better golden run: Stevie Wonder or Joni Mitchell?

Stevie gets creative control from Berry Gordy and makes some of the most transcendent music of all time, though it's not like his best singles weren't already masterpieces; Joni Mitchell gets her feet underneath her early and stays gold at least through Hejira imo. I know the Stevie records much less well but every time I listen to one from this period I'm like, fuck, who was on fire like Stevie in the 70s? Maybe only Joni, maybe nobody.

Here's Joni '71-'76:

1971: Blue
1972: For the Roses
1974: Court and Spark
1975: The Hissing of Summer Lawns
1976: Hejira

Here's Stevie in the same window:

1971 Where I'm Coming From
1972 Music of My Mind
1972 Talking Book
1973 Innervisions
1974 Fulfillingness' First Finale
1976 Songs in the Key of Life

I rate a lot of stuff from earlier in both artists' catalogues - Clouds is tremendous to me, and Stevie's pre-creative-control singles are some of the best tunes ever. But in this window who rises higher?

Al Green

I can play The Original Musiquarium Vol. 1 anytime any place, so I might give it to Stevie on pure pleasure grounds.

sorry, that was meant to answer who was on fire like Stevie in the 70s? but ignore me.

on one level i don't think this is hard for me cos Joni speaks to me more but i feel like if i attuned to Stevie a little more this wd be v. hard

yeah I'm basically starting this thread as an excuse to get serious about learning Stevie's run from here. I have Songs but it's such a huge endeavor that I basically only know the hits & the vibe but when I think how eg "Signed, Sealed, Delivered" changed my life I think, I need to be much more readily conversant with S.W. in his full-auteur phase

FFF was the last one I bought, years after owning the others, and was most surprised by: darker, sinister.

It reminds me of Hissing: a curtains-drawn insularity.

Al Green

― movember spawned a nobster (Noodle Vague)

yes, very good guys, this thread is about contrasting the work of two artists, as you might infer from the presence of these two artists' names in the thread title

tbf you also said "every time I listen to one from this period I'm like, fuck, who was on fire like Stevie in the 70s? Maybe only Joni, maybe nobody."

got a bunch of this stuff which i always mean to listen to deeper, with stevie my roadblocks are genre exercises and hippie-isms with joni it's trying to sympathize with her hand-wringing over la rockstar assholes. i'd rather have stevie in the background but i need to foreground all this stuff more

There's no matchup that would get me to vote for anyone other than Stevie, but I wish Joni the best.

background vs. foreground is a good thing to have in mind in this discussion 'cause yeah Stevie is great party music. I remember hearing Sir Duke at barbeques in SoCal in summer of what much have been '77? and thinking, this, this is the whole damn meaning of life, a song like this and sunshine and people you like. But my deepest love is always going to be for lyrics I can sit down and obsess over, and also I prize getting sad over all else, and Joni has Stevie trumped there.

There's no matchup that would get me to vote for anyone other than Stevie, but I wish Joni the best.

it's cool there's no voting! I just thought it would be a good area for discussion, da croup has the idea

man "I Believe When I Fall in Love" is sad AND has lyrics to pore over.

willing yourself into an ephemeral kind of optimism is real art

yeah but Joni does whole albums that are exclusively for feeling hugely languidly bummed

"I don't want to bore you with it" is one of my favorite bits to pore over.

But, yeah, I'm usually not picking Stevie's lyrics apart when I'm listening to him so much as trying to figure out how he constructs his insane chords.

yeah Stevie's chords are everything Joni's tunings want to be - she's mad infatuated with jazz and she has for-real chops, but her knowledge just doesn't run as deep. whereas the intro chords to "Isn't She Lovely" alone, which iirc are four permutations of the same chord - that's a level of purely musical expression that Joni can't really aspire to compositionally. She can get there with a little help from her friends, but Stevie's stuff is right there on the page, you can try learning to play it yourself and just howl with glee every time you find out how he's doing what he's doing.

joni, but hated to choose

very different kinds of peaks at work here - one rooted in having found one's voice and fully owning and exploring it vs liberation that comes w/ creative control and having the result be wildly successful. i love al green from this period more than the stevie or the joni but the run that's at work there seems more systemic in roots, like the comparison might almost be more stevie 60s (or otis 60s is more to the point). it doesn't seem quite as gleefully individual? anyhow i love joni and that run is incredible, not a bum note, etc but uh, this is stevie.

one thing these guys also have in common is that they were nowhere rock enough for me to really appreciate until I was into my 20s - while there's lots of stuff on Songs In The Key Of Life I dig now, I'll never love it as much as I love Sign O' The Times when it comes to 2LP "THE WORLD ACCORDING TO ME" albums

actually, i may have already been 30 by the time i finally sat and gave joni a real listen

eric h on stevie wonder is one of my favorite ilx reads

another area where Stevie has the edge is just the depth of his knowledge, having come out of the Motown school and worked around all those crazy accomplished 7-nights-a-week musicians. No accident that he's shouting out Ellington on "Sir Duke." Whereas Joni, she loves Mingus and she's right to, but Mingus himself would point you at Ellington for where the heavy songcraft was, and I don't think Joni's dug super-deep into standards to see what they're really all about.

