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Joni Mitchell
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The title song on this album—Both Sides Now-- remained a popular New York radio selection between 1967 and 1973. It was Joni's own composition. This 2000 version is even more hauntingly beautiful. Also, there's top quality instrumental work behind Joni's voice throughout the album while her treatments are full-throated and engaging. Generally she plays an instrument when she sings. Not this time. Joni uses her voice only and she relies for backup effects on expert instrumentalists. As a piece of music—a classic—here we experience the singer's own choices of the great "standard" popular romantic songs. Americana romantica at its best.
Klein says he found the singer's idea to be "innovative" and he was excited by it and thought it was especially appropriate "considering that the focal point of her work has been an inquiry into the nature of modern love." If Joni's approach touts a kind of realism in song, then romance or romantic love—as I noted in 1955 when Perry Como's Prisoner of Love was famous--is often pursued in our culture as a drearily masochistic enterprise. Romantic love--is usually launched on a foundation of pure fancy, as is often a person's conversion to some nutty cult, in fact. But the loony leap of faith that romantic love automatically takes, minus all the usual signs of rationality, of course, later wakes up on the other side where the grass had once looked greener but has now, instead, become a breeding ground for The Blues. Klein and Joni foresaw what Joni's new album has since become: "a programmatic suite documenting a relationship from initial flirtation through optimistic consummation, metamorphosing into disillusionment, ironic despair, and finally resolving into the philosophical overview of acceptance and the probability of the cycle repeating itself." Joni sees this arrival of romantic love as something inescapable, something unstoppable. "Nothing can be done," is the mantra of Comes Love. Hmmm. But time and too much familiarity with her newly discovered love object finds Joni soon crooning You've Changed which was another bluesy Billy Holiday favorite. "You've forgotten the words 'I love you,'" and "you ignore all the stars above."
The trial through which romantic love moves, finds the estranged and co-dependent lover begging: Don't Go to Strangers, "lover come to me." But Joni's next artful choice lets us know something about a particular romantic attitude that's responsible for domestic violence. The song through which she communicates this attitude is Sometimes I'm Happy:
Sometimes I hate you But when I hate you That's when I love you. Finally, Joni's Don't Worry 'Bout Me, is more Billy Holiday-ish, assuring a former partner-in-love:
Forget about me A more helpful lyric in this song suggests that the lovers "call it a day the sensible way," but there remains a sad sack solution, I'd say, even with the suggestion that they still remain friends. "Why should we cling to some old faded thing that used to be." Romance, once too illusory, becomes an almost visual disappointment, "an old faded thing." Pause to wonder why? Here on the cusp of the new millennium, it seems savvy to recommend a redefinition of loving relationships after following, with Joni, this wrenching kind of emotional route. I'd like to think that Joni is recommending much the same thing. Surely she doesn't want her listeners caught in Stormy Weather, where "there's no sun up in the sky," and where:
Gloom and misery everywhere But as soon as this hell-site has been reached, Joni knows what we will wish. We'll want that never-to-be-had certainty that romantic companionships can seem so inadequate at providing, and so we hear I Wish I Were in Love Again. The album's final cut, Both Sides Now, Joni's 1960s classic, makes mention of something she wants us to be aware of as we leap into romantic relationships, clouds, and she admits "I really don't know life at all." |
Cover of Mitchell's 
© 1997-2000 BEI