She does not give in to despair, merely boxes the emotions up, labels them and quietly moves on. When she left their Detroit apartment to head for New York in early 1967, he reportedly changed the locks, a detail that informs the song's chorus: I can't go back there any more, you know my keys won't fit the door." However, while there is a note of distress in Mitchell's voice, and in the upside down guitar chords she picks out, there is a quiet determination, too. Song To A Seagull begins, uncompromisingly enough, with the forbidding "I Had A King", a matter-of-fact account of her divorce from sometime singing partner Chuck Mitchell. However, while Dylan talked in riddles, Mitchell's brilliance here hinged on close - often uncomfortably close She's as good a poet as Bob, and a way better musician." "She's the best singer-songwriter that we've had in the past 100 years. "She's brilliant and tough and opinionated and slightly crazy and incredibly talented," Crosby said as he looked back on their time together, his opinion of Mitchell's gifts having only intensified overtime. The finished product sounds like it was recorded behind glass, but given Mitchell's tendency to view both her songs' subjects and herself here as slightly baffling museum exhibits, that is oddly fitting. "That's the thing I'm proudest of."Ĭrosby's production job was not uncontroversial, though his quest to capture Mitchell's voice in all its wild seagull swoops picked up plenty of extraneous hiss, requiring slightly brutal surgery in the final mix. "We did get the actual songs down without a bunch of other crud on it, and that made me happy," Crosby remembered. They would have said it's like having a whole paintbox and using only brown." "No one would have let me put out an acoustic album. "If I'd recorded a year ago, l would have used lots of orchestration," she told Rolling Stone in May 1968,Īlluding to how the success of her songs had enabled her to call the shots. The least user-friendly of all of her early records (her best-known songs of the time were largely omitted), its spartan production job was true to Mitchell and Crosby's determination to get these songs down in their purest form, without psychedelic curlicues or mom-and-pop-friendly string sections. Song To a Seagull (or 'Son To A Seagu' as it appeared on original copies, Mitchell's felt-tip frenzy sleeve art being badly mangled at the printers) is a quietly audacious debut. Her debut record, recorded with on-off partner Crosby's help at the back end of 1967, and released in March 1968, documented only a few fragments of a story still in flux: a few months in New York (Side One, subtitled "I came to the city") and a few more on the West Coast (Side Two: "Out of the city and down to the seaside"). She was also a divorcee, an art-school drop-out, and the mother of a child she gave up for adoption, three turbulent years having given her enough source material to last a lifetime. Country singer George Hamilton IV had made a hit of "Urge For Going", Buffy Sainte-Marie had recorded "The Circle Game" and "Song To A Seagull", with a trickle of versions of her other early works soon to become a torrent. Mitchell was, at that stage, a 23-year-old whose songs were living a life of their own. It's a little like falling into a cement mixer. "I walked into a coffeehouse in Coconut Grove, and she was standing there singing those songs, and I just was gobsmacked. I was pretty disillusioned," he recalled years later. "I went looking for a sailboat to live on- I wanted to do something else, find another way to be. The disaffected Byrd had come to Florida in search of a new start, but found a different kind of break from the norm. David Crosby knew what he had found within minutes of stumbling into a Joni Mitchell show at the Gaslight Cafe in autumn 1967.
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