Setlist: Joni Mitchell - Ladies of the Canyon
01. Morning Morgantown 03:13 02. For Free 04:31 03. Conversation 04:26 04. Ladies of the Canyon 03:32 05. Willy 03:00 06. The Arrangement 03:34 07. Rainy Night House 03:24 08. The Priest 03:40 09. Blue Boy 02:54 10. Big Yellow Taxi 02:15 11. Woodstock 05:29 12. The Circle Game 04:55
This is, although very underrated by JoniNuts, one of my Desert Island albums: after all it does include a couple of Joni's signature tunes (the ones she kept playing in concerts through her career): Big Yellow Taxi, Woodstock -a little scary rendition, indeed-, (The) Circle Game, For Free...
It's also the album where she began playing piano!
A comprehensive list of Big Yellow Taxi NOT her most covered song!
time for reviews:
All Music Guide, Rating 4.5 Stars (review by David Cleary)
Quote: This wonderfully varied release shows a number of new tendencies in Joni Mitchell's work, some of which would come to fuller fruition on subsequent albums. "The Arrangement," "Rainy Night House," and "Woodstock" contain lengthy instrumental sections, presaging the extensive non-vocal stretches in later selections such as "Down to You" from Court and Spark. Jazz elements are noticeable in the wind solos of "For Free" and "Conversation," exhibiting an important influence that would extend as late as Mingus. The unusually poignant desolation of "The Arrangement" would surface more strongly in Blue. A number of the selections here ("Willy" and "Blue Boy") use piano rather than guitar accompaniment; arrangements here are often more colorful and complex than before, utilizing cello, clarinet, flute, saxophone, and percussion. Mitchell sings more clearly and expressively than on prior albums, most strikingly so on "Woodstock," her celebration of the pivotal 1960s New York rock festival. This number, given a haunting electric piano accompaniment, is sung in a gutsy, raw, soulful manner; the selection proves amply that pop music anthems don't all have to be loud production numbers. Songs here take many moods, ranging from the sunny, easygoing "Morning Morgantown" (a charming small-town portrait) to the nervously energetic "Conversation" (about a love triangle in the making) to the cryptically spooky "The Priest" (presenting the speaker's love for a Spartan man) to the sweetly sentimental classic "The Circle Game" (denoting the passage of time in touching terms) to the bouncy and vibrant single "Big Yellow Taxi" (with humorous lyrics on ecological matters) to the plummy, sumptuous title track (a celebration of creativity in all its manifestations). This album is yet another essential listen in Mitchell's recorded canon.
All Music Guide Big Yellow Taxi Review (by by William Ruhlmann):
Quote: "Big Yellow Taxi" is one of Joni Mitchell's best-known songs, though it is atypical of her work in general, both in terms of music and subject matter. Mitchell noted in interviews that she was inspired to write the song by a trip to Hawaii, when she looked out her hotel window at the beautiful landscape, then gazed down and saw a parking lot. This gave birth to the song's chorus in which Mitchell repeats the cliché that you don't know what you've got till it's gone, adding, "They paved paradise and put up a parking lot." In the first three verses, Mitchell elaborates on this message of environmentalism until, in the fourth verse, she suddenly turns to more personal and characteristic subject matter, recounting how, the night before, a "big yellow taxi" took away her "old man," i.e., lover, and repeating that you don't know what you've got till it's gone. The song's lyrics are completely undercut by its music, which is up-tempo and set to an exuberant melody. Since much of Mitchell's music up to this point had been folkish and somber, this too was a surprise. But it didn't hurt the song's commercial appeal. "Big Yellow Taxi" was released on Mitchell's third album, Ladies of the Canyon, in March 1970. The album was a far greater success than its predecessors, reaching the Top 20 and eventually selling over a million copies. A group called the Neighborhood quickly covered "Big Yellow Taxi" as a single, and their version peaked in the Top 40 in August. By then, Reprise, Mitchell's label, had rushed her version out as a single, but it was only able to become a minor chart entry. Nevertheless, the song was beginning to make its way toward becoming a standard, a fact underscored when middle-of-the-road orchestra leader Percy Faith covered it in 1971. Bob Dylan, meanwhile, had cut a version during his sessions for his 1970 New Morning album, though it was not included on that LP. In 1973, when Dylan declined to renew his contract with Columbia Records, the label put out a shoddy collection of outtakes, Dylan, among them his recording of "Big Yellow Taxi." The release may have been inadvertent, but having Bob Dylan cover a song doesn't hurt its reputation. Mitchell tended to use "Big Yellow Taxi" as an upbeat show opener at her concerts, and her live version of the song, backed by Tom Scott & the L.A. Express, was featured on her Top Five live album Miles of Aisles in late 1974. She tried releasing this version as a single, and was rewarded with a Top 40 hit that matched the Neighborhood's ranking. Over the years, as Mitchell observed, "Big Yellow Taxi" became something of a children's favorite, a development she seemed to have conflicting feelings about as her later work struggled to find an audience while a song she called "a nursery rhyme" and "a ditty" remained popular. In 1994, Amy Grant recorded "Big Yellow Taxi" for her House of Love album, and a single release put it back into the lower reaches of the charts. Mitchell's own recording was featured on the television soundtrack for Friends in 1995 and on her belated best-of collection, Hits, in 1996, the same year that a live version from 1970 came out on Message to Love: The Isle of Wight Festival. In 1997, Janet Jackson sampled the song prominently in the first track to be emphasized from her chart-topping The Velvet Rope album, "Got 'Til It's Gone."
