The Hissing of Summer Lawns: a poll

Edith--sorry, boring

to me the ultimate self-absorbed L.A. coke album: drawn curtains, huddling in a carpeted room, remembering scraps of conversation with people long dead, remembering exchanges at the party last night with the Kingpin and that new actress – Scarlett something?

which is to say, the sequence from ""Edith" to the title track is unmatched.

my instinct is title track or "shadows and light". were i to put this on right now, might have a different choice.

boho

Easy. Harry's House/Centerpiece. It was Edith for a while but Harry's House/Centerpiece is the one for me.

I don't really like the slow blues portion of HH/Centerpiece, love the rest...Boho and Scarlett are runners up to Edith for me

to me the ultimate self-absorbed L.A. coke album: drawn curtains, huddling in a carpeted room, remembering scraps of conversation with people long dead, remembering exchanges at the party last night with the Kingpin and that new actress – Scarlett something?

― guess that bundt gettin eaten (Alfred, Lord Sotosyn), Thursday, May 29, 2014

So it's her Steely Dan record?

Can't believe this has never been polled...took me by surprise...this can't be rushed...

she definitely has a yin-yang thing with steely dan imo

or maybe i just got into both at the same time, while living in l.a.

anyhow i voted for edith

I don't think the jazz turn in JM's work would have happened without the example of Steely Dan? Please someone correct me if I'm wrong...

uh please offer proof that you're right.

"Jungle line" for the Moog riffs and lines like "Rousseau paints a jungle flower behind her ear." i'm sure i'd change my mind tomorrow.

kinda the same LA session player milieu, but i'd actually be surprised if joni was jamming steely dan records back then.

I don't think the jazz turn in JM's work would have happened without the example of Steely Dan? Please someone correct me if I'm wrong...

― Iago Galdston, Thursday, May 29, 2014 4:17 PM (7 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

uh please offer proof that you're right.

― mattresslessness, Thursday, May 29, 2014

I thought I remembered reading something concrete about them influencing her in that regard but don't know...Court and Spark is '74, by then the first two SD records had come out. Sorry!

uh please offer proof that you're right.

― mattresslessness, Thursday, May 29, 2014 4:20 PM (11 minutes ago)

"Though other rock groups like Blood, Sweat & Tears and Chicago have enjoyed commercial success blending jazz and pop, none has come close to matching Steely Dan in sophistication and taste. They helped inspire rock singers like Joni Mitchell to explore jazz and paved the way for the Doobie Brothers' brand of pop-funk. Even stylistically unrelated groups like the Eagles were influenced by Steely Dan's carefully blocked arranging style."

Stephen Holden, New York Times, January 18, 1981....happy now?

meh

j/k

in yo face!

tough choice btw title track & boho

this is silly, i can't really break it into constituent parts. i will probly vote "Edith" mainly cos "He tilts their tired faces/
Gently to the spoon" but maybe i will just listen to the whole thing on a loop for a couple of days and fail to come to a decision

the eeh-eeh-eeh-eeh multitracked Jonis on "Edith" obv inspired Prince.

Was trying to think of what my least favorite track is and that's almost equally hard, nothing I really don't like.

"Shadows and Light" has that massive Moog and more multitracked Joni but it's portentous and doomy.

So hard to choose but going with Edith. "Small town, big man..."

Edith. Love it.

also - the Steely Dan thing is more than implied. certain that Larry Carlton, Skunk Baxter and maybe one or two other Dan affiliates are on Court and Spark and Hissing...

Love the "Edith" love here, I'd always assumed that track was underrated.

Between that, "Shades...", the title track or "The Boho Dance" for me.

xp yes i knew they shared players, but saying jazz in j.m. wouldn't have happened without the example of steely dan is a little different. but w/e, it's nit-picky

I find this album more insular than anything in the Dan catalog besides Gaucho.

I heard an interview where she was saying that she really hated working with rock bass players; someone suggested she worked with jazz musicians instead, and that's how she moved towards the jazz sound.

Is anyone else a fan of Don't Interrupt The Sorrow?

I like that one, it might be my idk third or fourth favorite track on the record?

Boho Dance is just a song that has meant a lot to me in the last seven years or so of my life as I get older and more adultlike.

Is anyone else a fan of Don't Interrupt The Sorrow?

― funk79,

you're darn right!

went with the title track but love so much on this album

Is anyone else a fan of Don't Interrupt The Sorrow?

― funk79,

you're darn right!

this album is incredibly beautiful. makes me glad there's still new great music to discover.

court and spark is so much jazzier than steely dan at the same point imo. it's true that they both used "jazz" but the dan were writing pop songs with "jazz" chords whereas *to me* joni's writing just naturally progressed to "jazz". in fact, the book hotel california points out that her hiring jazz musicians was a result of being frustrated that none of the folk/rock dudes could play her stuff well enough or properly or w/e

Edith, but tough poll. Joni is like religion around here.

