Joni Mitchell's Theory of Relativity

Joni’s Both Sides Now has been translated into several languages. It was translated into Chinese, which was then re-translated into English. It came back as Joni Mitchell’s Theory of Relativity.

Those who love wanderings and wanderers dig Joni Mitchell. Usually. I do. I’ve spent a third of my life on jeepneys, trains, buses, relatives’ cars, stations, airports, chi-chi lounges, stopover carinderias, roads gazing at apocalyptic traffic and places I’d like to call the holy in-betweens. I am always in transit: From one apartment to another, one school to another, one job to another, one life to another. Sometimes I’m everywhere and nowhere and alone. But Tom Robbins went along on most trips. So did William Burroughs. For me, their dog-eared books are essentials in my little travels, and they’ve kept me company in an airport in Amsterdam (once) and seedy bus stations in Recto (a thousand times) teeming with Jesus freaks, pimps and fifty-peso prostitutes.

Musicians also make great traveling companions. Steely Dan (via a battered Walkman) talked to me about Bodhisattvas, black cows, Black Fridays, Babylon sisters, as I rode a plane to Manila dejected from a writer’s workshop in Dumaguete, suddenly understanding Deacon Blues and the meaning of how it is to be a glorious loser. Miles Davis shared silences and lonely fire-strains from the trumpet in Sagada and Singapore.

But even if I’m lying on my creaky bed in my room (which smells of bug spray, parrot dung and home shitty home), Joni Mitchell’s songs make me feel as if I’m walking wayward on a beautiful and broken-down road somewhere. There is no lovelier wanderer than Joni, the woman who told us about personal hejiras and the refuge of the road, the elegant chick who took me on her long, strange trips, while I took her on my long, dreary ones.

Using travel as a metaphor for existence — Joni’s not the first but she’s arguably one of the most eloquent and definitely the saddest. Joni Mitchell expressed her fancy for flight, her dialectics of drifting, and her music took listeners hitchhiking across their own psyches.

A Prisoner Of The White Lines On The Freeway

In a concert, Joni was exasperated by the audience clamoring for her old hits; she snapped, "The difference between an artist and a musician is… Well, nobody ever said to Van Gogh, ‘Paint A Starry Night again, man.’ "

I’ve always wanted to write about Joni Mitchell, always waiting for an excuse to do so. One Sunday, I was scrounging for CDs at a record store and saw the excuse: Joni Mitchell’s latest release titled "Travelogue." Trumpets blared. Angels sang. The heavens unfastened. Hallelujah.

I’m exaggerating, of course. But I was really thrilled Joni finally came out with a 2 CD-box set, after going through a contemptuous, "limited edition campaign against the jewel box." The thing is, one can never pigeonhole Joni. She has phases — like Picasso (Blue Period, Rose Period, Cubism, Neo-Classicism, etc.), like Miles Davis (Cool Period, Modal Jazz Period, Miles Runs The Voodoo Down Period, etc.).

Mitchell has resisted all attempts to put her in a categorical box. Starting out as coffeehouse folksinger, she got recruited into the "star maker machinery" of pop music and recorded self-confessional landmarks like "Blue," "Ladies of the Canyon," "For the Roses," "Clouds" and "Joni Mitchell," among others — pouring her heart out, wearing her "neuroses on her sleeve," groping for chords that conveyed a melancholy without a name.

Joni’s lone acoustic dominated tracks from that era, with erratic cameos by friends like James Taylor and David Crosby.

Change has a way of putting its grimy claws on everything. Joni put some jazz chord changes, jazz sensibilities into her folksy brew and came up with excellent albums (easily the favorites of hardcore Joni fans) such as "Court and Spark," "Hissing of Summer Lawns," "Hejira," "Mingus," "Don Juan’s Reckless Daughter" and "Shadows and Light."

Joni stretched on these albums. She collaborated with the best musicians around, jazz cats like bassist Jaco Pastorius, saxophonist Wayne Shorter, guitarist Larry Carlton and keyboardist Herbie Hancock, among others. Heck, she even worked with the great Charles Mingus in the much-misunderstood "Mingus" album. (She wrote lyrics to Goodbye Pork Pie Hat, a tribute to the great Lester Young: "We came up from the subway/On the music midnight makes/To Charlie’s bass and Lester’s saxophone/In taxi horns and brakes.")

