Women of Heart and Mind

Click on the orange link below to read a review of Girls Like Us: Carole King, Joni Mitchell, Carly Simon and the Journey of a Generation by Sheila Weller.

http://josephsreviews.wordpress.com/2011/02/02/women-of-heart-and-mind/

Read the review now, buy the book in May!

Click on the orange link below to read a review of The Singer's Gun, the forthcoming novel by Emily St. John Mandel (Last Night in Montreal).

http://josephsreviews.wordpress.com/2010/01/20/break-on-through/

How do you sleep alone in a King-size bed?

Click on the orange link below to read a review of How to Sleep Alone in a King-Size Bed: A Memoir of Starting Over by Theo Pauline Nestor.

http://josephsreviews.wordpress.com/2009/08/28/court-and-spark-sleeping-alone/

Of Joni (Mitchell) and Jenny (Dalton)...

Just last week, we took a look back at Joni Mitchell's classic bridging album For the Roses... Shortly afterward I spent some time listening to For the Roses during my daily commute. The next day, in went Jenny Dalton's Rusalka's Umbrella into the mp3 player in our New Beetle. Mrs. Bear, who'd never heard this album before, said after hearing the first few songs, "She's listened to a lot of Joni Mitchell, hasn't she?" Well, maybe, maybe not... I'd say that if Jenny has not studied Joni she has at least learned to channel Joni's heart, her spirit and her soul.

Here's an experiment for you. Take your copy of Rusalka's Umbrella and proceed to track number 12, Snow Mazes of Norway. Then, beg, borrow or steal a friend's copy of Joni's Roses and play track 7, See You Sometime. [Or listen to both at You Tube.] You'll notice the similarities... Each is almost a mirror-image of the other, not quite the same, but far more the same than different.

This is not meant in anyway to be negative, not at all. I have been a huge fan of Jenny's and remain so, so understand the point I'm trying to make here...

Being a musician who just happens to be talented enough to produce music that reminds some people of a genius, Joni Mitchell, is a tremendous gift. For me, saying that a musician is in Joni Mitchell's league is the very highest compliment that I know how to pay. This is the compliment I mean to pass on here to Jenny Dalton.

Looking back at a classic album...

Now we're looking back at a classic - some would say essential - album that I rate at 89.9 on a 100 point scale. I would like to rate it higher except for a flaw that I'll discuss when I get around to posting my own retro review. In the interim, here's what some high-placed critics had to say when it was released (and subsequently with the benefit of hindsight)...

I'm adding my own comment here, in italics, at the end.

The New York Times

Each of Mitchell's songs... is a gem glistening with her elegant way with language, her pointed splashes of irony and her perfect shaping of images. Never does Mitchell voice a thought or feeling commonly. She's a songwriter of genius who can't help but make us feel we are not alone.

The chord changes are mind-boggling.

Rolling Stone (Stephen Davis)

Love's tension is Joni Mitchell's medium - she molds and casts it like a sculptress, lubricating this tense clay with powerful emotive imagery and swaying hypnotic music that sets her listener up for another of her great strengths, a bitter facility with irony and incongruity.

Gorgeous piano lines.

The Village Voice (Robert Christgau)

Sometimes her complaints about the men who have failed her sound petulant, but the appearance of petulance is one of the prices of liberation.

allmusic

On For the Roses, Joni Mitchell began to explore jazz and other influences in earnest. As one might expect from a transitional album, there is a lot of stylistic ground explored, including straight folk selections using guitar, overtly jazzy numbers, and hybrids that cross the two.

Arrangements here build solidly upon the tentative expansion of scoring first seen in Ladies of the Canyon. "Judgment of the Moon and Stars" and "Let the Wind Carry Me" present lengthy instrumental interludes. The lyrics here are among Mitchell's best, continuing in the vein of gripping honesty and heartfelt depth exhibited in Blue. As always, there are selections about relationship problems, such as "Lesson in Survival," "See You Sometime," and perhaps the best of all her songs in this genre, "Woman of Heart and Mind."

This excellent disc is a top-notch listen in its own right.

