Joni Mitchell once called fame "a glamorous misunderstanding." As America's finest living Canadian songwriter (tied with Neil Young), few musicians have understood its nature so well. In the 1960s and 70s, Mitchell was Mary Magdalene to Dylan's folk-rock messiah, making music that was bittersweet and relatable, carrying what Dylan begat even further. Her work helped birth a new idiom that was personal and poetic, creating a new space for songs that made artistic statements, unbound by cliché and tradition. Such was the strength of her music that Mitchell's lyrics didn't have to make sense. But they did, particularly to women.
Mitchell's first 10 studio albums, cut during an 11-year span, have been gathered in this import box set. During this run, Mitchell charted one of the most solid career arcs in contemporary music that then detoured into one of the strangest, following her muse into places that very nearly cost her career and exhausted her fanbase's patience. Throughout, she was confident and unrepentant in her vision, in an era where that kind of ego was unbefitting a woman, even if she did have the gold albums and Grammys™ to back it up.
This is a basic set-- no frills, just all the albums' original layouts reproduced in envelope sleeves, the fonts so tiny only mice could read them. There are no extras, outtakes or re-anythinged. But taking these 10 records in a row, chronologically, it is a striking reminder no single artist has had a run like Joni (even her acolyte Prince only got to seven albums before he started to fall off). Mitchell was pop's first female auteur, an innovator of singular talent, whose influence was vast, immediate (see: Led Zeppelin's "Going to California") and long lasting (Joanna Newsom, St. Vincent, Taylor Swift's kiss'n'tell cottage industry).
Mitchell was "discovered" c. 1968 when ex-Byrd David Crosby pulled up in a sailboat outside the Florida club she was playing and took her to L.A. At the time, folk was out of fashion yet Mitchell managed to pull down an unprecedented major label deal for a girl and her guitar: total and complete artistic freedom, with the caveat that Crosby would produce her first album. It was rare for a woman to be writing and recording her own material at the time, let alone to be an unaccompanied solo act. Though Mitchell's debut, Song to a Seagull, was a heavy precedent for the era it's a harder listen now, the fin de siècle earth-mama lyrics playing strange against the stilted, formal musical settings. The delicate album suffers under Crosby's intrusive production; Mitchell would self-produce from then on.