Songbirds, Past & Present

My favorite record of all time (yes, all time) is Hejira, Joni Mitchell's 1976 sprawling & story-driven exploration of travel, love & heartbreak. Each of its tracks, from Coyote to Refuge of the Roads, is a standalone road story; a top-to-bottom listen shows an intricately woven story in 9 chapters of one woman drifting from place to place in search of an elusive truth. This is Joni at her most vulnerable, her most passionate, her most sincere. The voice has deepened in a way that's nearly imperceptible, because she's maintained the soft ethereality of the earlier work, but the change is present, palpable. Simply put, Hejira is the confession of a road-weary traveler, & the weariness appears in the depth of voice. Her songwriting, too, has changed, moved gently away from the brilliant end-rhymes of Clouds or Ladies of the Canyon toward a subtler poetics, one that fits into the Olsonian idea of Composition by Field. The songs occupy space, & the lyrics are actors, space-takers, interactive pieces of the larger sonic project. The song is a field of action, & in the projectivist mode, sound & language extend from one another to create what can only be described as a full experience of voice. The only way to really know is to hear it, & the best illustration is in the album's title track.



Rhyme appears & melts away:

I'm porous with travel fever
But you know I'm so glad to be on my own
Still somehow the slightest touch of a stranger
Can set up trembling in my bones
I know no one's going to show me everything
We all come and go unknown
Each so deep and superficial
Between the forceps and the stone

own, bones, unknown, stone -- these words are all getting at something, a thing deeper than the rhyme, something as lonely & dreamlike as the music itself, which is at once airy & thick. Joni's diction & phrasing play no small part in the construction of the songscape, the slow rising & falling of the heart & the voice. Particularly Olsonian in Joni's work here is the breath & its power to shape the line ("the HEART, by way of the BREATH, to the LINE," sd O). In short, Hejira, in its nine parts, is a folk-pop-jazz exercise in advanced Olsonian poetics. It's proof that the title of singer-songwriter barely scratches the surface of Joni Mitchell's talent.

& with the recent release of Joanna Newsom's latest record, a two-hour, three-part, 18-track opus, we've found the inheritor of the Mitchell tradition. The thing about inheritance that so many critics forget is the central idea of growth. Of course, Joanna isn't a carbon-copy of Joni. Her choices as both composer & songwriter are considerably more complex & multifaceted. Joanna often departs from Joni's mode of composition, expanding & spinning away to historical & tonal places that her predecessor never quite touched, but the essence of Joni's work is there, & it's important to acknowledge that a young woman, a musician of our generation, is capable of making a post-projectivist album. Have One On Me is just that.

The record's best track is Good Intentions Paving Co., a seven-minute love song that follows, quite literally, the road to the hell. Joni comparisons have already been made, & rightly so, but what the presumptuous folks over at Pitchfork seem to have overlooked are (1) that Joni is far more than her radio-friendly early years, & (2) that musical & poetic similarities & artistic reincarnation are two very, very separate phenomena. That said, imagine a Newsom cover of The Gallery or Judgement of the Moon and Stars. I can think of few contemporary musicians who could do justice to a lesser-known Joni tune, aside from Joanna. But again, doing justice is not the same as doing an impression, or fully replicating the original. It's a project of reinterpretation & reinvigoration that I'm thinking of here, & this is precisely what Joanna does with Good Intentions.



Like Hejira, we have a road story, & like Blue Motel Room, one of Hejira's loveliest tracks, we have a soulful & playful examination of just how a doomed relationship affects the woman at its center. What Joanna accomplishes with Good Intentions Paving Co. is an advanced project of Composition by Field: the motion of the music evokes both a propulsion forward & a circular return to the start. One of the song's loveliest lines, "Like a bump on a bump on a log," condenses this feeling beautifully. There's a sense in Joanna's phrasing that she is interrupting herself -- this statement could be a stutter ("bump on a- bump on a log") or a literal description. Either way, the same thing is articulated, a layered stasis that, musically, pulls the listener forward. Form is content.