Amazon essential recording

Sandwiched between the solitary, heart-on-her-sleeve confessions of Blue, and the ravishing pop of Court and Spark, 1972's For the Roses captures Joni Mitchell in a deceptively subdued period of transition. Still hewing to a spare sound, Mitchell ventures beyond the elegant folk sources of earlier records to explore her love of blues and jazz-based harmony, writing as much on piano as guitar ...the earnest reveries and heartbroken dirges of before give way to a more detached even journalistic perspective...

Exactly, Joni here was the musical equivalent of writer Joan Didion, looking at life with a bitterly cool laser focus; seeing all, forgetting nothing and forgiving some people for some things but not everything.

'Tis A Good Season for Music Biographies...

Four - count 'em, 4 - new music biographies are now out, detailing the careers of Pete Seeger, Joni Mitchell, Cat Power and Tom Waits. Click on the orange link below to read the brief reviews from The New York Times.

http://tinyurl.com/lonlrw

Ladies of the Canyon: A Review of the book Girls Like Us

Girls Like Us: Carole King, Joni Mitchell, Carly Simon and the Journey of a Generation by Sheila Weller

This is, quite simply, a fabulous book about the careers of three key singer-songwriter-musicians of the '60s and '70s and beyond; and the three just happened to be women. There was a big surprise for me in the reading, as I had read earlier that author Weller interviewed both Carly Simon and Carole King. She did not have the opportunity to directly interact with Joni Mitchell.

Based on this, I fully expected this to be a book strong in details about Carly and Carole, and weak on information about Joni. This was not the case... As someone else said, Weller spoke to virtually every musician, friend and intimate in Joni's life and it shows!

The next surprise is that I was sure the tales of Carly and Joni would sizzle like steak fajitas, while Carole's life story would sit to the side like a bland order of re-fried beans. Instead, both Joni and Carole come off as fascinating early hippie-earth mothers, who happened to be blessed with both tremendous intelligence and natural musical skills. (Despite my initial doubts, Weller fully and effectively makes the case for Carole's stature in modern rock and music history.)

Carly, sadly, comes off as a patrician - daughter of the extremely wealthy founder of Simon and Schuster - who married a fellow patrician. This, of course, was James Taylor, whose father ran the University of North Carolina School of Medicine. "James was a... lifelong-privilege man."

Here, Carly's career appears to be a product of social connections, luck (she was often said to be the least talented of the singing Simon Sisters trio) and blatant use of her long-legged sex appeal. "(There was) a sex-teasing leitmotif in every one of Carly's early albums."

Also, a lot of Carly's story is devoted to James' drug use and abuse; a topic that simply does not make for interesting reading. The days of wine and roses, this is not. Concerning Carly's patrician status, Jac Holzman, founder and president of Electra Records said that he and the singer "were from similar backgrounds - haute Jewish New York, although she was certainly more Brahmin."

Further, Weller notes that Stephen Holden of Rolling Stone wrote of Carly with-faint-praise-turned-full: "She has the whitest of white voices and uses it well, singing... with her faultless enunciation. Her almost literal note-for-note phrasing of songs is... ingenuous."

Weller has to be given props for finding the fascinating details you won't find in other musician/band bios. I'll provide just one example here... Weller writes of a young man who cleaned apartments in the Bronx in return for using the occupants' pianos. While most immigrant families managed to scrimp and save enough to purchase a piano, this young Italian immigrant's family was just too poor to do so. We came to know him as Bobby Darin, and one of the tenement flats he regularly cleaned belonged to the parents of a young woman who came to be called Connie Francis!

Weller may not be quite as talented when it comes to describing the turbulent culture and times of the '60s and '70s, but then this is still a rock and folk-music tale after all and not a pure historical overview. All in all, this is a fabulous read that adds heft to the musical reputations of Joni Mitchell and Carole King, as it somewhat dilutes the career of one Carly Simon.

Images: Amazon, Powell's Books.

A Tribute to Joni...

