Joni Mitchell THE STUDIO ALBUMS 1968-1979 | rhino.com Joni Mitchell THE STUDIO ALBUMS 1968-1979 Get the Album Stream the Album Now available - Joni Mitchell's THE STUDIO ALBUMS 1968-1979, featuring 10 of Mitchell's studio albums including her critically and commercially acclaimed albums BLUE and COURT AND SPARK. Both have been named as among the best albums ever made with BLUE peaking at #3 in the UK albums chart. Hit singles included in the set are 'Both Sides,' 'Now,' 'Big Yellow Taxi,' 'California,' 'Free Man in Paris' and many more. Get it here . About THE STUDIO ALBUMS 1968-1979 Joni Mitchell THE STUDIO ALBUMS 1968-1979 gathers together Joni's ten landmark albums from that period, including the classics such as 1971′s Blue, the acclaimed The Hissing Of Summer Lawns and Court And Spark, as well as the jazz-influenced Don Juan's Reckless Daughter and Mingus.

THE STUDIO ALBUMS 1968-1979 is now available from Rhino for a suggested list price of $59.98. The 10 albums are housed in simple replica card sleeves and held in an elegant white lift-off lid box. The full list of albums included is below. Song To A Seagull (1968), Clouds (1969), Ladies of the Canyon (1970), Blue (1971), For The Roses (1972), Court and Spark (1974), The Hissing Of Summer Lawns (1975), Hejira (1976), Don Juan's Reckless Daughter (1977) and Mingus (1979). A singer, composer and lyricist of exceptional talent and unmatched influence, Joni Mitchell has crafted an extraordinary body of work spanning more than 40 years and is widely regarded as one of the brightest musical lights of recent generations. Fans, fellow musicians and critics have delighted in an ever-evolving creative journey, with songs both universal and profoundly personal.

Her music has become a standard to which others are compared and which many aspire to copy, but its inventiveness and ineffable spirit make it decidedly her own. Explore the musical magnificence of Joni Mitchell. Tracklist Artist | HDtracks - The World's Greatest-Sounding Music Downloads Joni Mitchell About The Artist A singer, composer and lyricist of exceptional talent and unmatched influence, Joni Mitchell has crafted an extraordinary body of work spanning more than 40 years and is widely regarded as one of the brightest musical lights of recent generations. Fans, fellow musicians and critics have delighted in an ever-evolving creative journey, with songs both universal and profoundly personal. One of the most celebrated singer-songwriters of the 20th Century, some of her most successful and critically ... Read More A singer, composer and lyricist of exceptional talent and unmatched influence, Joni Mitchell has crafted an extraordinary body of work spanning more than 40 years and is widely regarded as one of the brightest musical lights of recent generations. Fans, fellow musicians and critics have delighted in an ever-evolving creative journey, with songs both universal and profoundly personal.

One of the most celebrated singer-songwriters of the 20th Century, some of her most successful and critically acclaimed work includes Blue, Ladies of the Canyon, Court and Spark, and Both Sides, Now. The recipient of a 2002 Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award, she was also ranked #72 in Rolling Stone's 2003 list of the greatest guitarists of all time. In 1997, Mitchell was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. Collapse List of All Top Joni Mitchell Albums, Ranked The Best Joni Mitchell Albums of All Time 1.2k votes 214 voters 1.6k views 23 items tags f t p @ List Criteria: This list includes studio albums only, so if you add an album make sure it's a proper studio release. Joni Mitchell is considered one of the greatest female vocalists . List of the best Joni Mitchell albums, including pictures of the album covers when available. This Joni Mitchell discography is ranked from best to worst, so the top Joni Mitchell albums can be found at the top of the list.

To make it easy for you, we haven't included Joni Mitchell singles, EPs, or compilations, so everything you see here should only be studio albums. If you think the greatest Joni Mitchell album isn't high enough on the list, then be sure to vote for it so it receives the credit it deserves. Make sure you don't just vote for critically acclaimed albums; if you have a favorite Joni Mitchell album, then vote it up, even if it's not necessarily the most popular. If you want to know, "What is the Best Joni Mitchell album of all time?" or "What are the top Joni Mitchell albums?" then this list will answer your questions. List contains albums like Blue and Court and Spark. This list of popular Joni Mitchell CDs has been voted on by music fans around the world, so the order of this list isn't just one person's opinion. You're able to copy this factual list to build your own just like it, re-rank it to fit your opinions, then publish it to share it on Facebook, Twitter or any other social networks you use regularly.

