100 greatest albums of all time: My Favorite Things

 

Before today, I would not have chosen "My Favorite Things" by John Coltrane as the greatest album of all time.

But there are a lot of greatest albums of all time. More and more all the time. 

And anyway, this happened:

We decided to get a record player here in our new city in France. It suits the charms of our darling and cozy little attic apartment. We bought a really cheap one from a store called Darty. It's kind of a little suitcase record player and reminds me of one handed down to me from my sister almost 50 years ago. It fits beautifully on a narrow built-in media cabinet we have in our apartment until you open it to play a record. Then it doesn't fit anymore. So we bought a phillips head screwdriver from the hardware store more or less downstairs from us and unscrewed the lid hinges. It was perfect!

But we didn't have any albums.

So we went out to the local record stores on a rainy evening and were sad to find that... they aren't very good. And they're very expensive. The second one, called Yusumi, or something like that, was much better than the first, but very very expensive. However, we found a nice French copy of My Favorite Things by John Coltrane we wanted, but it cost the sun and the stars. So we looked at every other album in the Jazz section and nothing quite worked.

So, figuring just this once we could accept the whispers of fate, we bought My Favorite Things even though it was more expensive than our actual record player!

Which is kind of funny.

Today I made us some coffee as the sun was setting and we listened to it.

McCoy Tyner is the piano player and he is wonderful.

I mean, everyone is brilliant.

What am I supposed to say? All old Jazz albums sound like Christmas music, or maybe Christmas music from a perfect world. Maybe all the greatest albums of all time are recordings smuggled out of a perfect world.

Somewhere there is a perfect world.

And occasionally, rarely, if you look just so, it's right here.

The hundred greatest albums of all time: Elephant

 

Welcome to my series of the hundred greatest albums of all time, with each album in the series being individually the single greatest album of all time despite the fact that there are a hundred of them (and surely far more), and despite the fact that that doesn't make any sense at all.

But it's nevertheless true!

And the greatest album of all time is Elephant, by The White Stripes!

I have not done one of these for a few years now. But The White Stripes were inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and...

I WAS THERE!

What? No, not at the Hall of Fame induction. I was there during The White Stripes.

I was in a band at the time, with my dear wife, and our guitarist, who was a huge devotee of Elvis Costello, introduced us to the stripped down wonder of The White Stripes after practice one day at his house. He showed us video tapes of The White Stripes on Conan O'Brien.

Oh my.

They did a cover of "Jolene" that was electrifying, the greatest cover I'd ever heard (I mean, outside of Nirvana doing "In the Pines", but maybe let's not start this silly discussion about "the greatest" again). And soon I had all of The White Stripe's CD's just as they were peaking, and I knew them all backwards and forwards. 

And, a fourth album was soon coming out!

(Sorry about all the exclamation marks, The White Stripes are still very exciting to me.)

As a great adorer of The Beatles I have heard tales of the time of their supremacy, and of the extraordinary event that was the release of Sgt Pepper's. I heard people talk about how the album upon its release existed everywhere all at once. That briefly it was the epicenter of the universe. 

Being two years old at the time I sort of missed it.

Elephant was as close as I got.

I generally find albums years or even decades after their moment, but not Elephant. I awaited it breathlessly, and the moment I got my hands on a copy I raced it off to my basement lair (where great swaths of early clerkmanifesto was feverishly written, you should check it out! Or not.), and I put on my big headphones and sat and listened to it.

Of course you know Seven Nation Army, the last perfect rock song ever written, but my favorite song on the album was Ball and Biscuit. I can still place the ripple of thrill in hearing it for the first time. The astonishment bordering on disbelief when one encounters art of the absolute highest order. Anchored by Meg White's deep percussion, we have a heavy and rich blues song, with a hint of menace and the expectation of storm.

It takes its sweet little time about it. It is hypnotizing, rich, and deep, and very... heavy. It is a dark cloud coming up over the horizon, a pregnant wind, a strange color in the sky. You think you should go inside but you want to see what happens, and it doesn't seem dangerous yet. So you stand there in the quiet as heavy drops of water fall on your upturned face.

