FEATURE:
And Went Looking for a Woman
Joni Mitchell’s Court and Spark at Fifty
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IN the first couple of months of this year…
we are going to mark some huge album anniversaries. Celebrate truly great releases that are adored and studied to this day. One of them marks its fiftieth anniversary on 17th January. That is Joni Mitchell’s sixth studio album, Court and Spark. Coming off a fabulous run of albums that began with 1970’s Ladies of the Canyon and then moved through 1971’s Blue, and 1972’s For the Roses, this was a genius songwriter at a creative peak. Maybe 1976’s Hejira – which arrived a year after Court and Spark’s follow-up, The Hissing of Summer Lawns – was the biggest musical departure (and divided critics more than the four of five albums that came before). Court and Spark provided a bridge between the Folk albums that came before and the more Jazz-orientated sound that would be evident through Hejira. Her most successful album, and one that was an immediate commercial success, Court and Spark reached number two in the U.S. The album was met with a raft of hugely positive reviews. I would advise anyone who does not have Court and Spark in their collection to add it. You can steam the album on Apple Music but, as Mitchell removed her albums from Spotify, you may have to go to YouTube to get access/free access to the songs (and I have included most throughout the feature). Released on 17th January, 1974, Court and Spark was instantly taken to the public and critical bosom. Music that lodged into their heads, hearts and souls! Some of the most powerful and beautiful songwriting from a peerless artist. Voted as the best album of the year for 1974 in The Village Voice Pazz & Jop Critics Poll; inducted into the Grammy Hall of Fame in 2004, there is no denying the legacy and importance of this album.
To mark its fiftieth anniversary, I felt only right to write about a mesmeric and magnificent album. To add depth and weight, there are some reviews and features about Court and Spark which shed new light and insight. Albumism provided a retrospective in 2019 on its forty-fifth anniversary:
“Joni Mitchell remains one of the greatest feminist artists of all time. She leads the way in freedom and is “too busy being free” for anyone to hold her down these days, even at 75. Her catalog is a collection of innovation in music, wondering aloud what it is to be a woman in love and on a journey through skepticism and delight. Mitchell’s 1974 album Court and Spark turns 45 this week.
Recorded after a year-long hiatus from releasing any music, the first time Mitchell did this since her 1968 debut Songs To A Seagull, Court and Spark is her most successful album. Many fans favorite her magnum opus Blue (1971) but Court and Spark is a completely different animal. After having changed record labels in 1972 to Asylum, Mitchell started experimenting with jazz, a genre she’s since become famous for renewing in her own way.
The title track opens with subtle piano. Mitchell is credited to all the piano and acoustic guitar on the record. She co-produced Court and Spark with Henry Lewy, who also produced and collaborated with her in-studio on four of her next five records. Traditionally, Mitchell produced and controlled the production of all her LPs, remaining in control whether it’s with the instruments or the mastering of her albums.
Her power is exemplified by her distinct vocal performance. Unmatched by her range, the pause and punch of Mitchell’s delivery helps turn her songs into stories, her lines to poetry. Move with them swift and slow and feel her sway with you.
“Court and Spark” is about a passing encounter with a busker on the street. Mitchell has a unique ability to take random moments of life and turn them into prolonged experience by relating to them. She exists in these songs, as if no other medium made quite as much sense to her (although painting arguably represents a close second).
Court and Spark is home to two of Mitchell’s biggest radio hits, “Help Me” and “Free Man In Paris.” The textures of these songs, the first with saxophone, the second with bass played by Wilton Felder, co-founder of L.A. jazz group The Crusaders, are what make them memorable and endlessly playable. Also in the background on “Free Man In Paris” are vocals by David Crosby and Graham Nash. They’re so subtle it almost sounds like Mitchell’s vocals layered upon themselves.
On “Free Man In Paris,” Mitchell shapes her lines take when she breathes and suspends through them are her own. To imitate her vocal sound is to struggle. No other vocalist can take on her vibrato, accompanied of course by unusual guitar tunings and open piano work.
On “People’s Parties” she manages to sing about herself from a distance. “Laughing and crying / you know it’s the same release” she sings about the woman at a party who’s makeup is running down, as she’s crying on someone’s knee. Mitchell echoes “laughing it all away” to close out the track before the piano comes in. First it sounds like the end, and then it’s just the beginning of the next song, “The Same Situation.” A song that sounds as if it starts in the middle, “The Same Situation” is another selfless look at herself: “I said ‘Send me somebody / Who’s strong, and somewhat sincere / With the millions of the lost and lonely ones / I called out to be released / Caught in my struggle for higher achievement / And my search for love / That don’t seem to cease.”