List Photo: user uploaded image Z G Options B Comments & Embed 2rerank list 1 Larry Carlton | New Music And Songs | Larry Carlton About Larry Carlton Like so many other Los Angeles studio musicians, guitarist and composer Larry Carlton was faced with a choice a number of years back: whether to go solo and develop a name for himself, or to continue the less risky, more lucrative existence of a session guitarist, making good money and recording with prominent musicians. Fortunately for fans of this eclectic guitarist, he chose the former, and has recorded under his own name for Warner Bros., MCA Records, GRP Records, and various other labels since 1978. Carlton's studio credits from the ''0s and early '80s include work with musicians and groups like Steely Dan, Joni Mitchell, Michael Jackson, Sammy Davis, Jr., Herb Alpert, Quincy Jones, Bobby Bland, Dolly Parton, Linda Ronstadt, and literally dozens of others. Among his more notable projects as a session guitarist were Joni Mitchell's critically acclaimed Court and Spark album and Donald Fagen's Nightfly album.

For much of the '70s, Carlton was active as a session guitarist, recording on up to 500 albums a year. Although he recorded a number of LPs under his own name as early as 1968's With a Little Help from My Friends (Uni) and 1973's Playing/Singing (Blue Thumb), he didn't land a major-label contract until 1978, when he signed with Warner Bros. Carlton began taking guitar lessons when he was six. His first professional gig was at a supper club in 1962. After hearing Joe Pass on the radio, he was inspired to play jazz and blues. Wes Montgomery and Barney Kessel became important influences soon after he discovered the jazz guitar stylings of Pass. B.B. King and other blues guitarists had an impact on Carlton's style as well. He honed his guitar-playing skills in the clubs and studios of greater Los Angeles while he attended a local junior college and Long Beach State College for a year until the Vietnam War ended. Carlton toured with the Fifth Dimension in 1968 and began doing studio sessions in 1970.

His early session work included studio dates with pop musicians like Vikki Carr, Andy Williams, and the Partridge Family. In 1971, he was asked to join the Crusaders shortly after they'd decided to drop the word "Jazz" from their name, and he remained with the group until 1976. In between tours with the Crusaders, he also did studio session work for hundreds of recordings in every genre. But it was while he with the Crusaders that he developed his signature, highly rhythmic, often bluesy style. His credits include performing on more than 100 gold albums. His theme music credits for TV and films include Against All Odds, Who's the Boss, and the theme for Hill Street Blues. The latter won a Grammy award in 1981 for Best Pop Instrumental Performance. Carlton delivered his self-titled debut for Warner Bros. in 1978, shortly after he was recognized for his groundbreaking guitar playing on Steely Dan's Royal Scam album.

(Carlton contributed the memorable guitar solo on "Kid Charlemagne.'') He released four more albums for Warner Bros., Strikes Twice (1980), Sleepwalk (1981), Eight Times Up (1982), and the Grammy-nominated Friends (1983), before being dropped from the label. He continued studio session work and toured in between, emerging again in 1986 on MCA Records with an all-acoustic album, Discovery, which contained an instrumental remake of Michael McDonald's hit "Minute by Minute." The single won a Grammy Award for Best Pop Instrumental Performance in 1987. Carlton's live album Last Nite, released in 1987, got him a Grammy nomination for Best Jazz Instrumental Performance. While working on his next album for MCA, On Solid Ground, Carlton was the victim of random gun violence, and was shot in the throat by gun-wielding juveniles outside Room 335, his private studio near Burbank, California. The bullet shattered his vocal cords and caused significant nerve trauma, but through intensive therapy and a positive frame of mind, Carlton completed work on On Solid Ground in 1989.

He formed Helping Innocent People (HIP), a non-profit group to aid victims of random gun violence. Despite the tragedy foisted on him in the late '80s after he was shot, with a long period of hospitalization and rehabilitation, Carlton continued his active recording and performing schedule over the next two decades, beginning with a number of albums during the '90s on the GRP label: 1992's Kid Gloves; 1993's Renegade Gentleman; 1995's Larry & Lee (with Lee Ritenour); and 1996's The Gift. Carlton also released the 1995 holiday collection Christmas at My House on MCA. And in 1997 he replaced Lee Ritenour in the popular, contemporary jazz outfit Fourplay, first appearing on the group's 4 album in 1998. The 2000s found Carlton as active as ever, recording live and in the studio as both leader and collaborator for a variety of labels. Two albums on Warner Bros.

began the decade, Fingerprints -- including guest appearances by Michael McDonald, Vince Gill, Kirk Whalum, and Vinnie Colaiuta -- in 2000, and Deep Into It in 2001. A popular concert draw in Japan, Carlton could be heard as a collaborator on two live recordings from that island country during the decade, Live in Osaka (with Steve Lukather), issued in 2001 on the Favored Nations label, and Live in Tokyo (with Robben Ford) on 335 Records in 2007. Meanwhile, his albums as a leader continued, with Sapphire Blue and Fire Wire released by Bluebird/RCA in 2004 and 2005, respectively, and The Jazz King -- with Carlton leading an all-star band performing music he composed on commission to celebrate the 80th birthday and ascension to the throne of Thailand’s King Bhumibol Adulyadej -- issued by Sony BMG in 2008. In 2009 Carlton appeared as guest guitarist on selected dates during Steely Dan's U.S. summer tour.

