Joni Mitchell – Song to a Seagull (1968)

Joni Mitchell – Song to a Seagull

When you first hear “I Had a King”, the lead-off track on Joni Mitchell’s debut, you don’t hear a mediocre effort from an artist whose other work may be more resonant and probably won’t hear the mixing issues resulting from David Crosby’s insistence on placing microphones inside the grand piano. What you do hear is a deeply moving and surprisingly catchy young woman, someone with so much warmth in her thick voice that she lifts up the jauntier “Night in the City’ into something you could almost dance to. Still, the album was fraught with issues, when printing the LP, the press cut off the birds that spell out Song to a Seagull, forcing Mitchell to self-title the album and that mixing issue is audible too, the songs simply aren’t as big as they could be, with many seeming muddled until Mitchell's voice breaks out of the low range. In a way, it does bind the more somber cuts “Michael from Mountains” and “Marcie” to the more upbeat songs in a way that gives the album much more cohesion that it would have otherwise, but it is still an issue. Taken separately from the other albums in Joni’s oeuvre, Song to a Seagull is an effective and beautifully ruminative folk album and when compared to her contemporaries, even more so. It stands alone among most other albums in 1968, Joni filling the album with what she would call “Chords of inquiry” and what every else would call a suspended chord, she also mixes in spoken word, banshees and strange chord progressions to sell her off-kilter delivery. Song to a Seagull might not stand up to her later albums, but that is by no means Mitchell’s fault. Her debut is an engrossing and strangely overlooked would-be cult album, one that would start off one of the most stellar studio album runs of the ’60s and ’70s.

~8.0

Comments

Concert Review: Wilco at The Riviera Theatre, – 3/26/23

Wilco at The Riviera Theatre, – 3/26/23 Chicago’s Uptown neighborhood was once the center of the city’s booming entertainment district. Located at what had initially been the end of the L Train system, The Aragon Ballroom, Green Mill Jazz Club, and long-defunct Uptown Theatre quickly defined the corners of Broadway and Lawrence Avenue as the designated area for Chicagoans to congregate for the arts. As the area’s zeitgeist waivered though, the theatres grew into a weekend oasis of vibrancy amongst an otherwise casual and sleepy north-side neighborhood. Given Wilco’s consistent championing of Chicago’s local institutions, and another Uptown landmark Carol’s Pub in particular, The Rivera Theater seems like exactly the kind of venue for the band to host their latest three-night run and the start of their spring tour. Jeff Tweedy and company know the former movie palace well, playing there many times over the years and even using it as the base for a five-night series of performances b...

Buck Meek – Haunted Mountain (2023)

Buck Meek – Haunted Mountain Big Thief, one of the best and most adept bands of the 21 st century, has done more in six short years than most bands can squeeze out of an entire catalog. Each of their five studio albums has managed to expand their signature homespun charm into exciting, self-contained albums. The sound always moves forward but with distinct detours projecting their country-folk and singer-songwriter tendencies over disparate palates. The band’s prolificity extends to their solo catalog as well, the most notable inclusions naturally coming from lead singer and principal songwriter Adrianne Lenker. But behind her eclipsing generational talent, is guitarist Buck Meek, an artist who could easily shepherd his own headlining band if he needed to. Aside from some early, Big Thief-adjacent work, Meek’s true breakout was with 2021’s Two Saviors , a beautiful, alt-country collection of songs, most of which approached the quality, if not the scale of his mother band’s...

Fever Ray - Radical Romantics (2023)

Fever Ray – Radical Romantics Karin Dreijer’s debut solo album Fever Ray came out only shortly after Silent Shout , an album that was almost immediately hailed as The Knife’s masterpiece. The inevitable comparisons seeped out, no one was completely ready to accept the more cavernous Fever Ray as any sort of a replacement for the lush maximalism of Dreijer and her brother’s The Knife. Regardless, Dreijer had proved how essential they were to that project and by 2014, the two had disbanded. Fever Ray’s next album Plunge continued Dreijer’s push towards empty space with an angrier and more overtly political edge and simultaneously built Fever Ray into a proper entity in its own right. Radical Romantics is a Fever Ray album in that its fixations swarm around Dreijer, all their proclivities, and all their vulnerabilities. It’s also the closest Fever Ray has ever sounded like The Knife, whether it be the soaring and anthemic “Shiver”, or the pronounced synths ripples on “New Utensi...

The SoundBite

Search This Blog