Joni Mitchell
For The Roses

THE REVIEW

Sandwiched between the perhaps most discussed and praised works of the blonde Canadian singer-songwriter (respectively "Blue" from 1971 and "Court & Spark" from 1973), this valuable album, released in 1972 as the fifth of her career, always risks being overshadowed in the vast sea of her production. It's the fate of transitional works: the two albums just mentioned sound very different from each other, and "For The Roses" places itself equidistant from them, as a work in progress and evolution between one and the other. 

In those years, Mitchell was considered, especially by industry insiders, more than just an exceptional talent: a real alien. First of all, for her voice, a sort of soprano bell of pure, silvery sonority (not yet compromised by the everlasting smoking habit), intent on careening with surprising mobility over harp-style, stunningly unpredictable harmonic foundations, regardless of the instrument of compositional approach (that is, the guitar, at the time strictly acoustic, the piano, and finally the dulcimer, the latter, however, put aside starting with this album) and in any case very personal, ingenious, sophisticated, avant-garde.

In parallel, her lyrics, always intimate and of unheard frankness, opened wide without filters onto her own conscience and experience, caused a general, admiring discomfort, especially for friends, colleagues, or lovers more directly involved in her life and persona. Unease even for the record company, at the sight of the photograph chosen by Joni for the cover: her, naked and from the back, standing on a rock by the sea... A partial censorship was triggered, with another completely chastened photo ending up as the cover, while the then twenty-eight-year-old Canadian's buttocks and the Pacific Ocean can be admired inside the album (or on the back of the CD booklet).

Mitchell's desire for jazz, a logical solution to the desire to increase, in depth and sophistication, the instrumental accompaniment of her open and harmonically changeable music, begins with this album, which sees wind instrumentalist Tom Scott add Californian fusion moods to some tracks. This trend will develop in crescendo for the rest of the seventies, through the full and well-known involvement of masters like Jaco Pastorius, Charles Mingus, Wayne Shorter in jazz-folk productions increasingly refined and less commercial.

The twelve songs of "For The Roses", half conducted with the piano and half with the acoustic guitar, are sometimes left very simple (instrument and voice, all alone in her hands) in the prevalent style of "Blue" and previous works, sometimes arranged for the accompanist group, instead in the dominant style on "Court & Spark" and all that will follow. They are almost always of short length (even less than three minutes) and enjoy, without distinction, the disturbing harmonic/melodic style peculiar to this extraordinarily talented singer-songwriter: a laborious, constant rise and fall of long vocal phrases, magically suspended in the seemingly disorganized yet brilliant, ingenious and free progression on the keyboard. Especially when our blonde is at the piano, the clumps of chords, inversions, and bass transpositions are something dizzying to those who love diving into concepts of harmony and composition.

When the lady instead wears the guitar, things would get even more linear, thanks to more sporadic chord changes, including entire verses that are content to sustain themselves on the same rhythmic figure, but at that point, another type of Mitchellian magic comes into play: the tunings. She doesn't even consider the classical E-A-D-G-B-E tuning of the six strings, preferring a whole line of so-called open tunings, from which to draw with ease the right one, song by song: a quirk that still at the time of this album forced her to have to tweak the mechanics of the acoustic guitar at every concert break. Roland finally took care of it, in relatively recent times, by developing a special electronic guitar for her that has in itself, programmed and instantaneously recalled, all the different tunings she needs.

Returning to this album, the episodes that most touch my personal taste are "Electricity", which opens with Joni's voice alone, incomparably harmonized by herself, while she describes one of her suspended and syncopated melodies; then the title track of the album, played on the typical tension created by the minor key chords during the verses, resolved by the shift to major for the chorus. Exquisite and poetic, even in the title, "Cold Blue Steel and Sweet Fire", while among the piano episodes my preference goes to "See You Sometime".

"You Turn Me on I'm a Radio" is a song literally commissioned by the record company, eager to release a Mitchell single that was decently accessible to everyone. She carried out the task, getting away with a kind of sui generis acoustic blues: there are only three chords... but the voice that sails over them escapes everywhere, hitting the most unlikely notes up and down for more than two octaves, as is her custom. It was a moderate success at the time, one of the very few appearances Joni made on the singles charts.

A musical figure always among the most influential and esteemed by industry insiders (figures like Jimmy Page or Prince would have given, and still would give, an arm to collaborate on one of her projects), she is the female figure I favor in the musical field. This album, like many others in her more than forty-year career, consistently and interestingly represents her art and her poetics.