Joni Mitchell: Morning Morgantown, A Case of You, & More: Rolling Stone Tribute-Survey 2021

[appalachiablue]

- Rolling Stone AU, "Joni Mitchell: 50 Essential Songs. From “Chelsea Morning” to “Coyote” and beyond, we survey the legendary singer-songwriter’s defining statements." June 25, 2021.

In May 2021, during an interview with Clive Davis, Joni Mitchell reflected on negative reviews she’s received over the years. “I thought, why is it that people are so hard on this stuff? Well, I guess it’s because it’s different,” she said. “It doesn’t fit into a genre. You can’t say it’s folk music or jazz; it’s somewhere in between.” Categories don’t apply to Joni Mitchell, and they never have.

She became famous in the early Seventies as the ultimate confessional singer-songwriter, but she’ll go down as maybe the greatest formal innovator in modern pop. Where so many of her contemporaries built on familiar folk or rock & roll models, Mitchell devised her own musical language, one that could encompass songs as intimate and plainspoken as “River” or as imaginative and epic as “Paprika Plains.”...

More, https://au.rollingstone.com/music/music-lists/best-joni-mitchell-songs-27038/morning-morgantown-1970-27050/
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- 'Morning Morgantown' (1970). Ladies of the Canyon closes with a legendary 3-song run: “Big Yellow Taxi,” “Woodstock,” & “The Circle Game,” tracks so beloved that they often overshadow the rest of the record.

The opener, “Morning Morgantown,” is one of them. Mitchell paints a peaceful portrait of a town at dawn- milk trucks & merchants rise with the sun, while tea & lemonade is sipped in the shade. The guitar twinkles as Mitchell sets the scene, concluding with a cheery send-off: “But the only thing I have to give/To make you smile, to win you with/Are all the mornings still to live/In morning Morgantown.” It’s the warmest of introductions to a successful album- her first to go platinum.- A.M.

(The song has special significance for me from unforgettable early experiences there).
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- 'A Case of You.' (1971).

“At that period of my life, I had no personal defenses,” Mitchell told Cameron Crowe in Rolling Stone of the era when she recorded Blue. “But the advantage of it in the music was that there were no defenses there either.” On “A Case of You,” Mitchell takes on an intimately conversational tone inspired by her relationship with Leonard Cohen, who told her he was “as constant as the Northern Star.” “I was a young man entranced by this radiant person,” Cohen recalled to David Yaffe in Mitchell’s biography, Reckless Daughter. “She was like a storm.”

“A Case of You” is genuinely funny in places (she even breaks into a bit of the Canadian national anthem), genuinely sad in others, and remarkably complicated: The song’s central conceit is one kind of communion (“You said, ‘Love is touching souls’”) becoming another, the lover’s blood as “holy wine.” —D.W.

- More,
https://au.rollingstone.com/music/music-lists/best-joni-mitchell-songs-27038/morning-morgantown-1970-27050/

[dweller]

1. Adding a few of my favorites 🙂

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✌🏻

[Staph]

2. Morgantown is my hometown, too!!!

[appalachiablue]

3. IK, saw you mention it in posts. I was there

for a short time and benefitted mainly from meeting some interesting people, musicians at a club where I worked and others who I traveled to Europe with for the first time. I transferred and finished at another school.