JONI MITCHELL - CLOUDS
Just listened to my copy. An immensely personal, and impressively mature album for not just Mitchell, but any artist I've ever heard in their breakthrough moment, and early aughts of their career. The album starts with "Tin Angel", in which the character has their history of love, but still yearns for the feeling, they still long for the memories of love, and find another broken soul, and "someone to love today". This track is placed specifically at the start, so when we finish with "Both Sides Now", the character sounds lifetimes older, yet still in their mature state, they still recall love's illusions and don't really know love, or even life, at all. "Chelsea Morning", the second track is superb in highlighting the overarching theme of longing, as it is a peer into these memories of love that are scattered throughout the album. It almost feels like a scene plucked out of a film, a woman wakes up with a man in her bed, and has visions of a whole life together with him, but she is absent in his own mind, looking at the song as a memory, it almost plays off as a dream of what could have been. The next two songs, "I Don't Know Where I Stand" and "That Song About the Midway", play as a part one and part two of two lovers who split. In part one, we see one side lose faith and become filled with uneasiness, then have their own yearning return in part two seeing their other half find their next chapter in life, while she is still lost in a path with no directions. I don't have the greatest read on Roses Blue, but it sounds like in some sense that she is reflecting on her own character and own missteps. "The Gallery" is a great culmination of the previous songs and an entire film of an overarching relationship, rather than the scenes we got before, it is also the longing of a woman who wants a man who doesn't want her. Mitchell's maturity and reflection then shine brightest in "I think I Understand", "tasting sunlight as her fear", she's stepped out of the fire of love alive, and has been hurt great magnitudes, but there no isn't the largest assurance in the title, she thinks, but she doesn't know, she still believes in the power of love, despite what she's been through. "Songs to Aging Children to Come" is the low point of the album with battering down of themes, though still keeps the literary vision and masterful imagery of moon playing the galaxy like an instrument. "The Fiddle and the Drum" is an excellent penultimate track to scathe down not only those who have hurt her, but those who have been hurt by her own country. Words aren't needed for the finale of this album.
