Her appeal is in the subtle texture of her toughness, and her readiness to tell secrets and make obscure and difficult feelings lucid and vocal. She breaks your heart and makes you tentatively smile. She is the leading lady in a personal pageant of Heavy Duty, tension-bound romance. The poetry of her love songs sets her almost on some other planet, some separate plane where there are no inhibitions about divine arrogance, no compunctions about laying the inside of her on the line. And then there's Joel Bernstein's flamboyant inside photograph—our Valkyrie gazing at green water in motion—it complements the unique feeling that one gets about the person who made this record, who can
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emerge from the hazy watercolor of life and say, "I am the best person it is within my power to be. Here I am."
"Some turn to Jesus/Some turn to heroin/And some turn to ramblin' around." People will go to desperate lengths to fill a hole in the heart. Some do some of the above, others might try to stuff themselves or another person into the hole: a few others make words and music, opening the hole a little wider so the amazing pain of catharsis and creation has the space to squeeze itself up and out of the wound. Love's tension is Joni Mitchell's medium—she molds and casts it like a sculptress, lubricating this tense clay with powerful emotive imagery and swaying hypnotic music that sets her listener up for another of her great strengths, a bitter facility with irony and incongruity. As the tiny muscles in your spine begin to relax as they are massaged by a gorgeous piano line or a simple guitar or choral introduction, you might get quietly but bluntly slammed with a large dose of Woman Truth.
In For the Roses, Joni is unabashedly biased, a wronged and wronging lover, an open and forgiving loser at love's games. Her lovers are somewhat less than idealized, in turn overly sensitive, boorish, alcoholic, jive, immature, selfish or junkies. They are human. Of her relationships with her men she is candidly her own severest critic. In her songs she is sensible, chameleon, caustic, sorrowing, boisterous, judgmental, harsh and passionately understanding, occasionally passing deftly through this gauntlet of emotions in the course of one song.
Yet her great charm and wit, her intense vocal acting and phrasing abilities (the way she chooses to deal with a single word can change the feeling of an entire song) and the sheer power and gumption of her presence combine to bring it all off and make it shine. With this record she seems to have cleared the air of the beautiful murk and ambiguity of her last, Blue, and what she again makes plain is her feeling that both sexes should play by the same rules, at least when she's involved.
Eloquence is going cheap these days and there's good music to be heard all over. When the two come together, as in this woman, the appreciative mind can boggle and stall, its attention riveted. As a