Take Your Pick (with Tak Matsumoto) appeared in 2010. Always happy to meet with the press, Carlton has a sweet, peaceful personality, and listeners continue to hear it in his unique rhythmic and warm guitar chords and ringing guitar tones. Carlton was featured on and produced vocalist Michele Pillar's holiday album, I Hear Angels Calling, in 2011. Also appearing in 2011 was Larry Carlton Plays the Sound of Philadelphia, followed by Four Hands & a Heart, Vol. 1 in 2012. ~ Richard Skelly, Rovi Hear more of Joni Mitchell: the sophistication of her music sets her apart from her peers – even Dylan | Music | The Guardian The Observer Joni Mitchell: the sophistication of her music sets her apart from her peers – even Dylan As a book of interviews and box set of songs from Joni Mitchell’s career are released, long-time fan Sean O’Hagan argues that her run of five classic albums, from Blue in 1971 to Hejira in 1976, surpass the work of her more celebrated male contemporaries Joni Mitchell looks out a window of her Laurel Canyon home in October 1970.

Photograph: Henry Diltz/Henry Diltz/CORBIS Share on Messenger Close “But even on the scuffle, the cleaner’s press was in my jeans/ And any eye for detail caught a little lace along the seams,” sang Joni Mitchell on a song called The Boho Dance from her 1975 album The Hissing of Summer Lawns. If the couplet was an acknowledgment of her Canadian well-bredness, it was also the perfect metaphor for the increasing sophistication of her music at that time, the “lace along the seams” of her songs. “For a long time, I’ve been playing in straight rhythms,” Mitchell told her friend, Malka Marom, in 1973, in the first of the three extended interviews that are included in Both Sides Now , a new book published next month.

“But now, in order to sophisticate my music to my own taste, I push it into odd places that feel a little unusual to me, so that I feel I’m stretching out.” Sophistication – melodic, lyrical, compositional – is an undervalued currency in popular music, though it illuminates the finest songs written by artists as diverse as Lennon and McCartney, Randy Newman, Ray Davies, Brian Wilson, Marvin Gaye and Curtis Mayfield as well as the songwriters for hire of an earlier era – Cole Porter, Rodgers and Hart, George Gershwin. It also defines the best songs that Joni Mitchell wrote at her creative peak, which, for me, stretched from the release of Blue (1971), through For the Roses (1972), Court and Spark (1974) and The Hissing of Summer Lawns (1975), to the pared and broodingly atmospheric Hejira (1976).

The sophistication of her songwriting and, in particular, her musical arrangements is the essential element that sets Joni Mitchell apart from her contemporaries and her peers, whether the troubadours of the early 70s Laurel Canyon singer-songwriter scene or lyrical heavyweights such as Leonard Cohen, Neil Young and even Bob Dylan. And yet in the music industry, Mitchell has never really been afforded the kind of respect heaped on her male counterparts. Rolling Stone magazine once listed her at No 62 in its 100 greatest artists of all time, just below Metallica. She was belatedly inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1997, but did not attend the ceremony. At 70, she remains a defiant outsider and recluse, who has often expressed her disgust at the music business. And who can blame her? Pinterest Her legacy, though, is long and enduringly influential, particularly on several ensuing generations of female singer-songwriters. If I had to choose her two masterpieces, I would opt for Blue and The Hissing of Summer Lawns, which between them illustrate the range and depth of her compositional skill. Playing Hissing...

again now, its utter completeness strikes me even more strongly, in this age of endless MP3 playlists. I seldom listen to a single track in isolation. (The exception is the iconoclastic and still arresting song The Jungle Line, which jumps out at you with its juxtaposition of Mitchell’s voice and the thunderous rhythms and whoops of the Drummers of Burundi.) Mitchell came up though the American trad-folk circuit of the mid-60s and was for her first two albums marketed as a fey, fragile hippy folk singer. She had already survived several setbacks. Her childhood in small-town Saskatchewan was fractured when she contacted polio, aged eight, in 1951. In 1964, she had fallen pregnant and, struggling financially, gave her newborn daughter up for adoption the following year.

