Released - March 1970
Genre - Folk
Producer - Joni Mitchell
Selected Personnel - Joni Mitchell (Vocals/Guitar/Piano); Paul Horn (Clarinet/Flute); Jim Horn (Saxophone); Milt Holland (Percussion); Teresa Adams (Cello); David Crosby (Backing Vocals); Stephen Stills (Backing Vocals); Graham Nash (Backing Vocals); Neil Young (Backing Vocals)
Standout Track - For Free
In my mid-teens I took up the clarinet. I forget exactly why - I had no particular idols who played clarinet and who I wanted to be like, there was no music I was particularly in love with at the time that predominantly featured clarinet, though I'd been to a lot of orchestral performances and liked the sound of it. I suppose that was all, really - I liked the sound of it and I wanted to be able to play something. I still have it to this day, though my days of being actually genuinely good at it are far behind me. I suppose all the old knowledge is still in there if I chose to call on it, but I haven't picked it up except to have a brief attempt at Tom Waits's "Closing Time" last year. But I digress. After I'd been playing the clarinet for about a year, my dad bought me a copy of Ladies Of The Canyon for a Christmas or a birthday, and had written the words "Great clarinet solo on track 2!" on the front cover (thereby decimating the aesthetic impact of the empty white space that makes up most of the artwork, but at the same time rendering my attachment to this album far more personal). I knew of Joni Mitchell at the time - I'd frequently heard her in the background when Mum played albums I would later know as Blue and Hejira, but I'd never yet been drawn into her or listened to her deliberately. So I sat down, with great reluctance and suspicion, and listened to track two, "For Free." For the majority of the song, it's simply an earth-shatteringly beautiful piano ballad, with Joni singing about an encounter with a street busker playing his clarinet and being ignored by passers-by, prompting her to reflect on the glamourous trappings of being a successful musician. It's the first time she confronted the recurring theme of the isolation of fame and success, and its final verse, in which she crosses the road regretting that she didn't go over to sing with him, is utterly heartbreaking. Then the clarinet solo my dad had been so keen for me to hear comes in and, to be utterly honest with you, the first time I heard it I couldn't stop crying. It's no doubt partly because of how personal a gift it was, and of how I took that solo to be a symbol of how I wanted to improve myself and work hard and become good at the clarinet so that I could make both myself and my dad proud. But even without all that, it's just one of the most profoundly wonderful moments in the history of recorded music.
So, after that lengthy preamble, for me this is the Joni Mitchell album to which I feel the greatest personal attachment (even if my further delving into her discography subsequently ultimately decided that it's not actually her best, though it comes very close). There's a sense here that, after Clouds, Joni felt vindicated enough by its moderate success and positive critical reception to continue pushing herself forward, and one feels listening to Ladies Of The Canyon that it showcases an artist capitalising on her forward momentum, refusing to make a carbon copy of her successful formula but rather tweaking it and finessing it. There's a greater ambition in these tracks, notable in the far greater use of overdubs (from the backing vocal chorus of Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young on "The Circle Game" to the joyous flute trills and saxophone barks at the end of "Conversation" or even that clarinet on "For Free.") The piano has also begun to become a more prominent compositional tool for her, with several songs like "For Free" and "Rainy Night House" being built around piano rather than guitar. There's no sense at all with those songs that Joni is resorting to her secondary instrument, she acquits herself as just as masterful a player on keyboards as on guitars, and the use of the instrument lends a colder, more magisterial quality to those numbers.
Lyrically, on Ladies Of The Canyon she shows herself preoccupied with the idea of living a simple life, and, as hinted on "For Free," with the idea of being dissatisfied with the trappings of success. "Morning Morgantown" is an almost naively perfect nostalgic paean to the town and the community she grew up in, while "Ladies Of The Canyon" is a warm account of women living in Laurel Canyon, where Mitchell was living at the time, and their ability to live simple lives defined by whatever they want rather than having to cope with the pressures of city life. "Rainy Night House," similarly, deals with a figure who becomes a "refugee" by escaping from the pressures of the life other people want to live for him and going to Arizona to see what he'll become. The specific details of these stories are kept vague, and rightly so - various accounts suggest that the women in "Ladies Of The Canyon" represent Joni's real contemporaries, including Carole King, and that "Rainy Night House" is about DJ B. Mitchell Reed, who allegedly had a brief relationship with her in the late 60s. None of these details are necessary, though - by themselves, these are songs with a heartfelt yearning for freedom, for a return to the lives we want to build for ourselves rather than the lives others expect from us. "Big Yellow Taxi," too, one of Joni's best-known songs, is a deceptively upbeat pop tune (one of the catchiest songs she ever wrote) that's actually a heartfelt activist cry against the destruction of the natural world for commercial gain. There's also the mysterious, smoky haze of "Woodstock," a detached observation of the Woodstock generation, and the poetic simplicity of "The Circle Game," about the process of growing up and learning and changing as time goes by.
The other song that really needs to be singled out is "Conversation" which, if it weren't for my deep personal attachment to "For Free," would certainly be the standout track on the album. Its frantic strumming and joyous melody (eventually climaxing in those uplifting "dee-dee-dee" vocals in the closing moments) disguises one of the most moving set of lyrics she ever wrote, right up there with the incredible storytelling of "Cactus Tree" on Song To A Seagull. It's a story about a woman who's in love with a man who comes to her every day "for conversation," and habitually watches him with his uncaring partner and reflects on how much better she would treat him. It's treated with such phenomenal restraint and maturity as to be one of the best portraits of unrequited love in popular music. There's a sense in general on Ladies Of The Canyon that, while Joni was getting more ambitious and forward-thinking in terms of the music itself, lyrically she was looking more and more into herself for inspiration. The vague philosophical reflection of "Both Sides, Now" is more or less absent here, and instead we have stories that feel very personal, though the attitude is still one of life-affirming positivity. It wouldn't be until next year's Blue that she decided to turn her own sadnesses and tortures and pains into heart-rending musical brilliance.
Track Listing:
All songs written by Joni Mitchell.
1. Morning Morgantown
2. For Free
3. Conversation
4. Ladies Of The Canyon
5. Willy
6. The Arrangement
7. Rainy Night House
8. The Priest
9. Blue Boy
10. Big Yellow Taxi
11. Woodstock
12. The Circle Game
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