After an initial few listenings, putting it aside, and then going back to it, I find T to be a tremendous pleasure. In fact, I find it more enjoyable each time I hear it. I admire its audaciousness, its ambition and its generosity. And I'm very glad and grateful Joni decided to do it.
I find the arrangements and orchestrations to be interesting, somewhat surprising and quite sympathetic to the individual worlds of each song. In some cases, Sex Kills and Sire of Sorrow in particular, the new settings bring the pieces to more exuberant life than the original recordings. And the vocal performances, to my ears, are superb. Has the voice changed? Sure. Have the changes impaired her emotional delivery? Not at all. (Although it does seem that at certain moments the orchestra surges to support the voice that in earlier times could achieve the power on its own.) In full disclosure, there are gaps in my Joni knowledge. The first record I listened to was LOTC, so I missed the first 2 albums. I followed her through the seventies. Missed the eighties. Resumed with NRH. So some of the songs on T are new to me, with no awareness of the original recordings to compare the new versions to. The presence of, to my ears, 'new' material is nice. But I still ask myself why she chose to do this. And I'm reminded of Dylan's two albums from the early nineties where he covered old blues and folk tunes, not including any new songs of his own. It seems those records were a means of getting back in touch with the traditions that truly inspired him. It worked. The next record, Time Out of Mind, was a masterpiece. I wonder if these most recent records of Joni's are a similar exercise. The traditions she returns to are not, of course, blues or folk, but the classic American popular songs of Porter, the Gershwins, Arlen, etc. And I think the purpose of the 'recontextualization' that the liner notes of T speak of is to place Mitchell firmly among the pantheon of great American songwriters mentioned above. The orchestrations remove the songs from the pop cultural crosscurrents of the 60s, 70s and 80s, and make us look at them in a new way. And the new way is as theater -- T has made me realize that as a composer and, especially, lyricist Joni is, with her best work, on a par with Sondheim. I'm surprised that no one has constructed a Broadway show around her work. Of course, no one can say whether this process of rediscovery on her part will ultimately result in remarkable new compositions. I hope so. If not, I'm glad she gave us this. PS. Why is there nothing from HOSL on T? This is a major puzzlement to me. Bruce