(The song, Little Green, from Blue, is an ode to her lost daughter and, on Chinese Cafe, a song released in 1982, she sang: “My child’s a stranger / I bore her / But I could not raise her.” She was reunited with her daughter, Kilauren Gibb, in 1997.) A brief, unhappy marriage to her fleeting musical partner Chuck Mitchell followed, before she set out on her own to be a folk singer. Pinterest Joni Mitchell at the Rotunda Gallery in Broad Street London, 1990. Photograph: Mike Floyd/Associated Newspapers/Rex When her manager, Elliot Roberts, first contacted her at the prompting of her early champion David Crosby, Mitchell was setting out on a tour she had organised herself, carrying a small suitcase and an acoustic guitar. She told him she didn’t need a manager, but he persisted. He later said she had already written as many great songs as most songwriters created in a lifetime.

It wasn’t until Mitchell settled in Laurel Canyon in the late 60s, sharing a house with the British songwriter Graham Nash, that she found a community of like-minded souls – Nash, Crosby, Stephen Stills, Jackson Browne, Mama Cass – to which she could belong at last, for a while at least. Her romantic liaisons were the stuff of legend – Crosby, Nash, Browne, James Taylor. Rolling Stone once published a diagram of her various romances under the disparaging heading: “Old lady of the year”. It was there, though, that her music deepened and shed its folkie affectations. She later acknowledged that her songwriter style also drew on what she called “the beautiful melodies which belong to the crooner era”. But it was Dylan – who else? – who taught her the power of another kind of narrative, free-form and allusive, as well as the often deadly deployment of the first person singular. “There wasn’t much room for poetic description in those older melodic songs,” she noted in a 2003 Canadian documentary, Woman of Heart and Mind . “That’s why I liked the more storytelling quality of Dylan’s work and the idea of the personal narrative.

He would speak as if to one person in a song… That was the key that opened all the doors.” In absorbing Dylan’s personal point of view, which hit her with the full force of an epiphany the first time she heard the gleefully splenetic Positively 4th Street, and melding it to the geometry of the old-fashioned well-wrought song, Mitchell began an extraordinary artistic voyage in the early 1970s. It began with the starkly powerful Blue, on which she single-handedly redefined the notion of the singer-songwriter. Intimate and confessional, her new songs of love and heartbreak shocked some of her male counterparts with their emotional intensity. On first hearing them, her friend Kris Kristofferson exclaimed: “Oh Joni – save something of yourself!” That was not an option for Mitchell, whose songwriting had now approached a level of rapt intensity. Graham Nash, the Manchester-born, Los Angeles-based songwriter, remembers her “channelling” her songs so intensely at the piano of the house they shared in leafy Laurel Canyon that she would be utterly immune to his presence in the room.

When I interviewed Mitchell in 1988, she said: “My work has always contained the question of how far the pop song could go. What themes it could hold without collapsing.” The trio of austerely beautiful and forlorn songs – River, A Case of You and The Last Time I Saw Richard – that close Blue are the real beginning of that creative tightrope walk. On the final repeated line of the beautifully forlorn River – “I wish I had a river I could skate away on” – she lingers on “skate”, making it sound like the resigned cry of someone falling slowly, wilfully though the ice. “During the making of Blue, I was so thin-skinned and delicate that if anyone looked at me, I’d burst into tears,” she admitted years later, referring to the messy fracturing of her relationship with Nash and the tentative beginnings of a short, but intense, relationship with James Taylor, then in the throes of heroin addiction. The success of Blue made Mitchell a star, the most powerfully personal voice of an emerging generation of west coast-based confessional singer-songwriters that included Taylor, Jackson Browne and Carole King.

“My individual psychological descent coincided with my ascent into the public eye,” she later said. “They were putting me on a pedestal and I was wobbling.” Blue, though, also signalled in more subtle ways the more dramatic musical shift that was to follow. Listen to the way she enunciates the very first notes of the title song, settling on the word “blue”, stretching and bending it across an octave or two in the manner of a seasoned jazz singer. Then there’s the joyous lilt and sway of Carey, one of several songs of wanderlust that, across the years, testify to a relentlessly restless spirit. The term folk singer no longer contained her, nor increasingly did singer-songwriter which, by then, was becoming synonymous with a certain kind of plaintive Californian narcissism. Pinterest If Blue was a dramatic refinement of her songwriting approach, the next album, For the Roses, seemed like a step sideways. Revealingly, though, the usual coterie of LA session players was augmented by jazz musicians Wilton Felder and Tom Scott.

The effortlessly commercial You Turn Me On, I’m a Radio – written to assuage David Geffen, the boss of her new record label, who had been pressuring her to write a hit single – and the snaky thrust of Cold Blue Steel and Sweet Fire both pulse with the more musically loose-limbed presence of Felder (bass) and Scott (woodwind and reeds). Joni was branching out and moving on once again. Despite all these scattered clues, though, Court and Spark came as a surprise. Gone was the fragile, confessional songstress in a flowing dress; instead, here was a confident, full-throated singer in designer threads with a slick electric band in tow. Gone, too, were the acoustic songs sung with just a guitar, piano or dulcimer backing, replaced by an electric, jazz-inflected, intricately arranged sound, courtesy of Tom Scott’s LA Express, that weaved around lyrics that were acutely observational or dazzlingly impressionistic, rather than soul-baringly confessional.

