Joni Mitchell Shin

This three CD boxed set features a number of live recordings of Joni from concerts and sessions recorded for FM Broadcast in the 1960s, 70s, 80s and 90s. Starting with a number of live cuts from shows she performed in the mid to late 1960s, her full set from the Newport Folk Festival in 1968, and a couple more cuts recorded in the early 1970s, Disc One provides an excellent introduction to the girl s live material from that early era. Moving on to Disc Two we are now in the early 1980s.

Sad, spare, and beautiful, Blue is the quintessential confessional singer/songwriter album. Forthright and poetic, Joni Mitchell’s songs are raw nerves, tales of love and loss (two words with relative meaning here) etched with stunning complexity; even tracks like “All I Want,” “My Old Man,” and “Carey” - the brightest, most hopeful moments on the record - are darkened by bittersweet moments of sorrow and loneliness. At the same time that songs like “Little Green” (about a child given up for adoption) and the title cut (a hymn to salvation supposedly penned for James Taylor) raise the stakes of confessional folk-pop to new levels of honesty and openness, Mitchell’s music moves beyond the constraints of acoustic folk into more intricate and diverse territory, setting the stage for the experimentation of her later work. Unrivaled in its intensity and insight, Blue remains a watershed.

Dreamland is the second volume in Joni Mitchell's self-compiled series of "theme" retrospectives. The first, issued on the Geffen label, was entitled The Beginning of Survival. It focused on songs that dug deep into social, cultural, political, and environmental themes, as "commentaries on the world in which we live." Dreamland was compiled from her Asylum, Reprise, and Nonesuch years and focuses, for lack of a better term, on the jazzier side of her catalog musically, including songs with lyrics are all highly imagistic in their makeup.

Joni Mitchell - The Hissing Of Summer Lawns (1975) {Asylum}
EAC rip (secure mode) | FLAC+CUE+LOG -> 211 Mb | MP3 @320 -> 101 Mb
Full Artwork @ 300 dpi (jpg) -> 17 Mb
© 1975 Asylum / Warner | 7559-60332-2
Rock / Jazz / Folk Rock / Fusion / Psychedelic

Joni Mitchell evolved from the smooth jazz-pop of Court and Spark to the radical Hissing of Summer Lawns, an adventurous work that remains among her most difficult records. After opening with the graceful "In France They Kiss on Main Street," the album veers sharply into "The Jungle Line," an odd, Moog-driven piece backed by the rhythms of the warrior drums of Burundi – a move into multiculturalism that beat the likes of Paul Simon, Peter Gabriel, and Sting to the punch by a decade.