And then it explodes.

And then just as quickly it is simply rain again, heavy and dark, twenty degrees colder, leaving you wondering if it actually even happened. You really should go inside. You're soaking wet. You're shivering. The sky is green black. Thunder pulses as if far away, but powerful. Something terrible and awesome happened, you think, and you have to see if it is going to happen again.

And it does.

And it's even better.

The Peanuts albums

 

Yesterday I announced a series of pictures done in a "Peanuts" or "Charles Schulz" style, but didn't get to it because I had so many "Dr. Seuss Style" pictures to show first. But with that done, I have pictures of all kinds right now in this charming Peanuts style, ranging from shots of the library, to a particularly darling portrait of an especially well-liked bald co-worker, all the way to pictures of Clerkmanifestoland.

But at some point I took a picture of a donated album we had randomly on display at the library (Abbey Road). I applied the style to that, and...

From there there was no looking back.

They're just so cute!

After ten album covers I decided maybe it was time to move along.

Here is the whole set:

100 Greatest Albums: Ready for the Flood

 

In these days of the late Summer, my darling wife and I have been attending the occasional concert. We have not done this sort of thing for awhile and have added a new wrinkle: The artists need to be widely beloved, the concerts have to be free, and we can easily duck out after a half dozen or so songs.

One might think that this would be a nearly unreachable bar; high profile acts for free! But we have managed two concerts that fit the bill. In Duluth, Bon Iver played in an outdoor amphitheater that allowed us to easily steal, no, scratch that, pirate his concert from a nearby bench that looked out over the picturesque Duluth Harbor (full of small craft gathered nearby to do the same thing we were doing). And in Saint Minneapolis last week, there was a free concert at the Harriet Bandshell of the semi-legendary local 90's band, The Jayhawks.

Thousands and thousands of people were at The Jayhawks concert, but through some mysterious process, partly contingent upon my wife's "let's go for it" attitude, we were able to walk up along the side of the crowd and end up comfortably standing close to the stage, surely no more than 20 feet from the lead singer, Gary Louris, who, I am nearly certain, performed half of a song for some reason looking directly at me.

Which slowly wheels us around to our greatest album discussion of the day.

This is a series in which I write a few words about the hundred greatest albums of all time, each one independently being the greatest album ever. I haven't written one of these in ages, and looking over my past ones in preparation I was surprised to find the last one I did was for Bon Iver's For Emma, Forever Ago. The very band we just heard in Duluth! So naturally it would be perfect to do a Jayhawks album today then.

Unfortunately, as much as I love some of those Jayhawks albums, and there would be a fair shoutout for Hollywood Town Hall and Tomorrow the Green Grass, I can't quite say these great albums are the greatest albums of all time.

However...

In 1995 one of the two main singers of the Jayhawks, Mark Olson, left the band. And then 13 years later the lead singer, Gary Louris, who once sang to me looking into my eyes, and Mark Olson, got together, and together made Ready for the Flood, the greatest album of all time. Yearning, heartrending, and exquisitely harmonized by the best voices together since CSNY, this album just kills me. Coming out of the same glowing folk rock milieu as the above mentioned CSNY, this album is about

It's about

Nope, I hardly ever have any idea what any album is about. Does it have to be about something? Maybe that's the mark of many a great album: that it feels intensely about something, and yet it's a wide open road. 

"It's hard to ride at night, on your bicycle with no lights to guide. Just take a chance and ride, on your bicycle with no lights to guide."

For our outtake, here is this wonderfully put-together mini-documentary that samples the music richly, if incompletely, and has awfully little to say about its content, which, I am suggesting, is not necessarily a fault. But Gary Louris, the man who looked into my eyes just days ago, does say this: 

"I like beautiful things that have depth and a bit of pain in them."

https://youtu.be/_zT_NWF7aww

Greatest of all time

 

I am drawn to superlatives. I like numbers. And I like the unmitigated absolutism of "best".

