January 1, 2003

In love again

You sat up all night and watched me / To see, who in the world I might be.

"Rainy Day House," Ladies of the Canyon

IT WAS EASY to fall in love to Joni Mitchell's first three albums. We cuddled on the floor, in the flickering light of a candle dripping red streaks down the sides of a wax volcano on a varnished "spool table." "Michael from Mountains," "Cactus Tree," "Chelsea Morning," and "Both Sides, Now" provided the soundtrack. Occasionally we'd flip on the radio for reports about what was going on across the continent at Woodstock. Then it was back to the angelic soprano soaring through the lilting melodies of "I Had a King" and "I Think I Understand." You could go into yourself and your lover deeper with Joni than with any of her singer-songwriter peers of the day. Robin and I used other people's songs at our wedding, but at least through the next two albums, Ladies of the Canyon (1970) and Blue (1971), Joni's music contributed to the permanent bond that has endured the geographical moves, career changes, aging, relationship maturation, crises, and recommitment.

Mitchell made two more great albums – For the Roses (1972) and Court and Spark (1974) – and a couple of very good ones in the mid to late '70s. Most of her output through the '80s and early '90s went ignored after the first few listens. I can't imagine couples fusing their hearts under the influence of Dog Eat Dog (1985), Chalk Mark in a Rain Storm (1988), or Taming the Tiger (1998). That last one was more memorable for its artwork – reproductions of Mitchell's paintings – than for its music, and Mitchell hasn't recorded any new songs since.

But she has given fans reason to get all damp and dewy again. In 2000 she released Both Sides Now, a shocking album on several counts. First, there's the choice of material – ten pop and jazz standards, such as "You're My Thrill" and "I Wish I Were in Love Again," from the Tin Pan Alley era, plus new versions of the title track and Blue's "A Case of You," all sequenced to describe the arc of a love affair. Second, grand orchestral settings harking back beyond Nelson Riddle's work with Linda Ronstadt to his and Gordon Jenkins's arrangements for Frank Sinatra, circa Only the Lonely and No One Cares. Most startling of all is Mitchell had made peace with her voice, deepened by time and smoke, down from the aerial soprano of "For Free" to a dusky alto.

Suddenly, Mitchell's stylistic "contemporaries" were no longer the confessional singer-songwriters drafting in the unavoidable wake of her three-decade career. Nor were they such new jazz divas as the ubiquitous Diana Krall and Jane Monheit. Rather, Mitchell cast herself as the musical sister of the now 68-year-old jazz veteran Shirley Horn. Indeed, Horn's 2001 CD, You're My Thrill, with lush string arrangements by Johnny Mandel, makes a fine companion piece to Both Sides Now.

As Robin and I, and probably thousands of other boomer pairs, can attest, Both Sides Now was romantic rekindling music of the highest order. A less sentimental response might have been to point out how brilliantly Mitchell employed her altered voice as an instrument, how its woolly texture merged with a canny sense of phrasing to sound like alto saxophonist Johnny Hodges or Paul Desmond. It teased subtle nuance from lyrics that should have been threadbare by now.

At least one critic has hinted that Mitchell is her own greatest admirer, and she was certainly enamored enough with what she did on Both Sides Now to repeat the approach on the new Travelogue, this time sticking strictly to her own Great (North) American Songbook. Endorsing the notion that there can never be too much of a good thing, or perhaps conceiving of the album as her swan song from the recording industry ("I hope it all goes down the crapper," she recently told Rolling Stone. "It's top-heavy; it's wasteful. It's an insane business"), Mitchell gives us 22 songs on two CDs, a hardbound 28-page booklet with photographs of her paintings, and a computer-readable "gallery show" on the first CD. Arranger/conductor Vince Mendoza is back, with such illustrious all-stars as Herbie Hancock, Wayne Shorter, Billy Preston, Kenny Wheeler, and Brian Blade mingling their talents with the enormous choir-augmented orchestra of strings, reeds, and brass.