The actress Edie Falco, formerly the female lead of The Sopranos, said this about Joni Mitchell:

"I'm an old-school, embarrassing Joni Mitchell fan. Her music made a hook in my soul and hasn't let go for all these years. I even sing her songs as lullabies to my (two) kids. All I want for them as they're falling asleep is to be complete in the knowledge of the love I have for them. And one of the surest things I know is my own love for Joni Mitchell. It seems to somehow connect me to the love I now have for my own children."

Add this post-script from novelist-essayist Meghan Daum:

"If there's anything I've learned from listening to Joni over the years, it's that if you don't write from a place of excruciating candor, you've written nothing."

See You Sometime (a song by Joni Mitchell)...

Where are you now
Are you in some hotel room
Does it have a view?
Are you caught in a crowd
Or holding on to some honey
Who came on to you?

Why do you have to be so jive
O.K. hang up the phone
It hurts
But something survives
Though it's undermined
I would still like to see you sometime

I'm feeling so good
And my friends all tell me
That I'm looking fine
I run in the woods
I spring from the boulders
Like a mama lion

I'm not ready to
Change my name again
But you know I'm not after
A piece of your fortune
And your fame
'Cause I tasted mine
I'd just like to see you sometime

Pack your suspenders
I'll come meet your plane
No need to surrender
I just want to see you again

We're in for more rain
I could sure use some sunshine
On my apple trees

It seems such a shame
To start off so kind
And end so heartlessly

I couldn't take them on all then
With a headful of questions
And hypes
So when the hopes got so slim
I just resigned...

But I'd still like to see you sometime
I'd sure like to see you

Photo: flickr (Pink Moose)

A Retro-Review of Brian Wilson's Smile...

Note: I originally wrote this record review in early 2004, when the long-delayed Smile was released. However, at that time I had no place to post it; now I do.

"God is not subtle." Albert Einstein. But could God have a sense of humor?

A REVIEW OF SMILE

OK, so first of all, forget everything you've read or heard about this being Brian Wilson's Sgt. Pepper's album. This is not Sgt. Pepper's - Pet Sounds was that and more - but another Abbey Road, side two.

Side two of the Beatles' Abbey Road was basically a collection of unfinished songs, ideas for songs that Paul McCartney called "bites." Brian Wilson called his song ideas "bits" and today, in the age of digital recording, they might appropriately be called "bytes," but that's another story. (The idea of playing song pieces derives from the English music hall and American burlesque halls, where musicians who ran out of sheet music to play filled in with their ideas for future songs.)

Smile is a collection of bites and bits and more; and like Pet Sounds and Sgt. Pepper's the work is more than the sum of its parts. It is a collection of musical ideas intended - like the Who's Tommy or Chicago II - to be experienced by the listener as one piece, from start to finish, for better or worse.

Let me get the worst out of the way right now. The biggest flaw with Smile is Brian's need, then and now, to show us what a comprehensive student of music he is. The pivotal and repeating "Heroes and Villains" theme borrows from Prokofiev's "Peter and the Wolf." Further, as we listen we hear the influences of Leonard Bernstein, Aaron Copeland, Gershwin, Erik Satie, Mozart, Dvorak, movie soundtracks such as How the West Was Won, casino crooners, Spike Jones and his City Slickers, and the colored vinyl children's records that Brian first digested. Some also hear Bach and/or Schubert.

It is all, at first, a bit too much, a kitchen sink approach to music. Just like the 23 tracks on the symphony-like Chicago II was at first too much, especially with the producer's note: "This endeavor should be experienced sequentially." But the more you listened, the more the whole effort made sense and eventually you couldn't consider re-arranging the track order.

This is what happens with Smile. Initially, it seems too cute, too bloated and busy. But then you remember the very appropriate title of this collection, and the original album art that looked very much like the cover of a children's book.

Oh... This isn't meant to be SERIOUS, this is for fun, deliberately childlike and childish in a deliberately non-grown up way.

Come to think of it, too much of our music is far too serious. From Springsteen's post-9/11 The Rising, to Sinatra's aging album September of Our Years ("Tonight is not for fun, tonight is for serious..." said the liner notes), to personal and brilliant but troubling confessionals like Bob Dylan's Blood on the Tracks and Joni Mitchell's Blue, it is all too serious. It is all so tiredly adult.

