Joni Mitchell
Both Sides Now

THE REVIEW

To the now seasoned (vintage 1943) Canadian songwriting superstar, fate has unfortunately dealt a nasty and premature old age: five years ago, a brain aneurysm seriously impaired her physically and mentally, thus definitively ending her very long, almost fifty-year career as a composer and performer. And painter.

With the stubbornness of the toughest ("I defeated polio at nine years old… this is just another, yet another battle in my life!"), the blonde keeps holding on and has progressively regained her lost speech, while regarding mobility issues, the wheelchair still hasn't been put out of use, but she's working on it.

This album dates back to the end of the last century and formally marked Mitchell's entry into the long "senile" phase of her career. It was followed by a slew of collections, recyclings, reinterpretations, and recoveries, all graced by only one unique album of new material titled "Shine" from 2007, which was superb.

"Both Sides Now" indeed comprises, for its ten-twelfths, very personal covers of light jazz standards from the sixties, fifties, forties, and even thirties. The album is completed by two reinterpretations of her early classics, the famous one which also provides the title of the work, and then the slightly less known "A Case of You."

The album has two peculiarities: firstly, the omnipresence of the large orchestra, arranged and conducted by the highly professional Vince Mendoza and recorded at London's Air Studios, the late Sir John Martin's, the one linked to the Beatles.

And then Mitchell's voice itself: gone! Two out of the four octave range as well as the round and clear timbre have been lost along the way, replaced by a dark and husky delivery, breaking where once it was strong and steady.

It’s due to the cigarettes… Three packs a day, since she was a kid! Of course, she vehemently denies it, as only ardent smokers know how to do, preferring to blame it on the late aftereffects of the past polio attack, on the fact that after fifty the voice always deteriorates (tell that to Al Bano, if you dare!). In reality, her youthful soprano pipes, exhibited with spectacular but often verbose results in the first four/five albums, had already transformed into that, definitively fuller, mobile, and interesting mezzo-soprano by the full seventies. The loads of smoked tobacco continued to take their toll and in the eighties, she performed as a contralto, yet still "clean" and wide-ranged, until the nineties when the hoarseness and increasingly evident strain towards the highs began.

All this to conclude, however, that Joni Mitchell's singing has improved over the years! Physiological limitations have been counterbalanced by experience, knowledge, expressiveness, clarity of purpose and means, infinite megalomania with a consequent pursuit of perfection in channeling her sensitivity into notes, vocal trills, and words. I much prefer this mature, breathless, and limited but sexy Joni Mitchell to that kind of exaggerated nightingale she was as a girl, continuously flying over the sound of her acoustic guitar without ever landing. The low, whispering tones of this elderly Mitchell, her sharp and sometimes almost verbal phrasing, the infinite nuances of her throat, are a blessing for my taste, and also… true stimulation to my sexual sphere! Just listen to the same "Both Sides Now", sung three tones lower than the original and at the same time three times more evocative, in its slow and melancholic pace that gives the lyrics full meaning.

It is not a rock album and not a folk album, it is fifty very retro minutes of voice plus orchestra. Certainly not for every day, but Joni is, even on this occasion, and more than ever, my favorite female musician of all time; and her voice gives me chills, even when tackling these antiquated pieces by Richard Rodgers, Mack Gordon, Harry Warren, Howard Stept, Charles Tobias, David Mann, Vincent Youmans, Harold Arlen, Reuben Bloom… half of Broadway's golden years, in short.