Joni Mitchell’s Reckless Drift

People liked it when Joni Mitchell changed. She had always changed. The Hissing of Summer Lawns made sense in that way, as a kind of departure that didn’t feel like escape. It was praised, mostly. Artistic growth. Personal evolution. That sort of thing.Then Hejira came. It was less loved, but still understood. There were broader structures, jazz textures, lyrics that became less declarative. Mitchell was turning inward. That was the signal. The listener had to follow, or not.Don Juan’s Reckless Daughter is the sound of getting lost. Or staying lost. A double album that wanders. The songs are long, some more than ten minutes. There are chords struck and held, left hanging like unsent letters. She sings over them. Not quite melody. Not quite meditation. There is Jaco Pastorius. Wayne Shorter. John Guerin. Their job is to find shape in the murk. Sometimes they almost do.The lyrics are impressionistic. That word is polite. What they really are is scattered. Images with no center. Ideas that don’t argue, just drift past. The poet has rights, they’ll say. Poets can do anything. But this isn't poetry, not really. It is a kind of posture. An affect. Something performed.She touches on things that matter. Weariness. Freedom. Sex and age. But nothing connects. No hooks, no phrases you remember later. No way in. What she offers is not music in the usual sense. It’s art. That’s the claim. The capital-A kind. And the paradox is that she loses the craft in reaching for it.There was a time when she was precise. When she built songs that held. But now the line between artful and arty is crossed and blurred. She’s among those who’ve come to believe their importance entitles them to indulgence. Lennon. Yes. Others.It is not failure. But it is not connection, either. Brilliant as she can be—let’s not deny Joni Mitchell her due; she’s a prodigy and a provocateur—she’s also responsible for a catalog that, in equal measure, feels half-baked, overwrought, and, yes, pretentious with a capital “P.” She wears that “genius” label like an overzealous badge, brandishing it with a self-consciousness that would make even Dylan wince—Dylan, who has made a career out of mythologizing himself, yet has the decency to flinch at such a moniker. Mitchell’s notorious complaint about Dylan’s supposed lack of authenticity is a riddle wrapped in irony, since the very concept of art is rooted in artifice. Let’s not forget that the word artist itself stems from artificer: the craftsman, the constructor, the one who lends a touch of the unnatural to the natural. Yet here is Mitchell, bemoaning authenticity as though she has forgotten that she, Simon, Dylan, and Cohen—the poet-songwriters of the Sixties—were, at their core, fabulists, fabricators, spinning tales from the threads of their own feelings, politics, and personal histories in pursuit of a memorable phrase, a piercing insight, or a story worth telling. Authenticity, I submit, has less to do with the artist’s raw emotion than with the effect conjured in the listener. Mitchell’s perennial grousing—her famous crankiness—has become a tiresome refrain, a dirge that plods along with the regularity of a metronome.

She demands—almost pleads—to be taken seriously as a musical artist, issuing albums that seem engineered to pummel the listener into acquiescence. Her excursions into art song, serial music, jazz, and a surrealist strain of feminism yield results as varied and unpredictable as a bowl of leftovers. The fatal defect in these ambitious undertakings is that their most egregious moments are so self-important, so precious, that they overshadow any spark of innovation. Mitchell’s persistent arrogance and lingering bitterness leave a metallic tang in the mouth. Still, her fans have admired her restless drive to reinvent herself, so my initial response to The Hissing of Summer Lawns was one of cautious optimism, applauding its bold leap toward personal and artistic evolution. Yet, while Hissing and the less successful Hejira saw Mitchell testing broader song structures, more impressionistic lyrics, and jazz textures, her quest for a distinctive voice gradually erected walls between herself and her audience. With Don Juan’s Reckless Daughter, a sprawling double album, Mitchell gathers the ground won by her previous records only to scatter it in a jumble of half-realized notions.

The lyrics are impressionistic, yes, but hardly impressive—a collage of images, cryptic allusions, and wan revelations that cry out for editorial mercy. Mitchell comes off like a whispering Imagist draped in the vestments of a Confessional Poet. Perhaps she has spilled all her secrets in the most evocative language she could muster—or, worse, forgotten what she meant to reveal. Writing that is elliptical by habit breeds lyrics that even the author may struggle to decipher. The spotlight is fixed on jazz modernism, with some tracks stretching past ten minutes, meandering through Mitchell’s shadowy piano chords. She finds a strident chord and lets it linger, musing aloud while her sidemen—Jaco Pastorius and Wayne Shorter of Weather Report, along with John Guerin—strive to impose some shape on the proceedings. Her defenders protest, “A poet may speak as she pleases!” But parsing Don Juan’s Reckless Daughter for meaning is a fool’s errand. Mitchell touches on themes—spiritual exhaustion, the weight of freedom, sexuality in middle age—that might resonate, but she offers precious few hooks, catchphrases, or familiar footholds. Instead, she serves up Art, with a capital “A,” indifferent to whether her audience savors it. The paradox is that, in her pursuit of Art, she has jettisoned craft, evolving from an artful songwriter into someone merely arty—a fate that often befalls public figures too enamored of their own legend. In this, Mitchell joins the company of John Lennon, Yes, and other luminaries who developed an unfortunate taste for their own mythology.

With Mingus, her next album, we are left to admire Mitchell’s willingness to stray from the chatty confessionalism that made her famous and reach for something resembling high art. “Arty,” however, remains the operative word, as her ambition outstrips her skill. There is a whiff of the amateur, the dilettante hammering away at the piano, hoping boldness will suffice. But Joni Mitchell is no Mingus—neither as composer, nor musician, nor artist—and one hopes she does not imagine herself his equal, for no one is. I have no quarrel with established artists seeking new terrain to advance their art, but I do object to dabbling in genres—like the moody expressionism of jazz—where one is clearly out of one’s depth. To be fair, the music and lyrics cohere somewhat better here than on Don Juan’s Reckless Daughter (that abyss of tuneless wandering and free-associative lyrics that communicate little), but the core issue persists: Mitchell is not a jazz singer. Her voice—thin, reedy, pale—never ignites when it ought to blaze with color. You find yourself yearning instead for Annie Ross or Patti Waters. As a tribute to the late Charles Mingus, the album falls short. The inter-song snippets of Mingus reflecting on mortality add scant depth to an already patchwork offering, alternating between brilliance and the half-baked. The whole affair, alas, carries more than a hint of tackiness.