When her friend, Malka Marom, author of Both Sides Now, asked her if the band’s presence meant that she might risk the vulnerable singer-songwriter image she had cultivated, Mitchell replied defiantly: “Well, I don’t want to be vulnerable any more.” Not for the first or last time, Joni Mitchell had moved on and, in doing so, had remade herself in the manner of a true artist. Underpinning Mitchell’s new songs, the band sound muscular and sinuous, but, as some live footage from this period shows, it is Joni who is most liberated by the pairing, her voice now a thing of raw and sensual power as well as a vehicle for the articulation of sorrow and sadness. As her friend, the songwriter Eric Andersen, put it: “This fragile Nordic goddess became a red-hot mama, flesh and blood.” “I was there when they were rehearsing the Court and Spark songs for the live tour,” says Malka Marom. “Joni had a close connection with drummer John Guerin. He was the first person to put her music on paper; he mapped it out for the band.

But he was also the one who inspired the courting and the sparking.” You can hear that romantic static loud and clear on the raucously sensual Raised On Robbery, in which Mitchell inhabits the role of a good-time girl on the pick-up, relishing the lines, “I’m a pretty good cook, I’m sitting on my groceries/ Come up to my kitchen, I’ll show you my best recipe.” It was a long way from Laurel Canyon, lunar miles from the folksy piety of Clouds. Pinterest Joni Mitchell with the LA Express: Raised on Robbery, live in London, 1974. On Free Man in Paris – reputedly about Geffen – and the observational People’s Parties, Mitchell turned her gaze on the newly ascendant Los Angeles rock music aristocracy with their “passport smiles” and cocaine cool.

As Court and Spark became her bestselling album, she was still the conflicted outsider, unable to fit comfortably into this new elite – “I feel like I’m sleeping, can you wake me?” she sings on People’s Parties, sounding resigned, almost numb, “...I’m just living on nerves and feelings with a weak and a lazy mind/ And coming to people’s parties, fumbling, deaf, dumb and blind.” The follow-up, The Hissing of Summer Lawns, sparked a critical backlash that, now, is hard to fathom. Rolling Stone noted Mitchell’s increasing sophistication as a songwriter while lambasting her “increasingly eccentric” melodies and “uninspired jazz-rock style”. One suspects that the rock blokes wanted folk-rock authenticity, but her hybrid sound and the shifts in style that now marked her writing had taken her way beyond that. Among those who did get The Hissing of Summer Lawns, though, were Morrissey – who called it “the first album that completely captivated me” – and Prince. “Hissing got thrashed,” a defiant but still bruised Mitchell recalls in Both Sides Now. “But meanwhile out there was Prince.

That was his first Joni record, and it was his Joni record of all time. So, though it got thrashed by the press, the young artists coming up could see there was something going on there.” What was going on was another refinement of style, another burnishing of lyrical and musical sophistication. Both the title track and Edith and the Kingpin dissect the compromises made by women bound by marriage to powerful men. The former has poetry aplenty, her observational skill honed to near perfection as she elaborates the consequences of a hollowed-out life behind the high walls of a mansion in the Hollywood hills: “He gave her his darkness to regret, and good reason to quit him/ He gave her a roomful of Chippendale that nobody sits in”. This is Mitchell exploring in song a similar terrain to Joan Didion, evoking the soul-deadening mixture of ennui and privilege that Didion would also dissect in her essays about Los Angeles in the 1970s.

Pinterest In The Boho Dance, Mitchell’s writing deploys an almost cinematic point of view – “a camera pans the cocktail hour” – and a similar approach is used to more impressionistic effect for the fleeting images that flicker through Harry’s House (“Yellow checkers for the kitchen/ Climbing ivy for the bath/ She is lost in House and Gardens/ He is caught up in Chief of Staff”) before the song takes a sudden turn into poignant personal recollection (“He drifts off into the memory/ Of the way she looked in school/ With her body oiled and shining/ At the public swimming pool”). This is songwriting of the highest order, brimming with telling detail, yet pared to the bone, refined and yet teeming with suggestion. After the richness of Hissing, the mood poems of Hejira seemed to me for a long time to be a muted coda to Mitchell’s golden period. Over time, though, the best of these often slow and brooding songs – Hejira, Amelia, Blue Motel Room – have kept calling me back despite my slight aversion to Jaco Pastorius’s relentlessly virtuoso bass playing.