As the decades pass, Joni Mitchell fans are harder to come by. The vocal vibrato, slides, and range have notoriously turned people away from her records. Sonically, she isn’t for everyone, but her ethos of individuality is a flag women everywhere fly high. (Lucky for me, I grew up with parents singing along to every word on every record, and with a sister who idolized her through high school. Mitchell’s records are like home.)
Mitchell’s place in history as a songwriter and composer is outside the realm of “normal.” And Court and Spark is anything but. If you’re new to her, consider it a starting point. You’ll find yourself gliding all over her records soon enough“.
In 2012, Pitchfork looked at Joni Micthell’s studio albums released between 1968 and 1979 (inclusive). It was a year when her first ten studio albums, released during an 11-year span, were gathered in this import box-set. Even though Joni Mitchell was not particularly underground or niche in 1974, Court and Spark was a commercial breakthrough that took her more into the mainstream:
“Her 1974 commercial break-out, Court and Spark, found her backed by first-call jazz session cats L.A. Express. It was her official severance from folk music. Court is her most pop album and gave her three chart hits, going gold five weeks after its release. Mitchell's production features heavy and sudden multi-tracked swells of her voice that spike melodies like a choir of accusing angels and mimic strings and horns. Her arrangement on "Down to You" (aided by Express bandleader Tom Scott) is stunning in its complexity, yet it never shakes you; it is still utterly a pop song.
Now six albums deep on the topic of love and loss, Court has a marked cynicism. It's a grown up album about arriving at the intractable issues of adult love. "Help Me", which was Mitchell's only top 10 hit, is reluctant about romance; she's "hoping for the future/ And worrying about the past." The refrain is pocked by the dawnlight realizations of that post-free love era: "We love our lovin'/ But not like we love our freedom." For the largeness of her band (which included Joe Sample of the Crusaders, and Larry Carlton, soon to be of every memorable Steely Dan guitar solo) they are nimble throughout; their finesse suited her own.
To explain how and what happened next in Mitchell's career-- how much her The Hissing of Summer Lawns was viewed as not a stylistic departure but a betrayal-- we must first look at the run up. While promoting Court, what could easily be defined as the commercial and artistic high-water mark of her career, Mitchell went to go see Dylan's Rolling Thunder Revue tour and wound up joining. At the time, she was a peer of Dylan, commercially and as a songwriter, she was also tight with tour member Robbie Robertson of the Band. She had a song in the Billboard Top 10-- and she was opening. When Mitchell recounts this in later interviews, she talks about how being on the tour was a matter of constantly having to subvert her ego to the men around her.
At this same time, many of her peers were headed further toward the mainstream, towards syncopation, towards rock, towards retro revivalism. Mitchell saw there was not much of a place for her amongst the new talents and the Peter Pan-ing crew she came up with, as a woman in her early 30s, and she saw jazz as a genre that would allow her to age gracefully and expand as an artist-- and so there she went. She was trying to find or develop a place to belong”.
I am going to finish off with one of the most detailed reviews for Court and Spark. Jon Landau shared his thoughts for Rolling Stone in February 1974. It was clear, as was true than as it is now, Court and Spark is a very special album that hits you the first time you hear it! I have listened to it countless times and I am always affected by it:
“ON FIRST LISTENING, Joni Mitchell‘s Court And Spark, the first truly great pop album of 1974, sounds surprisingly light; by the third or fourth listening, it reveals its underlying tensions. The lyrics lead us through concentric circles that define an almost Zen-like dilemma: The freer the writer becomes, the more unhappy she finds herself; the more she surrenders her freedom, the less willing she is to accept the resulting compromise. Joni Mitchell seems destined to remain in a state of permanent dissatisfaction — always knowing what she would like to do, always more depressed when it’s done.
Joni Mitchell has composed few songs of unambivalent feeling. Even her most minimal work suggests a need for change and skepticism about its potential results. On Court and Spark she has elevated this tendency into a theme: No thought or emotion is expressed without some equally forceful statement of its negation.
The actual opposites of Court and Spark — the thrill of courtship modulated by the fear of emotional commitment — suggest a series of choices that Mitchell touches on, passes through, and defines with astounding compression — the alternatives of love and freedom, trust and paranoia, security and rootlessness, concern for herself and for others, compromise and pursuit of perfection, and even sanity and insanity.
