Happy 50th Anniversary to Joni Mitchell’s third studio album Ladies of the Canyon, originally released in April 1970.
Artists who investigate disorganized rhythm gladly let their music wander off into the woods or into the sea. Or some may say up into the canyons, where nature grows wild. Joni Mitchell is hardly considered an experimental artist, but she has let her singular voice veer off into new directions with every record. As her catalog went from folk to pop and into jazz, her polyrhythms developed over time and came into clear focus on her third album Ladies of the Canyon.
An artist of many tunings, mediums, and methods, Mitchell has countless talents, perspectives, and approaches. Unmatched for decades past and to come, Ladies of the Canyon remains one of her most beloved and accessible albums.
With her own art on the cover, a minimal white outline and a burst of the colorful canyon she called home brings to mind her slanted, golden California neighborhood. And the opening “Morning Morgantown” is that home coming to life: a busy market, a city just waking up, stretching, and beginning the day. Many melodies come together. Her hands are steady on the guitar before the layers start. When the piano drops in to say hello, a tick-tock of a clock follows and creates a new pace.
Ladies of the Canyon is an album of place. We are grounded in a bottomless boom of hippies, Joni the recluse at its center in Laurel Canyon. It’s on Ladies where she started to change the straight folk direction her previous two albums took toward a heavy textured pop.
The record is moving and spacious. Her work on the piano and vocals, ranging from comforting to dissonant, mirror the larger world she takes on in her writing. She wrestles with fame on “For Free” about a clarinetist she saw on the street performing to no one. “They knew he had never been on their TV” and “Me, I play for fortune,” she sings, but they “pass his music by.”
It was “For Free” that made me fall in love with Ladies of the Canyon. It was the all too brief clarinet solo at the end. In following my older sister’s footsteps, I picked the clarinet in eighth grade and played it every day in band class for eight years. Familiar with the feeling of a wooden reed at my lips and the shape it takes in under my fingers, the solo came as a surprise when I first heard it. Mitchell was inspired by a blind clarinetist to tell this story. Instrumentalist Paul Horn plays after the somber piano ballad wraps up. It’s a jazzy moment, perhaps a seed sown for what’s to follow in her career.
That same sister bought Ladies of the Canyon for me on vinyl from a shop in her college town when I was a junior in high school. My love affair with Ladies started the same time most young women discover Joni Mitchell, at 16. The older I get, I am more grateful for my upbringing in a Joni household where we passed her records from kitchen to bedroom and sang along to them on the road.
Three of her most popular hits wrap up Ladies: “Big Yellow Taxi,” “Woodstock,” and “The Circle Game.” “Woodstock” became a smash hit and a classic rock radio staple thanks to the Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young cover. But Mitchell’s original takes an entirely different groove than CSNY’s gritty, electric blues. Her keys and down-tempo meditation on the Woodstock Generation conjures the dark side of free love, liberation, and the struggle “to get your soul free.”
Mitchell wrote “The Circle Game” back in the ‘60s when her songs were mostly performed by others. It’s been covered time and time again. Same goes for “Big Yellow Taxi,” her environmentalist anthem where she delivers the famous line “Don’t it always seem to go / you don’t know what you’ve got till it’s gone / they paved paradise and put up a parking lot.” It found itself famous, again, when Janet Jackson and Q-Tip sampled it for “Got ‘Til It’s Gone” in 1997, and again when Counting Crows delivered the same message on their cover in 2002. Joni’s poetry knows no bounds.
It’s the middle of Ladies of the Canyon and the title track where Mitchell’s narrative gains a foothold. Her inspiration comes from Trina Robbins, famed feminist underground cartoonist who made her home in the canyons. It celebrates the independent “canyon lady” baking brownies, welcoming you back, sewing lace on the windows, and wearing vintage fashions.
“Willy” was inspired by her love for Graham Nash (his middle name is William). Mitchell’s piano is rich and her voice fills the upper register broadening the song’s range. I see her view as she “counts the cars up the hill.” They’re in a row, their wheels turned so they will not roll. Joni shows me the many ways there are to count love in all its splendor as I daze out my window.
On “Rainy Night House,” the piano is backed by the cello instead of bass with layered, choral vocals creating an ominous night in the canyon. Her syllables pluck and paw and stretch into shivers that echo down the ravine. She pulls off the same tricks on “The Priest” with thick tiers of guitar and drum.
Joni’s folk intuition morphs its most classic instruments—guitar, piano, drum—and matches them with the familiar—clarinet, flute, and electricity—in unexpected ways. Left to her own devices as a composer and as sole producer, Mitchell steadies herself on Ladies of the Canyon. The following year she’ll deliver Blue and we will rejoice in its heartbreak. Even though her sound is singular, Joni always stands alone. Her genius thrives this way.
Sonic shapes have a way about them. They stroke the imagination and fuel a fire under the skin. My teenage ears never understood what Mitchell wrote about even as I memorized the lines. But as I age, I see what’s happening in her records. Joni’s balance of life, distance, and art is a lesson you can learn with many returns to her vibrant catalog. Ladies of the Canyon is a turning point in her arc. The hits remain sentimental for a time long gone and the rest are reminders of possibility.
Enjoyed this article? Read more about Joni Mitchell here:
Blue (1971) | Court and Spark (1974) | The Hissing of Summer Lawns (1975)
LISTEN: