Joni Mitchell - Clouds

Released - May 1969

Genre - Folk

Producer - Joni Mitchell & Paul A. Rothchild

Selected Personnel - Joni Mitchell (Vocals/Guitar); Stephen Stills (Bass/Guitar)

Standout Track - Both Sides, Now

Save for the truly astonishing "Cactus Tree," Joni Mitchell's assured 1968 debut Song To A Seagull hadn't contained much material that really took the listener's breath away. It was a remarkably confident and unconventionally complex (for a solo acoustic folk album) statement of intent by an artist who would clearly go on to truly great things, but 1969's Clouds marks her true arrival. The more hesitant or unconvincing moments from that earlier record have been swept away, and while she still wasn't quite at the peak of her musical powers, from Clouds onwards she would rarely put a foot wrong for several years (unfortunately, like so many brilliant artists of the 60s and 70s, the 80s claimed a lot of her talent and creativity).

The one thing it's easy to forget about this album is its sheer sparseness - I find it astonishing after listening to it that what I've heard is rarely anything more than Joni and her own acoustic guitar accompaniment, very occasionally augmented by some additional bass and guitar parts by Buffalo Springfield's Stephen Stills. But for the most part, this is nothing but a young woman and her guitar and her voice, and it's astonishing just how rich and diverse a listen it is given that. I'm again reminded of Joan Baez's debut album (I often think of Baez as a sort of proto-Mitchell but with less of a keen songwriting talent of her own), where the listener is frequently ever so slightly aware of the shortcomings of the music, of the limitations imposed by one girl's rearrangements of traditional tunes on an acoustic guitar, but no such feeling creeps in here, not when the material is so phenomenally strong. From those languid, weary, slow notes that introduce the maudlin portraits of "Tin Angel" at the start of the album, followed by the frenetic and joyous strumming of "Chelsea Morning," Mitchell is able to make these sparse songs sound more full of life and emotion and texture than any other folk singer-songwriter up until this point.

Lyrically, it's another tour de force as well - "Tin Angel" is another masterclass in image-based storytelling in the vein of "Cactus Tree," painting a picture of a collection of mementos of a former lover being discarded after an encounter with a new one - the mood is bleak, desolate, haunting, but with a trembling voice of hope for the future, and it makes for an enchanting album opener. The most affecting song on the album, though, is the glorious "Chelsea Morning," an album brimming with an unabashed and deeply sincere joie-de-vivre, and a real love for the smallest and simplest details of an ordinary life. It's a tremendously uplifting, redemptive song and one that can sweep away every shred of cynicism you could possibly try to hold against it. Like I said, the album is not quite up to the standard of her greatest work, and it does dip a little in quality here and there - "Roses Blue" has a studied oddness about it to match its subject matter of occultism, but that makes it struggle to really engage musically or melodically, while the a cappella anti-Vietnam protest song "The Fiddle And The Drum" is far from compelling.

But each of these low points are followed by an album highlight, first the beautiful love song "The Gallery" following on from "Roses Blue," and then album closer "Both Sides, Now," the song most likely to be familiar to listeners already, and the song that narrowly beats "Chelsea Morning" to being the album's true standout. It's one of the most heartfelt, honest, beautiful and non-affected attempts to rationalise one's sense of the meaning of life that's ever been recorded, and charts Mitchell's reasoning on the duality of both life and love and the necessity of making mistakes, of getting things wrong and trying everything from both angles before being able to have any honest appreciation or understanding of it. There's no way of really summing that song up that will be in any way more meaningful than just listening to it, so even if you only listen to one song from this album, make it that one.

Mitchell's voice continues to be a delight, as well - she swoops gloriously between registers, and there's no point anywhere in her range where she sounds strained or unconvincing. Whereas by the 90s her voice would have had to shift down to a lower register, here the play between different voices is one of the key elements that gives the album its diversity, and she also shows herself on "Songs To Aging Children Come" to be a master of complex harmony. Whereas Song To A Seagull was a fascinating blueprint, Clouds is the first of many truly essential albums from the Queen of Folk, who was soon to cement her crown as one of the most brilliant artists of the 70s.

Track Listing:

All songs written by Joni Mitchell.

1. Tin Angel

2. Chelsea Morning

3. I Don't Know Where I Stand

4. That Song About The Midway

5. Roses Blue

6. The Gallery

7. I Think I Understand

8. Songs To Aging Children Come

9. The Fiddle And The Drum

10. Both Sides, Now