So, Smile isn't Paul Simon's Graceland nor Peter Gabriel's Us, but it is equally life-affirming when heard with a different ear; a child's ear, before the end of the innocence. (Interestingly, like those two albums, Smile is acceptingly multicultural and not Anglo-Saxon ethno-centric.)

Smile is not one of those hard to absorb albums about the weariness of life or life's losses or heavy lessons. It's not a divorce album or an album about eventual survival or death. It is a simple collection of songs about enjoying life simply ("eat your vegetables") and having fun. Let's play that funny horn and make silly noises! Let's pretend to fly! I'll be Davy Crockett!

Smile is an album dedicated to the enjoyment of music, the enjoyment of life no matter how short - even if your siblings (like two of Brian's) pre-decease you. Enjoy life even if the worst is going to happen, when you grow up someday.

Smile tells us that music is enough. Smile reminds us that life is a miracle and so this music is Brian's prayer, his tribute, a child's contribution to God. A simple prayer, a fun prayer, a prayer meant to make even God smile.

Smile is not a masterpiece, but for human beings it is close enough.

Thank you, Brian.

The Question of Favorite Music...

The young contestants on American Idol are often faced with a dilemma when trying to cover a famous song. If they try to sing it exactly as it was originally recorded, they're told: "Your version had better be at least as good as and preferably better than the original, or people will find it lacking." This is basically an impossible task for young performers with no experience and without much confidence.

The second option is to change or re-arrange the original song. This tends to upset the judges and viewers as happened, in a prior year's competition, when a female contestant changed Me & Mrs. Jones (Got A Thing Going On) to Me & Mr. Jones. The same negative reaction was heard when another female contestant rearranged a song that Peter Cetera wrote for Chicago.

This dilemma hits even the most successful of musicians. When, for example, Elton John covered the Beatles song Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds the critics found it to be neither more exciting than the original, nor enough of a change from the original to be interesting.

Cover songs are usually best when they are clearly meant as respectful tributes to the original artist - singer and/or songwriter. The Beatles cover version of Words of Love was obviously a tribute to their idol Buddy Holly. You can still hear the nervousness in their voices on Beatles VI and they never attempted to out-do a song by the late, great, Holly & the Crickets. Another example is found on The Very Best of Sheryl Crow. She shows her respect for Cat Stevens by including not just one but two cover versions of The First Cut is the Deepest. Both covers are humble, quiet, restrained in order to telegraph the message that she's not trying to out-meow The Cat. (Yet Crow is hardly known for her modesty.)

Which is a roundabout way of getting to the first way of describing my favorite music. The first test of great music, of a great song, is to ask whether anyone else could perform the song any better? With the best songs, the best performances, the answer is always no.

Think of Gordon Lightfoot singing If You Could Read My Mind. I've seen him sing this live twice and I absolutely cannot imagine anyone doing a better job. Take a second and listen to the song in your head and try to imagine another voice in his place. It isn't possible.

The same is true with Sinatra singing It Was A Very Good Year, Neil Diamond singing Solitary Man...

Joni Mitchell... No one is ever going to record a song by Joni that sounds better than Joni's original. Sarah McLachlan has recorded tribute versions of Blue and River, but her versions are, yes, respectful. Not better than the originals. The reverse would likely also be true. Take Sarah's Good Enough, Plenty or Do What You Have to Do. All of these songs were inspired by Joni's work but it's very doubtful that Joni in her prime would have recorded superior versions.

The true recording artist, at the top of his or her craft, cannot be surpassed. The same principle applies to albums. There's a young female artist who has released a cover CD version of The Who Sell Out album. It's probably interesting, but not very good.

Pet Sounds by the Beach Boys, Rubber Soul and Revolver by the Beatles, The Rising by the Boss, What's Going On by Marvin Gaye, Blood on the Tracks by Bob Dylan, Blue by Joni Mitchell... Hopefully, no one is ever going to release a cover version of these classics. If they do, they likely won't be worth listening to. Magic doesn't happen a second time.

Now we get to the second rule, or test. (To be continued... The first in a series.)