Vocally, Have One On Me shows a progression away from a long-dismissed "childlike" tone, with Joanna focusing her voice in a way that, in certain phrases, is absolutely reminiscent of early Joni. That soaring higher register & an uncanny ability to allow descents of melody to articulate a deeper, more heartbroken layer to the love song. Joanna goes high with hope & low with reality. & Lyrically, the same beautiful ambivalence that only the best female songwriter can accomplish:

And I know you meant to show the extent
To which you gave a goddang
You ranged real hot and real cold but I'm sold
I am home on that range

This is what sets the great women apart from the great men. A truly subtle female songwriter gives you the full range of emotion, the hot & cold, & a very clear awareness of just how doomed her great love really is. That multidimensional aspect, the fact that Joanna knows the car's headed straight to hell & she isn't getting out, is so beautifully Joni-esque, is a condensation of the female perspective that I've only once seen in the work of a male poet, & not even in a love poem. What's more, the poem I'm thinking of, "I Know a Man," by the much-celebrated (on this blog, at least) Robert Creeley, is paralleled in Good Intentions. & this is where I'll close, letting, for once, the poetry speak for itself.

Creeley writes:

As I sd to my
friend, because I am
always talking, -- John, I

sd, which was not his
name, the darkness sur-
rounds us, what

can we do against
it, or else, shall we &
why not, buy a goddamn big car,

drive, he sd, for
christ's sake, look
out where yr going.

& from Joanna:

And I did not mean to shout, just drive
Just get us out, dead or alive
A road too long to mention, lord, it's something to see!
Laid down by the good intentions paving company

Joni

I didn't really find Joni Mitchell until I was 19. I had a wonderful roommate who must've sensed something in me that I hadn't noticed before, & after a long conversation about a very disappointing young man, she sat me down & played "My Old Man." My life was changed. (Incidentally, she also introduced me, in an earlier conversation about the same young man, to Bob Dylan's "Buckets of Rain.")

From that point on, I was hooked on Joni. Over the last three years, my appreciation of her music has only grown. Anyone who's ever lived with me can attest to the fact that her voice, along with Dylan's, is a constant in my home.

As my life changes, as chapters begin & end, I relate to different Joni records. That's the beautiful thing about her work: each album is a cohesive exploration of a moment in her life, functioning like a well-written novel. Blue was my 20th year. Now, it's a mix of Clouds & Hejira; what the two albums share is the thematic centrality of wanderlust. Joni writes beautifully about the effects of travel on the human heart, the longing for an absent lover, the impact of place on the perception of circumstance. A really wonderful songwriter makes you feel like she wrote the song about you. That's how I feel about Joni. Take, for example, "Coyote," a track from Hejira.




She creates a character in that song with such complexity, & all of it's revealed through her paradoxically reluctant & exuberant love for him. By animalizing her womanizing lover, she gives us a clear & beautifully poetic story of their relationship. He wakes her from a long sleep, and you can see it in the performance. That smile when she sings "flame" in the last verse? I know that feeling.

& another beautiful exploration of a relationship with a far-traveling lothario, "The Gallery," from Clouds:



The song's reportedly about Joni's affair with another favorite poet-musician of mine, Leonard Cohen. With that in mind, the track becomes much more powerful. Echoes of Cohen's own style are clear in the arrangement of the song, as well as the poetry itself:

"Lady, don't love me now, I am dead
I am a saint, turn down your bed
I have no heart," that's what you said
You said, "I can be cruel,
But let me be gentle with you."

That quotation of the lover has a clearly Cohenesque structure, & his character in this song can be found as an admission of self in a song like "Chelsea Hotel No. 2" It takes a great poet to adopt the voice of another while maintaining her own tone. Joni accomplishes it seamlessly.

What's especially lovely about "The Gallery" is that it exhibits the top of Joni's exquisite soprano range. Even in the early stages of her career, her smokey low register appeared on tracks like "Blonde in the Bleachers," from For the Roses. A close examination of her catalog reveals that, before smoking killed her range, her soaring high soprano was used for very specific emotional evocations. That sweet, songbird tone speaks to her innocence. (On a track like "Chelsea Morning," it's joy & playfulness.) The Joni of "The Gallery" is a virginal victim of a womanizer racking up notches on his bedpost. The point where her voice noticeably dips into the lower register is at the end of the chorus: "...cruel,/ But let me gentle with you." That's such a telling line, and the descent is even more powerful with the turn, when Joni claims the lover's cruelty for herself. Her assertion of power comes with a lower voice. But she still has that sweetness, the gentleness of love, that offers him forgiveness, whether he deserves it or not. For as long as she maintained her range, these subtleties are apparent in her work.

Aside from the fact that she's so much fun to read closely, what draws me back to Joni is the fact that I see myself in her work. To have a musical presence in one's life who accomplishes that with her work is a gift. It makes the world feel smaller, & gives a voice to experiences that would otherwise go unspoken.