Amazon's reviews
Quote: Editorial Reviews Amazon.com Joni Mitchell's third album offers a bridge between the artful but sometimes dour meditations of her earlier work and the more mature, confessional revelations of the classics that would follow. Voice and guitar still hew to the pretty filigree of a folk poet, but there's the giggling rush of rock & roll freedom in "Big Yellow Taxi," and the formal metaphor of her older songs ("The Circle Game," already oft-covered by the time of this recording) yields to the more impressionistic images of the new ones ("Woodstock"). The dark lyricism of her earliest ballads is intact (on "For Free" and "Rainy Night House"), yet there's a prevailing idealism here that sounds poignant alongside the warier, more mature songs to come on Blue and Court And Spark. --Sam Sutherland
a couple of reviews from That Time:
1970, April 5; Ladies of the Canyon; New York Times
Quote: joni mitchell (Warner Bros. RS 6376)
I have been hopelessly in love with Joni Mitchell since the unheralded arrival of her first brilliant recording. This is her third collection, and she keeps getting better and better. Her crystal clear imagery is as shining bright as ever, and her melodies, if anything seem to be improving. She always has been a fine guitarist and now, surprisingly, she is becoming a growingly powerful singer, too. Unlike the sometimes delicate vocalizing on her first two recordings, Miss Mitchell's work here seems to revel in chance-taking. She uses epiglottal stops, wide, headtone vibrato and resonant chest tones-- a range of vocalizing that would be remarkable even if Miss Mitchell hadn't written all the songs on the album.
With records this good it always is difficult to recommend highlights, since each of the songs has so many unique qualities. But for starters, try "For Free," a song about a Greenwich Village street musician, "Big Yellow Taxi," perhaps the first entry in a new genre that might ne called Ecology-folk ("They paved paradise. And put up a parking lot."), and Miss Mitchell's already-classic "The Circle Game."
1970, June 11; Ladies of the Canyon; Rolling Stone
Quote: ONE DAY AT A TIME, Joan Baez (VANGUARD VSD-79310) LADIES OF THE CANYON, Joni Mitchell (REPRISE 6376)
Along with other established ladies of folkdom, Buffy Sainte-Marie and Judy Collins, both Mrs. Harris and Miss Mitchell have been around a while. Some brilliant chick folksingers have vanished - Judy Henske, Alice Stuart and Rosalie Sorrels whither art thou? - but these two have endured. This is Joan's eleventh album and Joni's third and in their own gentle ways they come to grips with the teeth of the times in their curiously lyrical, frankly autobiographical fashion.
Joni Mitchell writes some of the finest tunes around and matches their flowing hesitancy with her enduring epiphanies and modern parables. Her clever inner rhymes and stylized satire have been around for years - recall Tom Rush's "Circle Game" and Judy Collins' "Both Sides Now"? Ably matched here by "For Free," "Conversation," and the already CSNYed "Woodstock," not to mention the elusive "The Priest" or the incisive "Ladies of the Canyon" and seven other enigmatic, poetic word-journeys that move from taxis to windows to whiskey bars to boots of leather and racing cars. Plus the fact that Joni has now mastered the piano to the point where she employs it rather than guitar on nearly half the cuts - she plays it shrilly with a lot of echo and lingering notes, giving certain songs even more dimension and wideness. Other innovations this time out are a mild use of horns and even vocal choruses on some cuts. The choruses don't work for me - I think they ruin her long-awaited version of "Circle Game" - but the point is debatable. The use of horns is excellent - in particular the minor riff at the close of the stunning "For Free."
And "Woodstock" must be mentioned. Forget the hyper-active CSNY version and listen to this one. Joni uses a heavily-amped electric guitar [sic] and sings the hell out of each phrase, each syllable of this soon-to-be anthem of the Seventies. She takes her time and the song has its mellowing, quicksilver effect: "We are stardust/Million year old carbon/We are golden/Caught in the devil's bargain/And we got to get ourselves/Back to the garden." An album of departures, overheard conversations and unquiet triumphs for this hymnal lady who mingles the random with the particular so effectively. Now that she has stopped touring to concentrate on writing, successive albums ought to get better and better.
Joan's album is curiously refreshing. It ought to have been entitled DAVID'S Album Volume Two, for all the songs were chosen again to cast musical shadows on the fact that her man is in prison. Thus we get vibrant versions of Bonnie & Delaney's "Ghetto," the Stones' "No Expectations" and Gil Turners's "Carry It On," among others. But useless cuts creep in: her re-done version of "Long Black Veil" is just repetitive, while the spasmodic "Jolie Blonde" is plain unnecessary. If there is a problem, it is that she is still stuck in Nashville singing through a montage of musicians led by Brady Tate (the formula for her last two albums also), though other idiosyncrasies occur this time. She is joined by Jeff Shurtleff for vocal duets on three cuts - the most effective of these being the title tune, Willy Nelson's introspective "One Day At A Time."
Oddly enough, the highpoint of each side occurs when Joan sings the songs she authored. "Sweet Sir Galahad," which is about her sister Mimi, the ghost of Richard Farina and Milan Melvin, along with the revealing "Song For David," succeed musically and lyrically, probably because the emotions and recollections are so close to home. Also interesting is Joan's version of the old union song "Joe Hill," from which Dylan borrowed ingeniously for his "I Dreamed I Saw St. Augustine."
Two albums of lyricism and folk echoes from two impresarios of the current music scene. I just wish Joan would leave Nashville behind for the next one.
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