Mitchell came up with her first "travelogue" — the spacey and atmospheric "Hejira," with Jaco contributing lyrical bass passages, especially on Hejira and Refuge of the Roads. But the highpoint of that phase is the live scorcher "Shadows and Light," featuring a kick-ass back-up band composed of Jaco, Pat Metheny (guitar), Michael Brecker (saxophone), Lyle Mays (keyboards) and Don Alias (percussions).

Wait… To dwell on that particular phase of Joni’s career would be long and encyclopedic. So better silence the raves for now.

In the ‘80s and ‘90s, Joni flirted with a little electronica (in "Chalk Mark in a Rain Storm," courtesy of Thomas Dolby); went back to her folk roots ("Night Ride Home" and "Turbulent Indigo"); released new material ("Taming the Tiger"); compilations ("Hits" and "Misses") and standards ("Both Sides Now"); and became the enigmatic muse that she is today. An influence to artists like Alanis Morissette and Tori Amos.

YS readers familiar with Joni’s old hits like Big Yellow Taxi (covered recently by the Counting Crows with Vanessa Carlton and sampled by Janet Jackson) or Both Sides Now (videoke’d by everyone from Bing Crosby to Dianne Reeves to Frank Sinatra) would be glad to know that there’s more to the long and rambling Joni Mitchell discography than just her hits, which she’d rather call "her most gregarious children."

Joni’s Travelogue

Then your life becomes a travelogue of picture postcard charms…Dreams, Amelia, dreams and false alarms.

I thought it to be Joni’s greatest hits in a convenient box. "Travelogue," it turned out, is a collection of eclectic Joni Mitchell songs (both hits and misses) re-recorded with a 70-piece orchestra, a 13-voice choir and old allies like Herbie Hancock, Wayne Shorter, Billy Preston and bassist-hubby Larry Klein. It’s Joni offering us an orchestral, mystery tour of her erratic 35-year career. You could also say it’s Joni’s re-painting of her past hits, giving old songs brilliant and shiny new colors — the aural equivalent of Van Gogh redoing "A Starry Night". Isn’t that ironic?

But it’s still a Joni. It’s an album from a Protean-like artist. Same with Picasso or Miles or Frank Zappa, I’d go listen, see, experience Joni in any incarnation.

Classics like Amelia, For the Roses, Woodstock, The Circle Game and Sex Kills, among others are dressed up in light and breezy orchestration, with Joni’s voice sounding huskier and huskier through the years (in the same neighborhood as her vocal delivery in "Both Sides Now," the album of standards and Joni jukebox classics). The quirky thing is — the hits on "Travelogue" sound as if Joni Mitchell were doing covers of Joni Mitchell songs. Sometimes they work, sometimes they don’t.

In the new versions of God Must Be a Boogie Man, Refuge of the Roads and Hejira, I miss Jaco’s singing bass lines, even if those passages were changed into horns and strings and interwoven into the orchestral fabric. And they sound — a word not formerly associated with the artist — "happy." Mitchell’s reported swan song is not elegiac as everyone predicted. Very much like Joni to throw a curveball into the by-the-numbers music-churning machine.

There are oddballs in "Travelogue." There is Slouching Towards Bethlehem, inspired by W.B. Yeats’ poem "The Second Coming" (And what rough beast, its hour come round at last/Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?). Other not-so gregarious or overplayed yet interesting Joni songs include You Dream Flat Tires ("Wild Things Run Fast"), Judgement of the Moon and Stars ("For the Roses"), Chinese Café/Unchained Melody (with quotes from Unchained and Will You Still Love Me Tomorrow?), The Dawntreader and Borderline ("Songs to a Seagull"), among others.

The verdict: Joni Mitchell’s "Travelogue" is a bittersweet reminder that every love story, inevitably, is a travelogue — a documentary of bus stops, dinners, lonely highways, the whole strange/beautiful trip experienced by "all the hapless lovers in this wayward world."

Why am I writing about Joni Mitchell on Valentine? Well, I bought my girlfriend Cathy a copy and told her "Travelogue," or any Joni Mitchell album for that matter, is better than all the roses (or tulips — are you reading this, Michael of Source 1 Asia?) in the world.

Flowers wilt. Joni’s sadness is infinite. Blessed is the trip that never ends.

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Mushy acknowledgements: Thanks to Anne Poblador of Warner Music Philippines for giving me her personal copy of "Travelogue"; to Ayvi Nicolas for helping me see Joni in a different way; and to Cathy De Castro for loving always my devils and my dreams. For comments, suggestions, curses and invocations, e-mail iganja@hotmail.com.