Seth Godin, Don Juan’s Reckless Daughter, and the Continuity of Joni Mitchell’s Catalogue

Seth Godin posted today about Joni Mitchell’s 1977 masterpiece double LP Don Juan’s Reckless Daughter, arguing that it marked a departure from her fans and from commercial or popular pressures she had, until then, ridden:

She had a choice: to make the records her fans had decided in advance that they wanted to hear, or to make the music that she was proud of.

After this, she was free.

Free to make the music she heard in her head, the music she wanted to share.

I appreciate Godin shouting out such a timeless record and one of my personal faves. But I have to respectfully disagree with his analysis that it represents Joni “breaking from” from commercial or popular pressures. Rather, it’s a natural continuation of the threads she had started chasing in 1972’s For the Roses.

Joni’s debut Song to a Seagull (1968) was already filled with challenging, atypical harmonies. As she described in 1979 to Cameron Crowe:

“[David] Crosby, in producing that first album, did me an incredible service, which I will never forget. He used his success and name to make sure my songs weren’t tampered with to suit the folk-rock trend.”

Her second record, Clouds (1969) included similarly jarring, dissonant cuts like Roses Blue and The Fiddle & The Drum. Even amongst more popular cuts like Both Sides Now and Chelsea Morning, much of Clouds wasn’t remotely commercial, even if this is the one record that Joni has, in retrospect, admitted that she finds “kind of irritating to listen to” thanks to the vocal affectations she adopted from CSNY.

After Clouds, as early as 1969, Joni was telling Rolling Stone that she was retiring. Thankfully, she didn’t, but her extreme discomfort with the industry repeatedly made it out over the years in both interviews and songs. In For Free (1970), she makes herself an ironic foil for the ‘purity’ of a moneyless musical pursuit:

Now me I play for fortunes
And those velvet curtain calls
I’ve got a black limousine and two gentlemen
Escorting me to the halls
And I play if you have the money
Or if you’re a friend to me
But the one man band by the quick lunch stand
He was playing real good for free

A couple years later, in the same Cameron Crowe 1979 Rolling Stone interview, she talks about feeling the industry turned on her long before, and how her response was to keep doing her thing:

“This is the thing that Rolling Stone, when it made a diagram of broken hearts, was being very simplistic about. It was an easy target to slam me for my romantic alliances. That’s human nature. That hurt, but not nearly so much as when they began to tear apart The Hissing of Summer Lawns.”

[…] “Here’s the thing,” she said forcefully. “You have two options. You can stay the same and protect the formula that gave you your initial success. They’re going to crucify you for staying the same. If you change, they’re going to crucify you for changing. But staying the same is boring. And change is interesting. So of the two options,” she concluded cheerfully, “I’d rather be crucified for changing.”

Don Juan’s (1977) may be more expansive than her 8 prior records. But I don’t think there’s a single track on there that you could identify as a fundamental shift from anything she’d done prior.

“Paprika Plains“, the side-long 15 minute orchestral number, might not be what radio was looking for. But it is not an outlier in her repertoire: it’s actually the culmination of a thread of piano-based songs with orchestrated interludes, starting as early as her third record:

• The Arrangement (Ladies of the Canyon, 1970)
• The Last Time I Saw Richard (Blue, 1971)
• Let the Wind Carry Me, and Judgment of the Moon and Stars (For the Roses, 1972)
• Down to You (Court and Spark, 1974)
• Paprika Plains (Don Juan’s, 1977)

What else could be considered a departure? The 6-minute percussive drum track “The Tenth World“? This is markedly similar to the coda of Blonde in the Bleachers (1972), which itself references gestures from 1970’s For Free. Furthermore, 5 years before Don Juan’s, “The Jungle Line” paired a bare, dissonant melody over a field recording of African drums and overdubbed synthesizer, and then– rather than burying it on the album– stuck it at track 2!  That’s not the move of someone who feels pressure to conform to label or popular pressures; that’s the mark of an artist who feels fully empowered to pursue her muse and experiment with every aspect of her sonic palette. And that’s perhaps why, in the quote above, she was so hurt by Rolling Stone tearing Hissing of Summer Lawns apart. (Spoiler: it’s an extraordinarily influential record for a lot of successful artists who have come since. Well done, Rolling Stone.)

The same can be said for the harmonies and textures on Don Juan’s. We hear this sort of writing and orchestration on Hissing, and then we get the classic Joni guitar + Jaco bass + ambient noodles on Hejira. Don Juan’s consists not of radical departures, but further elaborations on each of those musical threads:

Dont Interrupt the Sorrow > Black Crow > Talk to Me
Edith and the Kingpin > Refuge of the Roads > Jericho
Sweet Bird > Amelia > Otis and Marlena

While I appreciate the sentiment of what Godin is saying, I think he’s missing the continuity of Joni’s work and public statements when he concludes that Joni’s first 8 albums were made under label or commercial pressure, that Don Juan’s was a radical move to step beyond the fan base her work had created. Joni’s done nothing but ignore or circumvent the establishment since day one, often took heat for it, and continued to go her way, which is why she has such bulletproof cred amongst artists and fans alike.