The best songwriter is Dylan.

The best painter is Caravaggio.

The best soccer player is Messi.

And yet strangely it turns out that

The best songwriter is Joni Mitchell.

The best painter is Otto Dix.

The best soccer player is Maradona.

I know. It's confusing.

Among the ongoing series contained in this blog I began one called "The Hundred Greatest Albums". And the aegis of the series is that each album is individually the greatest album ever regardless of the others- each individually better than any else. And while, like so many concepts in Clerkmanifesto, this device contained a comic hubris and a fool's bravado, it simultaneously spoke to what I deeply believe and desperately need to learn.

There appears to be big problems and contradictions expressed in both of the following:

1. Who can say in art and human endeavor what is The Best?

2. How can two things each be greater than the other?

And yet as I have lived with this way of looking at things over time this has become more true to me despite all problems and contradictions.

Not long ago I would have said with some passion that Caravaggio was the greatest painter ever. But we look for simplicity sometimes where it doesn't belong. Caravaggio is indeed the greatest painter who ever lived, easily. But so too is Van Gogh the greatest painter who ever lived. If Caravaggio must then be a greater painter than Van Gogh, and Van Gogh must be a greater painter than Caravaggio, then so be it. 

We look for complexity sometimes where it doesn't belong too.

That concludes today's "official" post, if there was such a thing, which there isn't. But whatever it is, these remarks above serve as an introduction to an addition I am making to "My Recommended Books" page.  I would describe this page as undergoing major renovations. In addition to now containing my recommended books (the greatest 100 books of all times), the greatest 100 albums, and recommended Romantic Comedies (still just "recommended Romantic Comedies"), we will be adding in "The Hundred Greatest Artists" or "Artworks". I'm still deciding. Since that page is increasingly the hub of clerkmanifesto I'm also trying to make it more like a trip to a magical bazaar and less like rummaging through an attic. If you're interested check it out. If you're not interested then, um, I can't think of any advice. Follow your heart?

100 Greatest albums: For Emma, Forever Ago

I am chipping away at a series here called "The Hundred Greatest Albums of All Time" with each of the albums covered being individually the single greatest album of all time, irrespective of the fact that there are 99 other ones.

(And probably more).

The greatest album of all time is For Emma, Forever Ago by Bon Iver. 

But I'm sorry to have to tell you that today's selection is a bit of a bait and switch.

Allow me to explain.

Periodically I and my brain become completely obsessed with a song. All I really want to do is listen to that song. I play the song for other people. Sometimes I have even written about the song here; for instance once I covered my obsession with The Grateful Dead's Black Peter. But it has happened to me countless times with, just off the top of my head:

Cortez the Killer by Neil Young

Wing by Patti Smith

Delia as done by Bob Dylan

River by Joni Mitchell

Ruby My Dear (mysteriously a version by) Bud Powell

Ball and Biscuit by The White Stripes

If I listed them all, we could be here all day.

I guess the point is that it happens a lot.

It is happening right now.

And the song is 

Auatc (Ate up all their cake) by Bon Iver 

Oh I love this song.

I'm listening to it now.

And now I'm listening to it again.

I can't write very well when I'm listening to music to let's just wait for a second. 

And listen.

This song doesn't have an album yet. I guess it's supposedly coming eventually? Fortunately 13 years ago Bon Iver made the greatest album of all time, For Emma, Forever Ago. At some point it was bound to get its official clerkmanifesto 100 greatest album of all time blog post, so why not now, when we can deftly sneak in A.U.A.T.C.?

Which we have done.

When For Emma came out it seemed like there was a mythology with it. Honestly I don't know how much was purely in my imagination, how much was swirling, possibly nonsensical rumor, or if any of it was remotely real. 