"around here"? like, to your wife?

tough poll because joni is revered in these parts. are you the head of a fiefdom or something

sorry, too harsh. just thought it was a funny thing to say. glad this album gets so much love here.

Oh love love love. Lovey dovey

very difficult choice though my first instinct is "don't interrupt the sorrow"

voted "In France They -*wooahoooahh ooooo ooooahhhoohh*- Kiss on Main Street"

mainly because 0:36 of that song is when I fell in love with the album

Poppy poison. Poppy tourniquet.

mouth...piece.......spit

That's interesting...

the big poll arrives

From what I've heard, in France they...

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/c/c8/Charles_Marville%2C_Urinoir_en_fonte_%C3%A0_2_stalles_avec_%C3%A9cran%2C_Chauss%C3%A9e_de_la_Muette%2C_ca._1865.jpg/352px-Charles_Marville%2C_Urinoir_en_fonte_%C3%A0_2_stalles_avec_%C3%A9cran%2C_Chauss%C3%A9e_de_la_Muette%2C_ca._1865.jpg

urine real trouble for that one.

god this album is such a masterpiece

i have been like living and breathing these songs day and night for months

i love everything here very much but especially that run from "edith" through "boho dance", it is just astonishing

Jungle Line is incredible. Totally out there. What I especially like about Joni is she manages to be 'jazz' without shoving in a load of skronking brass or even that much traditional jazz instrumentation, but it's still jazz in spirit.

kind of been wanting to do a thread of Jungle Line vs Bowie's African Night Flight but not really sure how it would work, or even if there are other songs that could be wedged into a similar category.

well joni's "dreamland" would fit!

but yea jungle line, even if i prefer other tunes on the album, is so out there, such a forward-thinking piece of music, always felt like bjork really took that tune to heart and internalized it

oh i didn't know she'd done a version. yeah it's one of those tracks from the past that you could define a whole career by in that respect. we've got a thread for that somewhere, haven't we?

oh sorry i didn't mean she did a version! just that as soon as i heard it for the first time i thought "bjork must have listened to this a thousand times"

and she mentioned it in an interview recently

Pitchfork: Hejira is one the most feminist albums ever.

B: Right? The lyrics! And The Hissing of Summer Lawns as well. I love “The Jungle Line”, it sounds like something somebody would make now, it’s crazy. Maybe it’s because it’s not my generation, but when I hear the folk stuff that she did before that, I hear it as a lot of people and not just her. It’s a zeitgeist.

xp yeah it's that slippy vocal style that only just syncopates over the beat, which btw is totally irregular. can't work out what time signature it's in

bjork did sing "the boho dance" on the herbie hancock joni tribute several years ago

oh wait it was a different tribute album, not the herbie one

the one with Prince doing "A Case of You."

jungle line is in 4/4

What sort of doll's house would have a replica of HOSL in it?

Oddly fitting, in a way.

http://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/MINIATURE-ALBUM-VINYL-LP-1-12-Dolls-House-JONI-MITCHELL-Hissing-of-Summer-/301592222223?pt=LH_DefaultDomain_3&hash=item46384c1a0f

i think this is actually my favorite joni record

she covers her eyes in the x-rated scenes

every song is so perfectly constructed. like the last minute or so of "shades of scarlett conquering" my god

i think this is actually my favorite joni record

― flamenco drop (BradNelson), Saturday, March 31, 2018 9

you're darn right!

I'm pretty sure Hejira is ur fav Joni record...

Edith is correct as poll-winner, surprised to see seven votes for The Jungle Line, removing that song would make the album better in my challenging opinion

this or court and spark is my favorite Joni record

I love how playful that Moog line is, though.

niels, i agree with you, i can't listen to the jungle line, but the rest of the album is totally classic. i would've voted for "in france," just for the joyousness of the "do you wanna dance" refrain

Reading back over the earlier parts of the thread and it's interesting to see the speculation that Steely Dan inspired Joni to turn to jazz.

I feel like Hissing is the culmination of the approach she started cultivating with For The Roses (and the two records feel very related to me) - if anything a lot of the vocal cadences and song structures of For The Roses feel even more jazz-laced to me, but she doesn't yet have the band to support her direction so it's mostly just built around these ruminative piano pieces or complex guitar phrases. Incidentally FTR was released the same month as Can't Buy A Thrill.

Whereas on Hissing that same approach really flowers with these arrangements that are drenched in ambiguity and wondering. Edith, Shades, the title track and Harry's House in particular are such remarkably beautiful and passionate tracks given they're ultimately third person character sketches in which judgment is either suspended or heavily convoluted.

I think she was certainly aware of Steely Dan and they may well have had some influence, but to say that she was this folkie who heard Steely Dan and went jazz-pop seems like a bit of an ill-informed stretch and may in fact be the opposite of how things worked.

