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Joni Mitchell’s ‘Archives Vol. 4: 1976-1980’ Unearths Buried Treasure From Her Most Creative and Challenging Era: Album Review
Joni Mitchell’s ‘Archives Vol. 4: 1976-1980’ is six CDs of fascinating, previously unreleased material from her most experimental and creative era.
Her fellow travelers include jazz greats Charles Mingus (as a songwriter), Jaco Pastorius, Pat Metheny, Herbie Hancock, Gerry Mulligan, John McLaughlin and Tony Williams, and spot appearances from Graham Nash, a young T-Bone Burnett and even David Bowie vet Mick Ronson. The set remains in 1976 for three full discs, alternating between Rolling Thunder tracks, 20-odd songs from her own tours (including peppy versions of “Free Man in Paris,” “Big Yellow Taxi” and even “The Jungle Line”) and finally a beautiful batch of “Hejira” demos. Mitchell’s adventurousness had boxed her into a corner commercially, and by the time she returned in 1982, she was back with David Geffen, on his then-new eponymous label, with “Wild Things Run Fast,” a deliberately commercial album that featured a cover of Elvis Presley’s “Baby I Don’t Care.” After an awkward ’80 phase characteristic of her cohort, she returned to herself late in the decade and continued to release albums, some of them great, with decreasing frequency for the next 20 years before effectively closing the book on her recording career with 2007’s “Shine.” (Of course, she’s made several high-profile performances over the past couple of years, including the two-night “Joni Jam” at the Hollywood Bowl this weekend, but those are largely well-deserved victory laps.)
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