It went something like this:

Bon Iver was some guy who holed up in a cabin deep in the Wisconsin woods. He had a ton of strange recording equipment in his tiny rustic wooden cabin. He layered tracks heavily and overdubbed wildly with a magician's touch, tempered by isolation and wilderness, and produced, from out of nowhere, the greatest album of the day.

I wasn't too invested in that interpretation. I just love the album. All that.. stuff... doesn't matter. But it was there.

Nevertheless, as is my custom, I went out to get you a YouTube link to one of the songs from the album. I chose, almost randomly, Flume. It's a beautiful example/introduction, though I suppose anything I chose would have worked perfectly. But then I saw something about Bon Iver playing Flume in a "Pocket Party" in Paris. So I watched it.

Flume

To see it all done so simply only deepened my astonishment.

I listened to Flume four times in preparing these brief notes and links, stunned, riveted and amazed each time. It's gorgeous, powerful music.

Then I had to do some dishes. So I went to the sink and found myself singing:

Well, you're up all night

And your head's down low

If you can see your own kite

Shed a little light on it...

Hundred greatest albums: The Kinks Album

When asked who is the greatest of the five legendary Sixties British rock bands my immediate, unhesitating answer is The Beatles. But not wanting to make a needless fuss of it I will immediately start talking about how brilliant The Rolling Stones were, the underrated genius of The Who, and the sheer overwhelming and thrilling power of Led Zeppelin. I mean, it's really not a competition. I have been crazy about them all.

But for some years now, with all that being said on the surface, I am quietly, reverently, passionately, singing to myself Kink's songs.

So if I am boldly proclaiming the greatest album of all time, one of a hundred, with each being the single greatest, which album is this. What is "The Kink's Album"?

There isn't one. I don't have one.

I am cheating today.

With The Beatles, The Stones, The Who, Led Zeppelin, I swallowed their works, mostly in my youth, running through their prodigious outlays of masterpieces all in a few months to a few years. While I still have encounters with their music where I am suddenly struck, like with lightning, by the sheer brilliance of some song, for the most part I have burned through all my available listens to these musical works. By the time I was in my forties, after hearing all their music hundreds, perhaps sometimes thousands of times, it was rare to be able to make a real emotional connection to any of them. And even rarer to discover something missed from deep in their back catalogs.

But the Kinks were never like any of this. They have played out in a mysteriously unique manner of fandom. Instead of gluts of Kinks music, and acquaintance with multiple albums of theirs, every two to four years I am hit by one or two of their songs. I am gobsmacked, flattened, heartbroken, enthralled, splattered, all like I am a bug flying around on a highway in the desert, and they are a car going 85 miles per hour.

I am smeared by their songs.

Or painfully transported to heaven.

I love the Kinks

"One or two songs," you might think though, "That's not really so many." 

However, here's the rub: Over the course of 40 years it really adds up!

It adds up to a perfect mega album of mega albums.

It adds up to the greatest album of all time.

Witty, driving, way ahead of their time, essential, groundbreaking, idiosyncratic, melancholic, defiant, and full of feeling, this stuff is one amazing car window. This car is going very fast. 

I am but a very little bug.

I am a little sad not to give you the whole personalized 40 year album here, but a post a day asks for a little restraint sometimes. Nevertheless some highlights surely seem in order. And why not start with the most recent:

Last night in putting together a playlist to listen to with my darling wife I grabbed an old Kinks song just sort of on the basis of it being the Kinks. I literally am incapable of understanding how I missed this song. Like if you were a huge Beatles fan for four decades and suddenly came upon, I don't know, Come Together for the first time. It would be thrilling, yes, but also a little disconcerting.

 Anyway, the best new rock song I have heard in a year, in 10 years? 20? Ever? was cut when I was a baby! And I'm almost old now, in a moderate sort of way.

The ragged vocals and loose, ungodly harmonies put me in mind of another favorite song of mine- Sweet Jane.

I'm Not Like Everybody Else


If that's the most recent Kinks song to enter my idiosyncratic album here what was first? Oddly probably Lola, twisty, ubiquitous, and wonderful. Do I even need the link? I remember a time when this was the most played oldie in the world.

