Hi Fred, Why do you prefer Joni's earlier music? Hmmm, perhaps a lobotomy is in order. We can lay your neural net and brain cells in a row and stimulate them with chord/melodic changes. Or perhaps a less scientific point of attack... we can hire a spiritualist and channel your inner being. Somewhere in your soul there lies a tunning fork that resonates to 'basic' harmonic elements. When those frequencies pass into your ear, the inner muse of your tunning fork vibrates in sympathy to your ear. It's this sympathetic vibration of your soul that holds the key to your pleasure. All our tuning forks are tuned to different resonances, which explains why we like different music. -As Joni members, we share a spiritual connection of some sort. But it's not a closed set. Just tangent.
That's the best I can offer. As to Joni being more melodic. Hardly. Her early music is very sing song to my ear. The melodic line and the harmonic line mirror each other and are built very closely. It's western music harmony for sure. To put it on the simplest of terms: take the chord C e G. The notes played together would form a harmony. If you string the notes out, they become a melodic line. If you sing c-e-g and harmonize along with it by playing the stacked CEG along with it, you have the purest (?), or perhaps simplest form of being 'melodic.' Also, the most generally pleasing in terms of what American audiences are used to. If you look at the sheet music for many of Joni's earliest of early songs, you'll see this simple structure in action. This is what most people think of when they think of being 'melodic.' The twist Joni brought to the stage was adding tone colors with the addition of notes to the simple chord by using alternate tunings. Suddenly, the CeG becomes CeGaF. The harmony of the bar is widended and colored. The melodic line has a greater room for movement. the notes c e g a f all become fair ground for simple melodic/harmonic pairing. Essentially tho, her early music still relies on the melodic line/harmonic structure falling more in 'keeping' with each other. Enter jazz. Suddenly the melodic line and harmonic structure are freed from each other. In spaces of the bar, chords play 'free' of any rhythmic or harmonic movement of the melodic line. It's still melodic and it's still harmonic, just not mirrored to each other. This contrapunctnal structure is where Joni feels she's giving more melody to the song. Think of simpler song structures where you can write a lead sheet for a verse and then simply add the other verses underneath. Essentially, the words change but the melodic/harmonic movement stays the same. Here's Joni writing music where you can't do that anymore. She's altering where to come in on the bar and the notes raise and lower to, as she puts it, 'give the words their own natural inflection.' There's more there there. For a lot of people, to play CEG and never get around, in the melodic line to singing either c, e or g strikes of being non-melodic. It just doesn't rink right to their inner harmonic resonance. For myself, to play CEG and to sing c e g as a melodic movement is sing song and disinteresting. I'd rather hear the other colors in the melodic line. More dissonant, yes. But more complex and beautiful to my ear. One of the things I loved, for awhile with any 'new' Joan was a total feeling of not knowing where the @$#^^!#^& the song was going on the first listen. It would simply have to unravel before my ear. And it would take several listenings before I got familiar enough with the music to be aware of it's structure. That's the Joan I love and she delivers it in spades as her musical career evolved. We just need to warp your internal resonances a bit. -Gang, get the rack!!!
