If you dropped a needle on Joni Mitchell’s brand-new LP in January of 1974, you might have expected yet another hour of her signature elegies. On her two previous records, 1971’s Blue and 1972’s For the Roses, Mitchell excavated arresting songs from deep within her psyche. They are complex but accessible, often pairing Mitchell’s lithe voice with her own accompaniment on sombre piano or supple dulcimer. They are melancholy and sparse. And they aren’t very fun.
Court and Spark starts in a familiar Jonian fashion: mournful piano chords, poetic lyrics, Mitchell’s skyscraper voice. “Love came to my door with a sleeping roll and a madman’s soul,” she coos. “He thought for sure I’d seen him dancing in a river in the dark, looking for a woman to court and spark.” But when she unfurls the title of the album, something unexpected appears: a stuttering hi-hat. A beat in a Joni Mitchell song. And with that rhythm, the Joni of the past was gone. Joni the Confessional Poet, Joni the Selfish and Sad, Joni the Lonely Painter was no more.
By 1974, Mitchell had grown tired of her old style. “I feel miscast in some of the songs that I wrote as a younger woman,” she told CBC Radio a couple weeks after Court and Spark’s release. “You know, you wouldn’t ask Picasso to go back and paint from his Blue Period.” She was done playing the starry-eyed hippie. She was tired of singing dirges. She wanted to find new, challenging, exciting ways to write pop music. And so Joni the lonely, Joni the soloist, did something nobody ever expected her to do. She hired a band.
Mitchell enlisted members of L.A. Express, a jazz fusion band, to add some seasoning to her new crop of songs. At the time, jazz fusion records like Herbie Hancock’s Head Hunters were taking popular music into uncharted territory. Mitchell wanted in. She took her time with Court and Spark; 1973 was the first year since her 1968 debut that she didn’t release a studio album, and she performed live only a handful of times. (...)
Court and Spark, her sixth studio album, turns fifty this month. While it’s not her most beloved album (that would be Blue) and it’s not her album with the most hits (that’s Ladies of the Canyon), it is where she pushed those pop perimeters permanently. “Car on a Hill,” track six, starts off as a catchy tune about waiting for a lover to come over, but after the chorus, the song mutates into a slow, ascending choral riff. It sounds like Mitchell’s climbing toward heaven. At the end of the riff, she sings this note that sounds like the clouds have parted and a brilliant beam of gold light is shining right into your eardrums. Then the beat comes back in, and the simple chord progression from the beginning of the song returns as if she hasn’t just shoved a wonderful and strange and utterly shocking passage into the middle of an otherwise inoffensive pop tune.
Joni Mitchell’s Best Album Is Turning Fifty. It’s Not Blue
by KC Hoard, The Walrus | Read more:
Mitchell enlisted members of L.A. Express, a jazz fusion band, to add some seasoning to her new crop of songs. At the time, jazz fusion records like Herbie Hancock’s Head Hunters were taking popular music into uncharted territory. Mitchell wanted in. She took her time with Court and Spark; 1973 was the first year since her 1968 debut that she didn’t release a studio album, and she performed live only a handful of times. (...)
Court and Spark, her sixth studio album, turns fifty this month. While it’s not her most beloved album (that would be Blue) and it’s not her album with the most hits (that’s Ladies of the Canyon), it is where she pushed those pop perimeters permanently. “Car on a Hill,” track six, starts off as a catchy tune about waiting for a lover to come over, but after the chorus, the song mutates into a slow, ascending choral riff. It sounds like Mitchell’s climbing toward heaven. At the end of the riff, she sings this note that sounds like the clouds have parted and a brilliant beam of gold light is shining right into your eardrums. Then the beat comes back in, and the simple chord progression from the beginning of the song returns as if she hasn’t just shoved a wonderful and strange and utterly shocking passage into the middle of an otherwise inoffensive pop tune.
Joni Mitchell’s Best Album Is Turning Fifty. It’s Not Blue
by KC Hoard, The Walrus | Read more:
Image: Court and Spark/YT
