Bob Muller replied:
> On the other hand - songs like "You're My Thrill", "At Last" (at last, my > love has come along, my lonely days are over, and life is like a happy > song), > "Answer Me My Love", seem to DEFINITELY be ingenue songs. And you know > there > may be more...love songs with a girlish sensibility to them. > > WOA ! I may be onto something here. I think this whole thing may be primarily a semantic difference. The difference in perspective seems to me to be largely between the protagonist's role in the song, and the artfulness of the song itself. In the early stages of love (which, of course, Joni was trying to capture with the first two songs mentioned above), and even in some of the more trying times (where one's broken self-confidence can reduce a person to rubble, as in Answer Me), most of us act and feel like youths, even well beyond what would normally be regarded as our "ingenue" years (is there a male counterpart to that word ?). Trying to capture that vulnerability, which is most often but not exclusively found in the realm of youth's innocence, transcends the general sense of "ingenue" for me. On the other hand, I think that lines like "I'd like to buy you everything, a wooden bird with painted wings, a window full of colored rings, in Morning Morgantown" have both the emotional and artistic (lyrically speaking) substance of an ingenue. Like the NY Times reviewer of the Wall to Wall event said, some of Joni's lines would be viewed as terribly precious if they came from a lesser person. That said, Joni played the quintessential ingenue into her late 20's. I mean, at least through 1972 (she was 26 for the Pink Dress concert, and 27 for the JT BBC concert). Since I love Morning Morgantown as a song, perhaps I should pick on the Beatles (about whom I was also fanatical before Joni), and their "She Loves You, yeah yeah yeah,, you think you lost your love I saw her yesterday It's you she's thinking of, and she told me what to say, She says she loves you" Or "I wanna Hold your hand", both of which were even more precious and immature than Morning Morgantown. Which brings me to the other aspect. When Joni was referring to her early work as being ingenue work, I believe that she was referring to the innocence of the art itself, as well as to its content. Some (not all) of the songs were simpler (in their structure musically, and in their substance poetically) than her later work, and she feels that they were less evolved artistically because she had not yet fully developed her palette. So, she felt the irony of being admired partly because people could grasp her early songs better (and partly because she herself milked the part of the ingenue in presenting them ?) (and in part because people like to stay in or revisist the innocence of their youth ?), while her later work, which was higher art and had shed its ingenue aspects in substance and presentation, was not as well received (at least, initially). The songs you cite are surely not the work of ingenue composers and lyricists (one possible reason why some of us - myself included - were a bit puzzled by your classification). Particularly so musically. And, one could argue that even though the subject is infatuation, there is a difference - perhaps even a disconnect - between infatuation and the ingenue. (Sort of like ingenue belongs in a subset of the realm of infatuation - all ingenues get infatuated, but not all who get infatuated are ingenues). An interesting puzzle for me is why Joni's two contributions to this record (and who could argue with these choices ?) seem to have come from her "ingenue period". Both Sides now is a very simple work, musically - but "all the sparks connected", as Crosby said. And while it could be argued that Blue as an album marked the beginning of Joni's 'loss of innocence' , A Case of You (for all of its virtuosity) was still firmly entrenched in that era. Perhaps, ultimately, the essence of art lies not its technical merit, but in the capturing of those things that belong to our lives and our spirit in the barest, the most distilled, the purest form. Perhaps that's why Joni chose The Circle Game to close Travelogue. Bobsart