchell sings about lack of company driving to melancholy or suicide (“Marcie”, the theatrically structured “The Pirate of Penance”, “The Dawntreader”) and malevolent feminine seduction (“Cactus Tree”): "Night City", instead, seems fairly generic, despite the use of moderate percussion.
There are many Folk albums based about bluish feelings and melancholy, but few get spiritual like this. Hands down: this may be Joni Mitchell’s most consistent album ever, even more than her following efforts. It has all the ingenuity her writing lost later, along with terrific songs to recommend, mostly in the first side of the album. Maybe it’s time for a re-valuing?
Highlights: “I Had a King”, “Michael from Mountains”, “Nathan La Franeer”, “The Dawntreader”.
And have we to talk about the lyrics? At the age of 25, Mitchell was writing lyrics that seemed transcendental of an older age, and reflect her personal experience avoiding any explicit name linked to her life. On “I Had a King”, she voluntarily references the despotic nature of her father and her forced marriage with someone who couldn’t care; “Michael from Mountains” references a similarly seducing individual which manages to impress her woman and making her forgetting she wants to discover something else, and the title track personalizes the protagonist’s desire to leave off the concrete and greedy human world. Elsewhere, Mitchell sings about lack of company driving to melancholy or suicide (“Marcie”, the theatrically structured “The Pirate of Penance”, “The Dawntreader”) and malevolent feminine seduction (“Cactus Tree”): "Night City", instead, seems fairly generic, despite the use of moderate percussion.
There are many Folk albums based about bluish feelings and melancholy, but few get spiritual like this. Hands down: this may be Joni Mitchell’s most consistent album ever, even more than her following efforts. It has all the ingenuity her writing lost later, along with terrific songs to recommend, mostly in the first side of the album. Maybe it’s time for a re-valuing?
Highlights: “I Had a King”, “Michael from Mountains”, “Nathan La Franeer”, “The Dawntreader”.
Was this review helpful?