If Blue Motel Room is a study in longing and languorous sensuality – Prince has been known to cover it live – Amelia, an ode to the pioneering aviator Amelia Earhart, sees Mitchell in reflective mood, her confessional honesty now even more nakedly self-searing than before. “Maybe I’ve never really loved, I guess that is the truth”, she sings in the penultimate verse, “I’ve spent my whole life in clouds at icy altitudes…” Once again, she is articulating the essential duality that has underpinned her life, the search for love pitted against the austerity of the lone artistic life, but this time we are left in no doubt as to which has won out. It is an acknowledgment that Joni Mitchell created her best music at some personal cost, which is part of the reason it carries such emotional resonance across the years. She once said that her audience connected with the honesty of a great song because “it strikes against the very nerves of their life”. She then added: “To do that, you have to first strike against your own.” For me, she is indisputably the most sophisticated voice of hope and heartbreak, joy and sorrow, in popular music.

I hope against hope that she may yet return to the stage to reinterpret her songs in the spirit of risk and adventure that once defined her singular musical journey. If anyone can do that, Joni Mitchell can. Joni Mitchell – Help Me Lyrics | Genius Lyrics Help me I think I'm falling in love again When I get that crazy feeling, I know I'm in trouble again And a sweet taIking ladies man and you love your lovin' But not like you love your freedom Help me I think, I'm falling in love too fast It's got me hoping for the future and worrying about the past Cause I've seen some hot hot blazes come down to smoke and ash We love our lovin' but not like we love our freedom Didn't it feel good we were sitting there talking Or lying there not talking didn't it feel good Didn't it feel good, didn't it feel good Help me I think I'm falling in love with you Are you going to let me go there by myself That's such a lonely thing to do Both of us flirting around flirting and flirting hurting too We love our lovin' but not like we love our freedom More on Genius About “Help Me” Joni Mitchell’s biggest hit (reaching No.

7 on the U.S. charts) is the jazzy pop folk song, “Help Me”, playfully written about her ambivalance towards a blossoming love affair. It garnered her a “Record of the Year” Grammy nomination and is among her most beloved (and instantly likable) songs. It comes off the January, 1974 critically acclaimed Court and Spark. Hidden This page is accessible to Verified artists on the song Locked This song has been locked and is considered "done." You need 600 IQ to add annotations to locked songs. "Help Me" Track Info Joni Mitchell | Rolling Stone artists > J > Joni Mitchell > Bio Joni Mitchell Bio Starting as a finger-picking folkie and winding up as a jazz-savvy experimentalist, Joni Mitchell has brought a sharp eye, light touch and an agile trill of a voice to her songs, which have often dissected her romances and skewered myopic government. A wealth of musicians — from Tori Amos to Prince, from Joanna Newsom to Iron & Wine — have acknowledged her influence. An only child, Roberta Anderson grew up in Saskatoon, Canada. At age nine she was stricken with polio.

Defying doctors' predictions that she would never walk again, she recovered after spending nights in the children's ward singing at the top of her lungs. Throughout her childhood, she was involved in art and music, teaching herself to play guitar from a Pete Seeger instruction book. When she enrolled at the Alberta College of Art in Calgary, she took a ukulele with her and began playing folk music. She soon moved to Toronto, where she began performing on the local folk scene and gave birth to a baby girl. At the time, the social stigma of being an unwed mother was so intense that Mitchell didn't even tell her parents about the baby. Without money, a job, or even a home, in 1965 she entered into what she later termed "a marriage of convenience" to folksinger Chuck Mitchell. They moved to Detroit, where Mitchell felt she had no option but to place her daughter, named Kelly Dale Anderson, up for adoption. She and Chuck Mitchell soon divorced. Mitchell became a critical sensation on Detroit's folk scene, and her notices led to a series of successful engagements in New York. On the strength of her articulate songs and compelling performance style, Reprise Records signed her.

In late 1968 Judy Collins had a hit with Mitchell's "Both Sides Now." (In 1991 Carly Simon turned the song's lyrics into a children's book.) Collins' Wildflowers album also contained a cover of Mitchell's "Michael From Mountains"; the British folk-rock band Fairport Convention recorded Mitchell's "Eastern Rain"; and Tom Rush recorded "The Circle Game." Thanks to the buzz created by this ubiquity, Mitchell's debut, Song For a Seagull, coproduced by David Crosby, sold fairly well. It's more mature follow-up, Clouds (Number 31, 1969), sold even better. Mitchell's style was emerging, and it was unique. Pensive and lilting, her songs offered a bit of philosophy, and were unafraid of positing points of personal romance. She had moved to Los Angeles, becoming a key component of the Laurel Canyon scene of singer-songwriters. Along with area residents as Crosby, Still & Nash, the Mamas & Papas, and Jackson Browne, she helped create the leafy sound of the early 1970s California.

