1. “Huge Yellow Taxi”
Without delay incisive and joyful, this 1970 single — with which Mitchell opened her set final summer time — covers numerous floor in simply over two minutes, shifting seamlessly from social critique to private lament. Its observations about industrialization and environmental degradation are nonetheless piercingly related 54 years later.
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2. “Night time Journey Residence”
Mitchell’s poetic 1991 album “Night time Journey Residence” is a spotlight amongst her later releases, beloved by many followers however lesser recognized to most of the people than a lot of her work made within the ’70s. This moody, atmospheric title observe — that includes some hypnotic crickets on percussion — units the tone.
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3. “Raised on Theft”
This rowdy rocker from Mitchell’s 1974 masterpiece “Courtroom and Spark” chronicles a failed barroom proposition (“Hey, the place you going?/Don’t go but,” Mitchell implores, “Your glass ain’t empty and we simply met”), permitting her to indicate off an underappreciated energy of her songwriting: her humorousness.
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4. “Are available From the Chilly”
When Mitchell performed one other minimize from “Night time Journey Residence” as her fourth track within the Gorge efficiency, I knew we’d be in for a thrillingly eclectic set. As she proved on “Courtroom and Spark,” and afterward this seven-and-a-half-minute meditation on human connection, Mitchell is an knowledgeable at capturing the glowing flush of recent romance: “With only a contact of our fingers, I might make our circuitry explode,” she sings, recalling a teenage dalliance. “All we ever wished, was simply to come back in from the chilly.”
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5. “Amelia”
Most days, should you have been to ask me my favourite Joni Mitchell track, I’d resent you for making me select. However on sure days, significantly the lonely, melancholy ones, I’d blurt out, “Amelia.” A spotlight of her singular 1976 album “Hejira,” this sparse, looking out observe performs out as a stream-of-consciousness monologue to the doomed aviator Amelia Earhart, who right here symbolizes each the liberty and perils of independence: “A ghost of aviation, she was swallowed by the sky/Or by the ocean, like me, she had a dream to fly.”
