> Wish you all could have seen her...Joni was so excited in Toronto last year when she shared the samplings/demos. It was wonderful to be there, to witness her exuberance. Let's take it easy on her and perhaps take a more gentle approach to this new body of work...and be thankful that it's here at all.
I couldn't agree with you more, Mags. One of the dangers of being on this list as I have discovered with the releases of 'Hits', 'Misses', 'Taming the Tiger', 'Both Sides Now' and now 'Travelogue' is that you hear so much about the new cd before it is actually released that some of the joy of discovery is taken out of it for you. Somebody always gets ahold of advance copies and being the curious beasts, hungry for anything new from Joni that we are, we of course want to know about it. And now we have access to these tracks on the web. So some people seem to have their minds made up before the record is even out and of course they have every right to express their opinions and of course most of us will read what they have to say. And some of us will wish we hadn't. Blair wrote: I doubt Joni wanted this record to be the next best thing to Debussy, or Glass, or Edgar Varese, but to be only but true to what she wants it to be. Well said, Blair. I don't think Joni envisions 'Travelogue' as a great new compositional piece to be added to the catalogue of the world's great classical music. Not by any stretch of the imagination. And Christopher wrote: I DON'T THINK JONI WAS NECESSARILY TRYING TO MAKE ANY SORT OF 'NEW STATEMENT' BY RECORDING TRAVELOGUE. And again I think you're right on, Christopher! I don't think Joni was trying to record a great, new, innovative classical or jazz or folk or anything else album. My opinion is that mostly what she wanted was a setting in which to exercise her chops as an interpretive singer. In this case, to interpret (or re-interpret) her own work. She said in some interview that as her songs got wordier, her focus as a singer was to get all the words out and that she didn't have much room to play around with bending notes or letting her voice 'float' as I believe she put it. I also think that she views 'Travelogue' as a chance to flesh out musical ideas that she may not have been able to give full voice to when she first recorded the songs or that occurred to her some time after the first recordings. And I'm sure as she went through her catalogue to choose the material for 'Travelogue', she started to hear new things in her head when she re-visited some of her songs. I wonder how much input she had with Mendoza on the arrangements? We know that in the past she has instructed musicians by humming or singing or giving visual descriptions of what she wanted them to play. Finally, as I said before, everyone is entitled to their opinion. But I really have very little patience with comments about what Joni did wrong or what she should have done or done differently. It's Joni's record. Maybe she'll call you up and have you help her out the next time she records if she really wants to know what she should or should not do. My advice is don't hold your breath waiting for the phone to ring. Joni knows what she wants her music to sound like, she knows who to hire to get it and she knows how to get it out of them. Sure you can say you don't like it and you can say why. But that's your take on it, not Joni's. It's her vision. It's her record. I'm sure she sometimes listens to one of her albums or songs at a later date and thinks 'Gosh, I could have done this here! Why didn't I think of that then?' But in the long run, I doubt that she has many regrets about her body of work or feels that she made horrible mistakes in creating it. And if as long as Joni's satisfied that it's what she wanted, I'm satisfied. Mark E in Seattle
