This review will verify why some people hate critics! T'log was better than I thought it would be based on the sound clips.
What I really felt over all was that this was like a very special evening with Rosemary Clooney or Peggy Lee or Frank Sinatra or Tony Bennett... not is not a negative comment, it just had that feel to me. As a fan, I would love it and be on my feet applauding were I in the audience. If I wasn't already a fan, no big deal. The loss of voice really got to me. I don't think it is just aging. Cough. Cough. "Love" did nothing for me the first time around and failed to do it for me on this. And Joni's voice doesn't rise above the orchestration. I finally heard Joni sing a version of Woodstock that I don't care for. And I hated the chorus in Sire of Sorrows and God must be a boogie man. Edit out those chorus singers and I would have loved these versions. All the passion and anger that drove For the Roses, and made it such a great recording,, is missing. The sense of an intimate conversation that was not ever vocalized but more of a continual vapor thought process crystallized in a moment for our hearing which is Amelia is missing. For the rest, I was reminded of why I am a Joni fan, why she is an all-time person with me. Slouching and Judgment (why the extra "e" on the track listings?) were made for this treatment. I'd like to remix them even more with a classical bent. Borderline, Dawntreader, and Last Time I Saw Richard were excellent. Refuge of the Road and Hejira lost their sense of freedom and movement, but these were certainly interesting interpretations. I suspect I won't play this much - I don't have those cultured evenings at home where I listen to classy music, and in the car, I like something that I can sing along to and the phrasing of these interpretations are so particularly Joni that I don't think I'll ever sing along with them. On the other hand, I listened to these while driving on open road in open country and the album lends itself towards that listening location - space does affect our perception of what we hear, and perhaps it was where I was physically that allowed much of T'log to fill up all the space around me with beauty. I'm glad that I did not hear this the first time in an enclosed room. It was just so perfectly set for listening to in the wide open spaces. I sure would like new Joni lyrics for Circle Game. I wrote my own new lyrics years ago. The span of life of the song sounded so vast when I was 20 (and I wasn't as jaded as the boy in the song at 20) but with some new lyrics reflecting a (our) longer life span, it would be a life time anthem. It almost cramps the album to end with a song that thinks turning 20 is a final stage in the circle of life. I was thinking as I was listening about Joni and Eminem. Yes, of course I was. One artist got her ground of being of being in Detroit, one totally developed in Detroit, and both identify heavily with African American music. And for all the rap (clever pun) on Em being white in a black genre, at least he has never appeared on an album cover as black persons of various genders. Joni has always thought of much of her music as African American (I think I have read this in her interviews through the years). So I would like to hear Joni do her next set of remixes and interpretations - not with a rapper, that is just not her - but with a great blues band. I think that would pick up the rhythms and really put her music in some contexts where it would be so natural. Joni with her cigarette singing the blues with a great band at 2 am - now that I would love to see and ever more hear. Joni, come back to Detroit, or Chicago, or Memphis, someplace where the blues are thick and heavy and infuse yourself with some blues rhythms and give us that album... I think your whole oeuvre cries out for you to do that interpretation next. Just my random and meaningless thoughts. Vince
