Thanks a lot for your thoughts on a Joni box, Patrick. I recall that you did participate in this thread the first time around, and I really appreciate you taking the time to do so again.
Yours was a long post, and contained much that I agree with (most notably, that a tremendous boxed set could be created from commercially-unavailable sources). I hope that others respond to what you've written (so as to get others involved in a JC discussion, for one thing), so I'll refrain from dominating the give and take. There is one argument you put forward that I'd like to address, though. > 1) it should include as LITTLE commercially available material as possible... reasons: > > i) joni wants it that way. she believes she would lose significant album sales. > > ii) when joni says her albums should be heard as albums, she's right. the album-length musical creation is something that has existed for only a short while (40 years) and is on its way out. one of joni's greatest achievements is to have mastered and extended the form. a boxed set that rifled the commercial files wouldn't reflect that aspect of joni's artistry, and would cause a lot of people to miss it. forever. > Without disagreeing with what you've said about Joni and the album form, I contend that the songs *can* be separated from the contexts in which they're placed on the albums. After all, Joni did this in concert throughout her career. For example, in her concerts "A Case Of You" was not a lesser song for not having been surrounded by all the other material on "Blue," played in the order in which it appeared on the album. There are only a few of Joni's albums, in fact, which I believe *do* present a loose narrative, song to song (not that the sequencing isn't almost uniformly excellent). Even in those cases, however, I contend that Joni's artistry doesn't suffer when the songs are heard out of context in the way that, say, The Who's "The Acid Queen" does. Off hand, I can't think of a single song of Joni's which is dependent on its juxtapositions to be fully understood, even on albums like THOSL and "Hejira." I guess I wasn't trying to debate whether or not a boxed set of commercially-available material *should* exist, or whether it would or would not hinder Joni's catalog sales (she could be right that it might - or, it could send people in search of the full albums from which certain songs were taken). I was thinking that it would be a fun project and a whole lot of JC to accept the concept of a "standard" boxed set as a given and then go from there. If the JMDL were compiling a 4-disc boxed set, knowing it would present Joni's career to many who only know her well for "Both Sides Now," "The Circle Game," "Big Yellow Taxi" and "Help Me," what would it contain? How would we pare it down to 320 minutes of music and be satisfied with the portrait it paints? Best, Jim
