Joni Mitchell
Shine
(hear it)

A wild ride of an album.

I sat listening to this album, and I gradually realized that it is mostly a self-produced "Prince Alone In the Studio" album. A drummer and saxophonist join her on several tracks, but there is also a lot of drum/sax sound made by Joni. Then I realized she's doing it all on a keyboard. Synthetic horns, strings, drums. It sounds really killer, no doubt helped along by the engineer at whatever awesome studio Joni Mitchell gets to record in.

I began to feel like a schmuck. Here's Joni Mitchell doing the same sort of thing that I do, right? Album-making as a sort of personal endeavor. Although on Marsh Marigolds Tim expresses his own meaning on the drums, even there there's a lot of self-expansion happening to make all the music exist the way I felt it should. The schmuckiness arrived as a big feeling of inadequacy next to Mictchell. Lea says I'm fine, that Marsh Marigolds isn't so bad; I don't know, but at the time I felt completely foolish.

Then, I wanted to see information, because I sort of wondered if maybe JM had learned how to play saxophone, flute, violin, etc. So I went online, and along with finding out that she does indeed play a keyboard (and by the way, it sounds a lot more unnatural if you listen on a good stereo system - I was essentially listening on mono), I found all these reviews just completely trashing the album.

So, in my opinion, my music is worse than Joni Mitchell's generally-understood "worst album ever". YIKES. Life goes on, though...

bb, 3 Feb 08