Dear Ann,
Reading your book inspired me to revisit my discovery of Joni Mitchell’s 1977 album, Don Juan’s Reckless Daughter. I was 15, at a used-record store. I did not know that it was Joni on the cover, but that was the least of it. The jazz part of my brain was in one place, and the part that I had for her albums Blue and Clouds was in another. It was like two people passionately meeting. It was like falling in love. It was music that sounded like no one else’s.
You did not fall for Joni as a teenager. It happened later. What makes that happen?
Happy travels,
David
Dear David,
I am grateful for your jazz brain! Your musical analysis makes [your book] Reckless Daughter an essential document—biblical, even—for any Joni fan. I would not have been able to write my own book without it. Thank you so much for that gift.
When I was a teenager and young adult, I was a fierce generational loyalist. After a New Wave adolescence, I moved from Seattle to San Francisco at 19, in 1984, and became immersed in the scene and the sounds of West Coast punk, funk, and nascent indie rock. I had no room for baby-boomer icons in my steady diet of Kate Bush, Prince, and the Gun Club. It’s funny what youthful bravado blocks out: only when I started working on this project, in 2016, did I play early Bush and early Mitchell back to back and realize how much my beloved bat goddess had taken from folkish Joni.
I did do the most pedestrian thing possible at one point, sinking into Blue as a salve for my chronically broken heart. I loved the lucid inebriation of “A Case of You” and the world-weariness of “The Last Time I Saw Richard,” a song that reminded me of the films of Mike Nichols and John Cassavetes, all about the damage men and women do to each other out of fear and carelessness.
Later, I grabbed the chance to write about Blue for a Montreal conference organized by the Mitchell scholar Lloyd Whitesell. I took a kind of prose-poetry approach, writing tiny essays about each song. At the time, my husband and I had just adopted our daughter; Joni had re-united with Kilauren, the daughter she entrusted in adoption years before, and at my panel they were there in the front row! I got really emotional and cried as I was reading my paper. After that I felt humiliated—like I just wasn’t cool enough—that, to be honest, that experience derailed the nascent Joni renaissance I’d begun enjoying.
When I began researching Traveling, I had an attitude about Joni. Really, I was fed up with pop- and rock-star idol worship in general, and I didn’t fully understand the intensity of her fan base. I knew she was great but didn’t, and still don’t, think she’d been marginalized in the pop canon, as many of her supporters have often said. As you moved through Joni’s phases and changes, did your perspective on her change, as mine did? Or did that youthful fervor continue to burn bright?
I don’t know about you, but I’d been raised to believe jazz fusion is a poisoned well.
Or do I? You know, because you’ve read Traveling, that I also love her work with Larry Klein. I really fell for their romance—a working relationship that had each learning deeply from the other and daring each other on a daily basis. I know that many casual Joni fans are skeptical of her 1980s and early-1990s work, but I’m hoping my book helps lead people back to albums like Dog Eat Dog and Chalk Mark in a Rainstorm. I’m ready for the big-shouldered-pantsuit Joni revival!
xakp
Dear Ann,
Since I played keybs in an arts high school with an excellent jazz program—Roy Hargrove was a senior when I was a freshman and Erykah Badu was a sophomore—of course, fusion was the enemy. Not 70s fusion, but 80s fusion. That was the sound of compromise. I could have seen Miles in 1990, but I just couldn’t. I loved him too much.
Chalk Mark in a Rainstorm was the first Joni album I bought in real time. I loved it, but not as much as I would love Night Ride Home. That album haunted me, and it still does. “Come in from the Cold” makes me cry because I’ve been there so many times. Loving someone as much as you could love anyone, yet still getting hurt, still lashing out, still in fear of abandonment. We never work ourselves out, not really.
Night Ride Home was an accumulation of resentments in a still-functional marriage. We want a lover to bring us in from the cold. We want the wish fulfillment. We want the painful part of our lives to be edited. Anyone who loves Joni has experienced versions of this. Joni is the ultimate relationship artist, because she has been there and is devastatingly honest. She is a laureate of emotions. We keep fucking up, and there she is, ahead of us, ready for us.
I was assigned a cover story for Mirabella. I was 24, around the time you were editing the music section for The Village Voice and you were such a soothing presence in a rough newsroom. Her P.R. people played a tough game. They insisted on a cover story, and I got it. Then, at the last second, she was re-uniting with her daughter, it was still a secret, and the album was shelved for over a year. By the time it was released, there was no more Mirabella.
I read Elizabeth Bishop’s “One Art” to Joni. She was not impressed. She is the thing itself. There is nothing you can add. We are blessed to have her as a muse, as a subject. I still can’t believe our names are on the same book. And you are now part of the names, and I leave it to you to connect today’s audience with Joni, something that is already happening.
If you want me, I’ll be at the bar,
David
Dear David,
My friend Jordan Hamlin—a musician, producer, and studio owner par excellence here in Nashville—always insists that we listen to the full version of “Come in from the Cold,” not the radio edit. I need it all, she says. She is so right! The tidal quality of that song, the way each verse not only builds on the other but somehow washes through the rest to form an encompassing sense of yearning—intimate, erotic, communal, spiritual—that is not resolved but, in becoming the basis of experience, becomes bearable. I agree that these later albums are therapeutic. But they’re also prickly, challenging, even at their most sonorous—she’s still that woman, the one who will argue with you about the important things, because her conviction won’t let her rest in silence. I like to think even now she is that way; after all, she inserted “Sex Kills” into her Joni Jams setlist. She’ll give us our favorites, but she also wants to remind us there’s much more beyond those memorized melodies.
And she’s also returned to the music of her youth, performing doo-wop faves like “Love Potion No. 9” and the standard “Young at Heart.” With those songs she reminds us that for all of her originality and rebelliousness, she is also a proud daughter of the North American songbook. That’s Joni—she loves to show us the big picture, even when the view is unexpected.
Thanks for this dialogue, and lots of laughs,
akp
David Yaffe is a professor of humanities at Syracuse University. He writes about music and is the author, most recently, of Reckless Daughter: A Portrait of Joni Mitchell. You can read his Substack here