As a lyricist I don't think Stevie's up on Joni's level at all, but he's writing pop music for the most part, he doesn't have to be. And some of this is personal bugaboo stuff for me - like, I just had some heavy living-room dancing w/aero jr to "Isn't She Lovely" and it was a profound experience, but "making one as love-LEE as SHE" will always irritate the piss out of me

stevie is like the 20th century mozart really

i'll go with him, still have residual complex memories of my mom listening to tons of joni mitchell when i was in my elementary school years and into nothing but 'thriller' and lionel ritchie's s/t album.

joni's one where i 'respected' it in principle or whatever but in reality i rolled my eyes and would leave the room if it was played for the longest time and then one day something snapped and i went thru an obsessive period (somewhat similar thing happened w/ kate bush - i loved several songs but would rmde at the standard kate fan and then one day i woke up and started to become one of those weirdos also). i'm old enough so that stevie was always this presence for the longest time - i can remember ppl getting very excited by hotter than july in an 'alright, just a speed bump, he's back in the groove' and then throughout the eighties this since that even as he kept releasing stuff, some of it incredibly great ('do i do'), some of it solid ('part time lover'), some of it truly dire (you know of what i speak), that eventually he'd stop fucking around giving tours to the cosby kids in his studio and unleash another holy shit masterpiece when he decided to. in some ways witnessing this prepared me for the last twenty years of prince.

"If It's Magic" into "As" is one of the great sequencing miracles of the album age, Jesus Christ

xp great post b

"making one as love-LEE as SHE

The seventies are full of unexpected Stevie intonations and lyrical constructions.

btw Songs in the Key of Life is my least favorite album of Stevie AND Joni's imperial phase sequences.

and Characters, Conversation Peace and A Time to Love are solid to excellent albums, but a lot of fans don't appreciate him when he's full R&B (as I think he is on these records imo).

do ppl really live to be 205 on Saturn tho

it's 10 zillion light years away

not gonna call a guy with a visual impairment on his sense of distance

lol A+

both once odd roadblocks for me, and it's still sort of that way with stevie. i bought blue on reputation and was sort of unprepared for its spareness and that voice like a beam of sunlight bouncing off a damn crystal which i understand can be a little overwhelming for some and definitely was for me. but i kept listening to it, trying to find in it what other people found, and eventually lived in the songs for so long that the pleasure i eventually discovered felt very individual (i haven't totally worked out my thoughts about this but i think this might be a huge part of her appeal). i'm still sometimes confused by the chord progressions in "the last time i saw richard," they don't work in the way i expect chords to work, it's kind of dizzying. this effect is of course amplified a thousand fold in hejira and hissing of summer lawns which were hugely dense and elusive first listens for me, and honestly hissing still gets away from me. for stuff that is often coded as emotional and confessional it is very minimal, reticent even, giving very little away, pretty content with its own performance and space.

stevie sort of feels similar even though he is very much a Pop Musician. something about the hugeness of songs in the key of life and the twisting structures of some of his songs, which function as pop but complicate as they go. i just listened to fulfillingness' which is a record i love but today i wasn't really feeling it until the second side kicked in. something about the richness, the incredible history you can perceive note-to-note in these records is so overwhelming that it can be initially, sometimes intermittently, alienating? dunno. also my idea of stevie is kind of screwed up—always heard his motown singles on oldies radio but they never actually name songs on those stations, so for a while i just carried stuff like "signed, sealed, delivered" in a disembodied way. later in my life i bought a motown singles box and was blown away to discover that was stevie; the stevie wonder i knew was the narrative i constantly received from vh1: "(small, near-invisible description of early career) but then CREATIVE FREEDOM and these CLASSIC, EXPANSIVE RECORDS"

This is a great thread. And perfect timing for me. After having listened (and very much enjoyed - it's a perfect album, really) only to "Blue" for years, I bought the new box set the other day, and am finally getting ready to dig in for real. "Hejira" is amazing. Got some work left to do on Stevie, too, but love "Songs" and "Innervisions", especially the latter.

Marvin Gaye suffers from a similar problem. Once I got past the hits that everyone knows I was floored by how great the pre-creative freedom catalogue is.

With Stevie it was simpler: I inherited my uncle's copy of Innervisions, put the needle on "Too High," and couldn't believe its liquid groove.

Twenty years after hearing George Michael's the-good-ol-college-try version, I can now say "They Won't Go Where I Go" is chilling. I'm sure Stevie Wonder himself knows what he uncorks in that vocal.

Stevie by a long way. In that run of albums I think there are probably only three songs that I don't like. I Wanna Talk To You, Sweet Little Girl and Isn't She Lovely. Those albums are just full of incredible songs. His run from 70 to 80 has probably only been equalled by prince in the 80's, probably shouldn't start that argument here though.

The Joni run is great but I've gone off Blue in recent years and really the fact her best album, Court & Spark ends with such a terrible song still bugs me quite a bit.

Al Green's run is pretty amazing but his music didn't have the variation that Stevie's did. I'd probably say Curtis Mayfield is the closest person to having a similar kind of run in quality around the same time.

always thought it was a bizarre cover for George Michael; like what must the FAITH era fans have made of it? and it wasn't buried either it was Side 1 Track 3.

Mitchell's run would have gone on longer, but the mixes on the albums just after this period have the bass guitar up way too loud. (THESE ARE THE ONLY RECORDED WORKS IN THE HISTORY OF RECORDED WORKS WHERE THIS CAN BE SAID.)

Tangentially related: Best Stevie Wonder Single post-Original Musiquarium

The Joni run is great but I've gone off Blue in recent years and really the fact her best album, Court & Spark ends with such a terrible song still bugs me quite a bit.

I don't think that Court & Spark is Joni's best album, but I agree with you that it ends with a terrible song.