Oh, but, what if you've never heard of it? 

Ohhh, you're in for a treat! 

You might like Come Together by the Beatles as well.

As a side note I saw the Kinks in concert in the eighties. They did one of the most cynical, lazy, hostile versions of any famous song I have ever seen. Ray refused to sing more than 10 percent of the song, leaving the rest to the audience. It was pretty terrible.

I have not used that version:


Lola


Recently I posted this, very recently, but I'll do it again. It's from possibly my favorite scene from any movie ever. So this song is for me due to that movie and thus came into my Kink's Album about 13 years ago:


Strangers




And to end with I'll go with one I discovered for myself maybe 15 years after it was written, around the time I saw the Kinks in concert, and maybe it's even slightly obscure enough to be new to you. 

It's hardly the end of the story here. 


God's Children



If I went the rest of the way there would be no dip in quality for surely another 20 songs. So a bit of a double album, eh. 

The greatest one of all time.

100 Greatest Albums: John Prine Live

Well, I was going to do this album anyway. It's not like he had to go ahead and die!

But so it is. And he did.

No one ever said the world isn't stupid.

Really?

That's the way that the world goes 'round, you're up one day and the next you're down. It's a half an inch of water and you think you're gonna drown. That's the way that the world goes 'round.

I guess it's a matter of interpretation then, but sure, maybe sometimes the world isn't stupid. We can all take that one up with god if we've got enough gumption for it when the time comes.

Of course, the time is always now.

My friend Grape gave me a tape of this album. It's a live album. John Prine Live it's called. Grape sure did give me a lot of albums in these 100 Greatest Albums I've been putting together. I wonder how he's doing, still locked down in California, just a few miles from tangerines they sell for nine dollars a pound out here.

This album kind of has everything you want in John Prine. Well, except it doesn't have his late masterpiece, one of the great mysterious wonders of songwriting, Lake Marie. I guess he hadn't written it yet. But it's full of John Prine weaving slow cozy stories into relaxed, flawless versions of a healthy scattering of his light, dark, perfect songs. Light songs that are all killers. Sketches. Short stories. Pleas, wonders.

Two songs then to make my case.

As engaging as the story here is, it's in the telling. It is an act of pure magic how much feeling this absolute trifle carries in it. I'm not sure anyone writing anywhere could do so much with so little.

Sabu

And then there's this. No secrets here. No jokes. And a payoff that would seem almost treacly if it didn't hit about as hard as anything could- a deft line of American tragedy. It's as slim as that first song, but straight up. As straight up as any song you'll hear.

Sam Stone


Somehow you could take ten brief songs of John Prine and have yourself enough quotes for every situation- a bit of our own Shakespeare on a porch somewhere, I suppose.






Sweet songs never last too long on broken radios.....





Rest in peace.

100 greatest albums in the days of the pandemic: Gone Again

There is a kind of pattern in these 100 greatest albums I'm writing about, with each album being individually the greatest album ever. A seminal artist makes an album that revolutionizes music, that is essential, and revolutionary. 

And I set that aside. 

A decade or two later they make something else. It's just a little more personal and somehow deeper, with nothing to prove, but it doesn't add much to the evolution of music and its genres. 

And who cares. 

That, that later album, rarely written into the sacred book of the culture, is the album. 

At least, for me.

And so it is with this one. Patti Smith made an essential album that went some long way into ushering in all of punk rock. It also included maybe the greatest line of Rock N' Roll history: 

"Jesus died for somebody's sins but not mine." 

But... whatever.

Let's move a couple decades forward. 

Let's talk about the people she loved dying; husband, brother, close friend. 

Even Kurt Cobain takes his place:

Boy boy
Just a boy
Just a little boy
Just a little boy
Who will never grow 

Let's talk about Gone Again. All chants and hypnosis, rage and wisdom, grief and, oh, I wanted to say redemption because it sounded good. I don't know about redemption, almost nothing at all. Death is the bottom falling out. Falling out forever. There are some things we will never, ever, ever get back. 