She made For the Roses with Tom Scott among other session players before the first Steely Dan record came out, and while that and the second album may have played a role in pushing her in more of a jazz-pop direction on Court and Spark, that record came out before the Dan went more explicitly jazz-inflected on Pretzel Logic, and its direction was likely simply a consequence of bringing on Scott's band, the LA Express, which had released their debut album within the prior year, and which included Larry Carlton (who not too long after played on Katy Lied and The Royal Scam), and Joe Sample (who subsequently joined him on Aja and Gaucho, the last of which finally roped in Scott himself).

That same band also played on Miles of Aisles and the Hissing of Summer Lawns (which did rope in Victor Feldman from Dan-land, but featured Chuck Findley before he played on The Royal Scam, et al) and absent a reason to challenge her statement, Mingus approached Joni rather than vice versa, presumably after noting her work with Jaco and other Weather Reporters on Hejira (a year before Aja came out) and Don Juan's Reckless Daughter.

re: "oh but hejira is your actual favorite joni record" sure, ok, yes, hejira's accomplishments can't be overstated, it's probably her most comprehensive lyrical achievement, it sounds like no other record, a complete world of its own made up less of chordal progressions than desert shimmers. hissing resembles several records but that's ok imo bc it's the most distant and almost... orchestrated version of all the fusiony jazz-pop records it shares superficial qualities with (the motifs in "shades of scarlett conquering" and especially the "darkness!" choral vocal in the title track feel so symphonic to me), a storyteller observing her characters with an eye that isn't detached or unsympathetic but still doesn't interfere emotionally with what's already happening, allowing the scene to develop almost of its own accord. i hear the word "honesty" associated with joni's work a lot and i think this is really the form of honesty she deals in, a kind of pop flannery o'connor, characters so completely realized that their feelings power them toward their fates. also idk, as soon as i hear the drums in "in france they kiss on main street" i'm completely mesmerized, what a fucking record

tl;dr even though hejira is her most realized record-as-soundworld the in-betweenness of hissing is what draws me to it

This is my favorite too. “Oh well, just another hard time band with negro affectations” = such a great line that you could never get away with now, although I don’t *think* she meant anything problematic by it (if anything she’s calling out the white dudes)

I'm pretty sure Hejira is ur fav Joni record...

Edith is correct as poll-winner, surprised to see seven votes for The Jungle Line, removing that song would make the album better in my challenging opinion

― niels

it's not on the demos record, which was how i got into the record. the demos also has "dreamland" and less skunk baxter.

I am looking that demos record up now, remember the Edith demo from Tyler's rarities piece, was great

I guess it's not the first time the Joni/SD comparison has been brought up here Literate Jazz-Pop TS: Steely Dan vs. Joni Mitchell 1974-1980

There is a sense of freedom in Joni's work, in her phrasing and the melodies she writes, which is absent in SD, which is obv very very controlled, a different kind of jazz. I think the only other artist that I am familiar with who explored similar territory is Van Morrison.

oh yeah and Brad otm btw, was just teasing, Hissing is probably the Joni record I've spent most time with in the past few years, probably her best album title

a storyteller observing her characters with an eye that isn't detached or unsympathetic but still doesn't interfere emotionally with what's already happening, allowing the scene to develop almost of its own accord. i hear the word "honesty" associated with joni's work a lot and i think this is really the form of honesty she deals in, a kind of pop flannery o'connor, characters so completely realized that their feelings power them toward their fates.

Booming post.

The Jungle Line is the eye-of-the-duck of the album. Makes me think of African Nite Flight off of Bowie's Lodger.

One of my favourite ephemeral moments on this album is the opening phrase 'He bought her a diamond for her throat' - it's the phrasing on that last little 'for-her-throat', sounds like a flute line, like something Mancini would have played or something.

yes - incredible delivery on that line

Never gave this one any time and now...now I'm in love.

but...will she love you?

I will take my chances.

I'd have picked "Don't Interrupt the Sorrow" or maybe "Sweet Bird". I'm surprised to see all the admiration for "The Boho Dance", it always struck me as unremarkable.

I love the balls out confidence to place ‘The Jungle Line’ as the second track on this album...it’s such a jarring jumpcut it really disturbed me for such a long time, but now see it as someone so in control of their artistic vision...breathtaking...consequently I have a penchant for weird/off kilter second tracks

I think it's her best album. Everything is lockdown inflected now but I listened to this in what feels like the briefest of window of being able to listen to music in public spaces and it utterly transformed me and the dull urban space I was occupying at the time.

"The Jungle Line" was the song that got me into Joni Mitchell. I was into Bow Wow Wow at the time and I immediately recognized the "Jungle Line" beat as a Bow Wow Wow beat played at half tempo.

I agree that it's hard to imagine these ten songs in any other order.

today is the day this album really clicked for me. thanks, thread!

It’s funny: this record’s sonic influence is strikingly all over Kate Bush’s “Never For Ever” but I’ve never read a KB interview where she gives Joni M more than a passing acknowledgment.