Her boldest fears come out in her songs about madness, the last two on the album. Her own “Trouble Child” and Lambert-Hendricks-Ross’ “Twisted” deal with it in strikingly different ways: The former is tragic, the latter is a piece of comedy with an hilarious punch line that plays on the very notion of schizophrenia. Together they flirt with insanity from a distance safe enough to show she can control even so threatening a concern.
On For the Roses, Joni Mitchell’s best lines were: “I’m looking way out at the ocean/ Love to see that green water in motion.” Here she uses water to evoke the breaking of another’s spirit:
Some are gonna knock you Some will try to clock you It’s really hard to talk sense to you Trouble Child Breaking like the waves at Malibu.
It is a song of infinite compassion, but although she has externalized her feelings by writing about another person, the song is ultimately introspective. For that reason, the quick move into “Twisted” seems almost desperate. To me she says: Now that we’ve taken a look, let’s get out of here — there’s nothing left to do but laugh.
But if Joni Mitchell is capable of subtly edging around the notion of breakdowns, she’s unable to keep the same distance when singing about the men who dominate the album. She never seems to know where she wants to draw the line in love, or if a line exists at all. But it is precisely on the songs about love that the new lightness in her music makes so much sense.
The album achieves its ethereal and lyrical quality with even more instrumentation than any of her other recordings — including horns, strings and a full rhythm section. Blue, her best album, defined a musical style of extraordinary subtlety in which the greatest emotional effects were conveyed through the smallest shifts in nuance. On Court and Spark the music is less a reinforcement of the lyrics and more of a counterpoint to them. An album about an individual struggling with notions of freedom, it is itself freer, looser, more obvious, occasionally more raunchy, and not afraid to vary from past work. It is also sung with extraordinary beauty, from first note to last.
Still, her boldest musical stratagem is not the most successful. On “Car on the Hill” she changes tempi and inserts choral passages between verses, using voices that literally sound like ladies of the canyon. She then brings the performance back to its initial fantasy — the anticipation of waiting for a man. The cut attempts a contrast between very specific lyrics and dreamy musical interludes. Striking in its own way, it suffers from a possibly too literal conception.
“Down To You” is every bit as intricate but works much better. It’s the album’s best love song — sophisticated, subtle and complete in itself. As good as melody, vocal and arrangement are, the lyrics overshadow them, with intimations of the album’s opposites: “Everything comes and goes . . . You’re a kind person/You’re a cold person too . . .”
Simple songs like the title tune are almost as fulfilling. “Court And Spark” is about a drifter who suggests the possibility of her severing all inhibiting connections. She successfully (but depressingly) resists the temptation to make too much of a casual affair. But in the following song, “Help Me,” she reverses herself — the strength is gone and love becomes a threatening force that one copes with rather than surrenders to.
On “Free Man in Paris” and “People’s Parties” she moves from love to her other favorite subject: fame and its demands. She sees it as a further complication in the process of sorting out values. “I’m just living on nerves and feelings . . .” she sings in “People’s Parties.” The song, musically related to the delightful “You Turn Me On (I’m a Radio),” is at once her least ambitious and most affecting work.
Some of Side Two is more playful and suggests a wish to gradually surrender everything to emotion. “Raised on Robbery” is pure release: She ducks every issue for an exhilarating fantasy. But then on “Just Like This Train” she uses some fantasy imagery to define a relationship between freedom and time: “I used to count lovers like railway cars.” Now she doesn’t count anything and just lets things slide. Jealous loving makes her “crazy,” and so she now equates goodness entirely with the heart: She can’t find the one because she’s lost the other. The album’s most haunting song hangs on the deceptively simple line, “What are you gonna do about it/You’ve got no one to give your love to.”
On “People’s Parties,” Joni Mitchell sings, “Laughing and crying/You know it’s the same release.” The special beauty of Court and Spark is that it forces us to do both, and that it does so with such infinite grace”.
An album that, upon initial listening, might sound like Joni Mitchell albums that came before, Court and Spark has a depth and slow-burning magnetism and wonder what is revealed after several trips through. A staggering meeting of genius songwriting and Joni Mitchell’s distinct and captivating voice, Court and Spark deserves a lot of celebration and love before its fiftieth anniversary (on 17th January). Some say 1971’s Blue is Mitchell’s greatest work. Others might say Ladies of the Canyon (1970). To many, and with little reason to argue against them, Court and Spark is the peak of…
JONI Mitchell’s golden career.