In the end, all of them.

Hold on.




If there's one thing could do for you...

100 greatest albums: The B-52's

Out getting coffee with my delightful wife I was telling her about all the research I did for my most recent greatest album of all time, Randy Newman's Good Old Boys, and about how I didn't get to use any of the research because all the interesting things I learned didn't really say anything about what was so great about it. And undoubtedly something came up in this conversation about how depressing the songs on that album really are, which led pretty naturally into how, well, why wouldn't they be, all the albums that I have so far called the single greatest album of all time are terribly sad.

I suppose this came up because they so indisputably are. Each one of the albums I have included is deeply, profoundly bleak, or sad, or crushing, or simply heartbreaking, or at least somewhat dark. And so a challenge was issued for me to choose as my next album a happy album. No cheating too. It really had to be the best album ever made. 

I all too casually agreed.

Then we made a lot of jokes about how my next entry in the 100 greatest albums of all time would now not happen for years and years and years and years. And making the vow I kind of believed it really would be years. There was nothing in music like that. The most cheerful group I could think of, that I love, was The Velvet Underground. The Velvet Underground! This glorious 100 greatest albums project was doomed. We would all die a prisoner of my quixotic promise.

And then from out of nowhere the B-52's rescued me.

One can say if they didn't rescue me some other happy band would have occurred to me. But I don't believe it. The B-52's are funny, buoyant, clever, musically delicious, and delightful. But they are also inimitable, one of the most unique bands I have ever heard and from one of the tiniest strains of popular music, the minuscule, infinitesimal genre of insouciant joy. They are like kid's music, but if it were insanely good and made for adults.

They are also, curiously, the first new music I ever loved.

My musical awakening was saturated in a catching up with everything starting at 15 years before that time. There was a lot there to work through and I was happy to do it. That sweep of music, 1964 to 1979, had everything. It kind of still does: rage, wisdom, poetry, freedom, prophecy, melody, revolution, invention, vision, grief, genius, politics, love. Well not quite everything. The only thing it didn't have was... candy. The sheer, cheeky, irreverent delight music is also capable of. I remember just as I discovered this initial B-52's album I read that John Lennon loved them too, and I felt so confirmed. The Beatles were the first band for me, and it did make perfect sense. The closest thing I can think of to the B-52's, if I have to find something, anything, at a stretch, is maybe Yellow Submarine or Come Together, just with the crucial difference of The Beatles don't sound like they're having nearly as much fun. 

In each of these greatest album essays I link to a song or two on YouTube. Sometimes it's just an album track behind a still image. Sometimes, if I'm lucky enough to find one, it's a performance or video that matches the song in spirit and soul. In this case it's the latter, and it was all too easy to find; every old performance I tracked down of the B-52's is delightful, clever, silly, and wonderful. The guitar player is some kind of low key absolute genius, the main lead singer is bursting before our eyes with personality, and the back-up singers (often lead too) are possibly the most inventive I've ever heard. Every bit of footage I could find of them, despite the deep familiarity of these songs, both amazed me and left me grinning like a maniac. This is not my usual reaction to my favorite music, and so all the more precious for it.


Planet Claire


Private Idaho

100 Greatest Albums: Good Old Boys

There may be more than 100 greatest albums of all time, with each individual album being itself the single greatest album ever. But 100 is neat as a number, and it is an irresistible organizing principle. Plus, when I conceived of this project, all the albums that made the claim in my heart of "greatest" easily nestled like marbles in a small bag in my mind. They weighed a certain amount. I sort of knew what all the marbles were, loosely, and it felt like it was about a hundred. It weighed about a hundred. 

And yet, when I reach my hand in to pull one out, sometimes I am completely surprised by what I get.

But only for a minute. After a minute I say:

There should only be this one marble in this bag!

And so...

