Joni Mitchell - Ladies Of the Canyon (1970)

With her third album, Joni Mitchell hit creative heights it takes lesser recording artists as many as six albums to reach.  Ladies Of the Canyon is a moody, richly arranged, highly evocative record that offers personal sketches and observations of the world around her and the world within her. If you want to understand what makes Joni Joni, this is the LP to listen to.

The music on Ladies Of the Canyon is intricate and as low in key as Bob Dylan's John Wesley Harding, but is by turns more tender and unsettling; light guitar chords give way to deeply hued piano and organ arrangements, with a few bright medium tempos thrown in to enliven the pace.  Such moments of brightness are deceptive; with the exception of the colorful deception of small-town life in "Morning Morgantown," the album's opener, the songs are mostly about loss and alienation, maturity and renewal. Songs such as "Willy" (about Graham Nash, whose middle name is William) and "Rainy Night House" (referencing an anonymous DJ) explore the frustration of breaking through to relate to a lover, while "Conversation" looks for away to help a willing and able suitor express his feelings.

Ladies Of the Canyon finds Joni sorting out her place in the world, attempting to reconcile her pastoral, personal ideals to modern reality, as the bright dreams of the sixties began to devolve into a new decade.  "Woodstock" celebrates the promise of positive change implicit in a music festival she was unable to attend, even as she pointedly ponders the value of what is lost and what she didn't realize she had in her ecological anthem "Big Yellow Taxi."  The garden has been replaced by the manufactured pleasures of consumerism, where art is judged by its price; Joni may not have been the first musical artist to understand that blind luck spells the difference between fame and obscurity, as the pop star ponders the unknown street performer in "For Free," but the regret in her voice amplifies her dismay over the idea of music as a commodity.  But she remains hopeful in the future; in Ladies Of the Canyon's  closing song, "The Circle Game," a loving portrait of a boy coming of age, she admits that the past is gone, but she's not ready to lose faith in the future just yet.  Joni has been through a lot, but she's ready to move ahead with her eyes open.