Joni Mitchell - Night Ride Home

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Music reviews of Night Ride Home

Music Review: Welcome Home, Joni
Rating: 5 Stars

But "Night Ride Home" is perhaps even more interesting within the context of her journey as a musical artist. In her early albums, the young Mitchell developed the basic skills - "words and music" writing, intrumental and confessional - that would culminate in her first masterpiece. "Blue" was puctuated by exquisite melody writing, on top of her own musical accompaniment. There was little vocal harmony, and only a smattering of instumental help (except for a little James Taylor and Stephen Stills). The question was, where could she go from there? "For the Roses" was a fine album, featuring a bit more accompaniment and even two successful injections of traditional orchestration, but it could not exceed Blue, and therefor could not equal it (since it came on its heels).

Gradually, Joni made the committment to expand her musical horizons, mixing Tom Scott's 'semi-jazz' into her equation in the commercially successful "Court and Spark" and even more intensely into her experimental "Hissing of Summer Lawns". The latter album was less popular, and no doubt confused many of her fans (including this one) and most music critics, unable to keep up with the pace of her musical advancement. "Hissing" had some misses, but it would be received far better by fans and critics as time passed, and proved to be the transition to her second masterpiece, "Hejira".

Hejira, released only five years after Blue, represented almost a complete transformation in musical style from Blue. The soaring, expansive melodies of Blue had yielded to more tightly knit, almost narrative melody and lyrical lines in Hejira, and the musical accompaniment - a sort of fusion jazz punctuated by Mitchell's unique stylistic variations on the guitar - took center stage. The confessional lyrics were largely gone - while still personal, their emphasis reflected more the emptiness of one in search rather than joy of new love or the anguish of heartbroken separation. With this transformation, Mitchell lost some old followers (in my case, it was twenty years later that I woke up to the album, finally able to absorb the beauty of the instrumentation) but gained some new ones who were more jazz-oriented.

Yet Mitchell was not yet finished with her move in the direction of jazz-oriented exploration. With "Don Juan's Reckless Daughter" and "Mingus", she lost most of her original following altogether, even though some of us trusted that she was exploring areas she needed to in order to complete her development as an artist, and realized that it was we who could not yet keep up.

The 1980's brought the Larry Klein era, and a move to consolidate the many skills acquired into a new style with a new direction, but still rather heavily jazz-oriented. I have not yet warmed up to the three albums from that decade - perhaps one day I will - but one cannot help but respect Klein's work and its positive influence over time on Mitchell's music.

With "Night Ride Home", however, there is a return to the emphasis on traditional, fluid melody last seen in "Blue", but this time with much more sophisticated harmonies and counterpoints, and more polished guitar arrangements. And with "Night Ride Home", Joni has for a second time answered the post-Blue question "where do I go from here?". She could not hope for a second masterpiece in the style of Blue, but she has found a way to improve upon Blue significantly in some respects, and that is really something.

"Turbulent Indigo" won the Grammies, but I suspect they were in part a belated recognition of the overlooked "Night Ride Home", which had enabled even Joni's earliest fans to welcome back into their lives the greatest artist of the late 20th century in the English-speaking world.

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