Court and Spark is truly the best of the best. Joni Mitchell was the best female songwriter of the ’60s and ’70s, and Court and Spark, released in 1974, is her greatest achievement, combining understated lyrics and deep philosophy, innovative arrangements and painstakingly realized songs. The first few bars of piano that open the record which are full of the subdued eloquence that characterizes Mitchell’s work prepare the listener for an album that explores human hopes and shortcomings with honesty and grace.
The album is so flawlessly produced that its wide range of unconventional instruments (chimes, woodwinds, clavinet) come together like the mechanisms of a Swiss watch yet it still somehow sounds effortless and improvisational. Many well-known musicians contributed to the album, including Jose Feliciano on electric guitar and Graham Nash, David Crosby and bizarrely enough Cheech and Chong on backup vocals.
By the time she recorded Court and Spark, Mitchell’s voice, which was previously known for its lilting, folksy high notes, had slightly mellowed and deepened to a timbre more appropriate for a jazz chanteuse than a barefoot flower child. The album represents Mitchell’s transition from the innocent, optimistic voice of songs like ‘Woodstock’ and ‘Big Yellow Taxi’ to that of a sophisticated, but not quite cynical, woman of the world.
In a way, her songs mirror the final comedown of the 1970s, when the youthful optimism of the counterculture over-ripened into worldly decadence. You know that the climactic lines of ‘Car on a Hill’ embody more than disappointment in love when Mitchell sings, ‘It always seems so righteous at the start / When there’s so much laughter / When there’s so much spark.’
Mitchell is as much a poet as a musician, and her lyrics on Court and Spark acutely describe cycles of human desire and unfullfilment. The lyrical highlight of the album is ‘Down to You,’ a painfully honest, existential meditation on alienation that quietly captures loneliness and human indifference with lyrics like ‘In the morning there are lovers in the street / They look so high / You brush against a stranger / And you both apologize.’
While most of her songs seem deeply personal, Mitchell at times taps into her songwriting abilities and inhabits other voices, creating characters like the brazen barfly in ‘Raised on Robbery’ and the disillusioned L.A. executive of ‘Free Man in Paris.’ The final song on the album (and the only one Mitchell didn’t write) is ‘Twisted’, an adorable, witty little song about mental illness. This song was originally improvised by piano bar singer Annie Ross, which is pretty amazing given clever lines like ‘Now I heard little children were supposed to sleep tight / That’s why I got into the vodka one night / My parents got frantic / Didn’t know what to do / But I saw some crazy scenes before I came to.’ There’s nothing funnier than a drunken child.
Joni Mitchell is an extremely talented musician, and it’s not a stretch to say her work has influenced everyone from Lars von Trier to Belle and Sebastian. If you’ve written her off as just another hippie with an acoustic guitar, I urge you to give Court and Spark a try and see if this delicate work of grit and beauty doesn’t change your mind.
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