<< I don't feel particularly enlightened about
any of her material having read it and for me personally it is a little more
than I want to know about Joni's personal life. >>
Well, let's not be TOO tough on Marcel...while I mostly agree with you, I
think it was an interesting exercise. I don't think it sheds any light on
anything...there are SOME songs where the subject is KNOWN and where the
writing was immediate, like some of the Blue & FTR stuff. But then there's
"Beat of Black Wings", written over 20 years AFTER she met & talked with
"Killer Kyle" and first mentioned him in "Cactus Tree":
"There's a man who sends her medals,
He is bleeding from the war"...
So it would be a false assumption to think that the songs in each period
revolve around who she was romantically linked to, and like Victor says,
doesn't provide much illumination.
What WOULD be interesting, and far more meaningful I think, would be to match
Joni's albums with partners for ourselves. One of the reasons Hejira
resonates so much with me has nothing to do with Joni's relationship to John
Guerin or whomever, but rather what *I* was going through with a girl named
Laura (not the coupon queen! :~D).
So maybe that's more of a key to why Joni is special to us; not an analysis
of what the songs are about to HER, but rather what they mean to us on a
purely individual level.
Bob
NP: Rickie Lee Jones, "Show Biz Kids"
