Joni Mitchell — For the Roses
Qobuz archive review (December 2023)
Of all the great transitional albums in rock history, Joni Mitchell’s For the Roses is one of the greatest. Coming after the spare, diaristic Blue — on which Mitchell both perfected and abandoned her evolution from the coffeehouse folk scene — and pointing the direction to the more jazz-flecked and kaleidoscopic sounds of Court and Spark, Roses found her going from strength to strength lyrically, while opening a pandora’s box of musical possibilities in these songs’ structures and instrumentation. The album starts familiarly enough, with the piano-and-vocals simplicity of “Banquet,” which initially presents as an impressionistic number but quickly reveals itself to be a biting class critique far more cynical and angry than anything Mitchell had previously recorded. If that wasn’t enough of a clue that Roses was going to be a very different Joni Mitchell album, “Cold Blue Steel and Sweet Fire” makes it clear that this was an artist intent on radically reshaping her sound. The song couples bleak lyrics about addiction and codependency with a lush arrangement that leans as heavily on well-deployed horn lines as it does on a full-bodied acoustic guitar attack accentuated by subtle studio effects. It’s a complex sonic construction that is remarkably airy and light-filled, providing an unsettling contrast to its dark lyrics.
Despite its rather dour opening, Roses has considerable tonal variety; after all it’s also home to “You Turn Me On, I’m a Radio” one of Mitchell’s most beloved accidents, written as an offhanded half-joke reply to her label’s insistence that she get a song on the radio. Naturally, it wound up being a hit, but also sneakily subverts the “songs about radios get played on the radio” trope by being lined with “Wall of Joni” multi-tracked vocals, no discernable chorus, and a questionable take on whether radios are actually cool or not. There are also several other numbers that align closely with the singer-songwriter vibes of Blue, most notably the beautiful piano-and-vocals approach of “Lesson in Survival,” but for the most part, Roses is an album that finds Mitchell pushing forward. “Let the Wind Carry Me” is profoundly intense lyrically (“Sometimes I get that feeling that I wanna settle and raise a child with somebody/ But it passes”), and wildly dynamic musically, with odd timings, quirky phrasings, and ethereal saxophone lines intertwined with gut-punch vocal harmonies. “Car on a Hill” would revisit some of the musical themes here just a few months later, but this number is far more challenging than its Court and Spark descendant. Likewise, “Blonde in the Bleachers” — a pure homage to the sanctifying (and suffocating) power of rock stardom — is perched upon such a jazzy foundation that it wouldn’t have been out of place on The Hissing of Summer Lawns three years later. This “in-between-ness” has often found For the Roses left out of conversations extolling the virtues of the records it came before and after, but that very aspect is what makes it such a remarkably unique and utterly essential album in Mitchell’s catalog.