Good Old Boys is an album by Randy Newman from 1974. It was his fourth studio album, and it was originally conceived as a 

blah blah blah.

I'm afraid time is too short to regurgitate Wikipedia.

Because what I wanted to tell you, before the ocean of the Internet washes over the brief second this glints in the sun, and pulls it back out to sea, is that Good Old Boys absolutely confounded me when I first heard it. No music had confounded me since I first listened to Highway 61 Revisited and had a key to the Universe handed to me. Sometimes one gets the same key over and over. The key says: 

Art isn't a bunch of marbles in a bag.

It's not a butterfly collection.

It's not money or fame.

It's not answers it's

questions...

Questions are the answers!


Wait.

Randy Newman is a beautiful songwriter who seems like he has an overwhelming, almost unbearably strong point of view. Too strong.

But pay attention and

it turns out he's just listening.




Marie

Ladies of the Canyon

After the initial enthusiasm of starting my series of The Hundred Greatest Albums, with each album individually being the single greatest album ever made, I tailed off for a bit. I am surprised now to find that it has been a month and a half since my last one. But during most of that time I have known that my next album was going to be this: Joni Mitchell's Ladies of the Canyon.

It's just that there was a lot to say.

Somewhere around the turn into the 1980's I was convinced of the abiding glory of all things and culture of the 1960's. One of the small benefits of this was that the used and slightly scratched albums of this era thickly populated the discount bins of the local record stores.

I was a teen of very little money, so this was an important detail. And Oz Records, on Topanga Canyon Blvd, had a bin of used records for ten cents each. 

Ten cents was cheap even back then. I could afford 10 cent records! I mean, not that I didn't still have to think about it. Dimes didn't grow on trees. Even now the little things aren't exactly for the taking.

But when I came upon a copy of Ladies of the Canyon for ten cents I didn't actually have to think about it very much. Mainly I just had to wonder if somehow it was in there by mistake.

I guess it wasn't since no one stopped me from buying it.

Now a question I have for myself is, how did I know that this was a special treasure that I was lucky to find? After all, it was my first Joni Mitchell album. What reference made me aware that this was an unbelievable find?

Through the murky shadows of time I can discern no clear answers. All I know is I excitedly took home my freakishly cheap treasure, hoping the scratches weren't too bad. I put it on the stereo, and listened. 

Destiny? Is all art destiny?

Though it was strange. Not like I would have thought it would be back then.

Her voice was so... soprano. Like a line held way up high. It wasn't like folk really, or pop, or rock. It was kind of old and modern. Even now it seems unique, belonging to nothing else, individual, like art is supposed to be.

The songs were so... understandable.

Even though they were kind of complex.

And because the voice was so high it didn't seem like they'd be so... tuneful. But wonderfully they were, I don't know, something past catchy, something, all, you know, up in your heart, cutting through everything else.

And every single song seemed to take you to another world and let you live a moment in another place.

At first these songs were like stories, or still lifes, but then they were all... feelings. Ecological disaster as a metaphor for lost love. Dreams of a better world, but almost like an elegy already, even as its dreamed and pined for. Something about what art is supposed to be but maybe is and maybe isn't. 

There's mostly piano in this album, and a spareness in how it's put together that feels like it's thought up idly, on the spot. But it's paired with immaculate, intricate, and wildly original vocals and phrasing that makes one realize that these are mastercrafted songs, woven with every thread accounted for, a work of absolute resounding genius.

Lately I, and at my house, we, have seen a few interviews with Joni Mitchell, and they are not really exactly pleasant, perhaps a bit painful to watch. There's something that's a little bitter, or hard. Something almost self-important but focused on all the wrong things. I'd rather throw those away if I can. Maybe, I hope, she, in her ambition for it, is at her worst talking about her work. Or maybe there is a terrible wedge between art and the people who make it. Maybe every great success pays a price. 

Maybe magic never belongs to us anyway.

Maybe Joni Mitchell taught me half of everything I know about that.




Willy