Ladies of the Canyon, a reflection of the lives around her (Number 27, 1970) went platinum, yielding a minor hit single: "Big Yellow Taxi" (Number 67, 1970) (which Janet Jackson sampled nearly 30 years later in her hit "Got 'Til It's Gone"). Mitchell's next platinum album was the critically acclaimed Blue (Number 15, 1971), which featured "Carey," "My Old Man," and "The Last Time I Saw Richard." That album included contributions from friends such as James Taylor (purportedly the subject of "Blue"). Mitchell had fallen in and out of love with Taylor and Graham Nash during these years; her personal life became fodder for her art, and the articulation with which she accounted for her heartbreak was deep. Blue is seen as the zenith of confessional songwriting, illustrating the joys and woes of romantic relationships. She played guitar and piano on most of the disc, but, uniquely, she also used a dulcimer on a few tracks. She'd learned how to play the easily portable instrument while living in Greece earlier in the year.

For the Roses (Number 11, 1972) went gold and contained another minor hit, the twangy "You Turn Me On (I'm a Radio)" (Number 25, 1972). The highest-charting album of Mitchell's long career remains 1974's Court and Spark (Number Two), which yielded the hit single "Help Me" (Number Seven, 1974). By this time, Mitchell's sound had grown from simple, unadorned acoustic guitar and voice into a sophisticated blend of jazz, folk and pop, replete with horns, keyboards, and complex backing vocal arrangements performed by Mitchell herself. Tom Scott and the L.A. Express, an agile electric jazz outfit, helped her flesh out a few of Court and Spark's rather elaborate arrangements. The approach alluded to Mitchell's future direction with its overtly swinging version of Lambert, Hendricks & Ross' "Twisted," Mitchell's first recorded cover. The L.A.

Express helped Mitchell deliver this new sound to her audience, captured on the live album Miles of Aisles (Number Two, 1974) and also participated in parts of The Hissing of Summer Lawns (Number Four, 1975). The singer's song structures were becoming more sophisticated and gorgeous. But her lyrics were a bit too ambitious for some critics, and Summer Lawns suffered some harsh reviews. Today the album is cited as influential by many artists, including Elvis Costello and Cassandra Wilson, particularly the tracks "Edith and the Kingpin" and "Shades of Scarlet Conquering". Mitchell wasn't shy about experimentation. "The Jungle Line" was probably the first pop record to use Burundi drums. Though smoother and instrumentally spare, Hejira (Number 13, 1976) was another gorgeous disc that baffled some critics. It centered on travel and restlessness while tackling issues of commitment from a uniquely feminine perspective. Around Thanksgiving of that year Mitchell appeared at the Band's farewell concert in San Francisco, and was part of the filmed documentary, The Last Waltz.

In light of her previous two records, the double-disc Don Juan's Reckless Daughter (Number 25, 1977) was a logical if mysterious next step. Some critics felt that her lyrics had grown more convoluted and vague; indeed, Mitchell was using song structures far more ambitious and rich than the straight singer/songwriter confessional mode. Still, contrary to the then-prevailing view, Don Juan's Reckless Daughter was not all wild experimentation; in fact, half of its tracks (for example, "Talk to Me," "Off Night Backstreet," "Jericho") might have worked on any previous Mitchell album. But with jazz musicians Larry Carlton and Wayne Shorter working in cahoots with a group of Latin percussionists (including Airto), Mitchell was once again scouting new musical territory. "The Tenth World" and the side-long "Paprika Plains" were poetry soundscapes. Perhaps indirectly, Don Juan led to Mitchell's most daring and most controversial project, her work with jazz bassist and composer Charles Mingus. Then dying of amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (Lou Gehrig's disease), Mingus invited Mitchell to collaborate with him.

She set lyrics to some of the last melodies he wrote, composed the rest of the material herself, and released Mingus in 1979 not long after the bassist's death. It received mixed reviews but went to Number 17, an incredibly high chart position for a jazz album and a testament to Mitchell's fans' enduring interest in her work. The live album Shadows and Light (Number 38, 1980), which featured a band comprise of Weather Report's Jaco Pastorius, jazz-rock guitarist Pat Metheny, and the a cappella group the Persuasions, also met mixed reviews. Years later, Mitchell repeatedly and adamantly expressed no regrets about the rocky course she set. "I would do it all over again in a minute for the musical education," she told Rolling Stone. In 1982 Mitchell released her first album for Geffen, Wild Things Run Fast (Number 25, 1982), a more pop-oriented album that featured a cover of Elvis Presley's "(You're So Square) Baby I Don't Care" (Number 47, 1982). That year she married her bassist, Larry Klein.

(They divorced in 1992.) With Dog Eat Dog (Number 63, 1985), Mitchell's work showed a new emphasis on social commentary. Coproduced by Thomas Dolby, the album featured appearances by Michael McDonald ("Good Friends") and actor Rod Steiger (as a money-grubbing evangelist on "Tax Free"). Chalk Mark in a Rainstorm (Number 45, 1988) — with a guest roster that included Peter Gabriel ("My Secret Place"), Willie Nelson, Tom Petty, and Billy Idol ("Dancin' Clown") — was hailed by some critics as a return to form. Throughout the '80s Mitchell all but abandoned the concert stage. Her hastily arranged acoustic set at the 1986 Amnesty International benefit (she was a last-minute substitute for Pete Townshend) was cut short when the crowd, obviously unfamiliar with her work, booed her. Mitchell experienced a resurgence of sorts with the 1990s, due to a confluence of events: a trio of albums generally considered among her best, her finding and reestablishing a relationship with the daughter she had given up for adoption, and a flurry of industry accolades and honors.

Fans and critics swooned over Night Ride Home (Number 41, 1991), an album of readily accessible albeit sophisticated jazz-tinged pop. Three years later, Turbulent Indigo (Number 47, 1994) was released to glowing critical response and a Best Pop Album Grammy. While promoting that album, Mitchell disclosed that she was suffering from post-polio syndrome, a neurological condition related to her childhood bout with the disease that made it difficult for her to perform. Because her repertoire includes more than 50 different tunings, Mitchell was considering quitting the stage until she obtained a Roland VG-8 computerized guitar that eliminates the need for retuning. In 1995 Mitchell became the fourth artist to receive Billboard's Century Award (previous recipients were George Harrison, Billy Joel, and Buddy Guy). It would seem that the award was made for Mitchell, since it recognizes artists who have not been accorded the acknowledgement they deserve. Two years later, Mitchell was reunited with her daughter, Kilauren Gibb, and a grandson.

Though Mitchell had been quietly seeking her daughter and had written, however obliquely, of the matter in several songs (Blue's "Little Green" and Wild Things' "Chinese Café"), Kilauren began to suspect the connection when she received information about her biological parents that seemed to match facts posted on a fan's Joni Mitchell Web page. Mitchell skipped her 1997 induction into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame because she wanted to spend more time with her newly discovered family on her first Mother's Day. Taming the Tiger (Number 75, 1998) was another critical triumph, followed in 2000 by a concept collection of standards concerning romance, Both Sides Now (Number 66, 2000). Using orchestral and big-band backing, Mitchell tackled such classics as "At Last," "Stormy Weather," "You're My Thrill," and "You've Changed," with two of her older songs, "Both Sides Now" and "A Case of You." Both Sides Now received the Best Traditional Pop Vocal Album Grammy. In the late Nineites, Mitchell became a bit more visible, appearing on television and performing in concert.

In 1998 she undertook a limited tour with Bob Dylan, and in 2000 she toured to promote Both Sides Now. That spring TNT presented "An All Star Tribute to Joni Mitchell," on which k.d. lang, Cassandra Wilson, Elton John, Richard Thompson, James Taylor, Wynonna, and others performed her music. Mitchell has produced or co-produced each of her albums since her debut and has maintained control of her master recordings and her publishing from the beginning of her career. An accomplished painter and photographer, she created the art for each of her album covers, and her artwork has been exhibited throughout the world. Her first major career retrospective, Voices — The Work of Joni Mitchell, opened at the Mendel Art Gallery in Saskatoon in June 2000. A lifetime of smoking put a deep mark on Mitchell's voice, but the husky tone it boasted during the recording of 2002's Travelogue, made with an orchestra and jazz associates Herbie Hancock, Wayne Shorter, and Brian Blade, was an apt fit for a glimpse back at a life's worth of work.

In 2007 Mitchell collaborated with the Alberta Ballet in Calgary, Canada on The Fiddle and the Drum. Also that year, Mitchell featured her anti-war in an installation called Flag Dance, which had an eight-week run at L.A.'s Lev Moross Gallery, and she released her first album of new material in seven years, Shine. Two engaging studies of Mitchell's life and work also surfaced as the decade came to a close. Girls Like Us, by Sheila Weller, was an insightful overview of three pop women, Carole King, Carly Simon, and Mitchell. It arrived in the spring of 2008. The next year found Michelle Mercer's Will You Take Me As I Am in the racks; it's an investigation into the singer's Blue period. Portions of this biography appeared in The Rolling Stone Encyclopedia of Rock & Roll (Simon & Schuster, 2001). Jim Macnie contributed to this article.

Question: Who released the critically acclaimed albums Blue and Court and Spark?
Answer: Joni Mitchell