Joni Mitchell- The Hissing of Summer Lawns (1975)- Vinyl Rip (24 bit FLAC)

Joni Mitchell was at her creative height with The Hissing of Summer Lawns, and she was the first (and only?) artist to successfully blend folk and jazz, and end up with a masterpiece. Harry's House is magically nuts, and is at the top of my list of favorite songs. No wonder why THOSL is one of Prince's favorites. Much Like Pet Sounds, this is one of those rare albums that other artists drool over. Now it's your turn to drool. Enjoy.




From Ken Shane at Pop Dose:

Joni Mitchell is a long-time member of my personal pantheon. It’s a short list of artists who I revere not just for what they produce, but for the journey that informs their work, for their willingness to live on the edge artistically, and to blur the lines between genres. Miles Davis is another member. Picasso too. As I said, it’s short list.

Given the esteem I hold for Joni, The Hissing of Summer Lawns is a big deal for me. It’s not only her best album, but her artistic peak. It was a continuation of her flirtation with jazz, which began in earnest with her 1974 album Court and Spark. Less than two years after the release of that masterpiece, along came another one for the ages. The Hissing of Summer Lawns was released in November, 1975, and reached #4 on the Billboard album chart. Sadly, Joni’s audience was unprepared to accept the eclectic nature of her work. She hasn’t had another top ten album since then.

The album’s players are a who’s who of the jazz fusion scene of the day. Guitarists Robben Ford, Jeff Baxter, and Larry Carlton are on hand, along with keyboard players Victor Feldman and Joe Sample. John Guerin holds down the drum chair, but it’s the bass playing that really sets the album apart musically. There is brilliant work from Wilton Felder and Max Bennett. I think the album marked the first time that I really focused on the bass playing, and it’s a revelation. Bennett’s playing on the title track is simply stunning, as is Felder’s performance on “Edith and the Kingpin.” And just to prove that she wasn’t cutting her folk rock ties completely, old friends James Taylor, Graham Nash, and David Crosby were along to lend vocal support on the opening track “In France They Kiss On Main Street.”




Perhaps the album’s greatest track is one on which none of the all-star cast performed. “The Jungle Line” features Joni on Moog synthesizer and acoustic guitar, placed over an African drum track borrowed from the Drummers of Burundi. The incorporation of African influences in western music was far from common in 1975, and is another example of Joni being well ahead of her time. Lyrically the song pays tribute to the work of the French painter Henri Rousseau.

Whether she’s writing about a southern belle in “Shades of Scarlett Conquering,” a mobster’s girlfriend in “Edith and the Kingpin,” or a mistreated wife on “The Hissing of Summer Lawns,” Joni’s ability to create evocative imagery is the equal of her brilliantly blazing musical talent. To close the album, Joni uses multiple overdubs of her voice placed over a synthesizer bed to address her critics in the hauntingly beautiful “Shadows and Light.” It’s an appropriately groundbreaking ending to an astonishingly innovative work.

Naturally, radio found all of this a little too much to handle. Gone forever was the sweet Canadian folksinger who had won hearts with her gentle acoustic songs. In her place however, rose a musical titan who would lead the way for musicians who were wise enough to see the road she had created. While commercial success of the level she had known would continue to elude her in the years to come, she has never wavered in her determination to follow her muse.




Technical Information:

Artist: Joni Mitchell
Album: The Hissing of Summer Lawns
Year: 1975

Audio Codec(s): FLAC8
Encoding: Lossless
Rip: Vinyl rip
Avg. bitrate: 2596 kb/s
Sample rate: 96000 Hz
Bits per sample: 24
Channels: 2
File size: 793 MB
Length: 0:42:43


Personnel:

Joni Mitchell: vocals, acoustic guitar, Moog, piano, keyboards, Arp, Farfisa
Graham Nash: background vocals
David Crosby: background vocals
James Taylor: background vocals, guitar
Robben Ford: electric guitar, dobro, guitar
Jeff Baxter: electric guitar
Larry Carlton: electric guitar
Victor Feldman: electric piano, congas, vibes, keyboards, percussion
Joe Sample: electric piano, keyboards
John Guerin: drums, arrangement, Moog
Max Bennett: bass
Wilton Felder: bass
The Warrior Drums of Burundi
Chuck Findley: horn, trumpet, flugelhorn
Bud Shank: saxophone and flute, bass flute
Dale Oehler: sting arrangement
Henry Lewy: producer and engineer
Ellis Sorkin: engineer and assistant engineer




Tracklisting:

01. In France They Kiss on Main Street (3:20)
02. The Jungle Line (4:26)
03. Edith and the Kingpin (3:39)
04. Don't Interrupt the Sorrow (4:05)
05. Shades of Scarlett Conquering (5:00)
06. The Hissing of Summer Lawns (3:01)
07. The Boho Dance (3:50)
08. Harry's House/Centerpiece (6:49)
09. Sweet Bird (4:13)
10. Shadows and Light (4:20)





Hissing of Summer Lawns Megaupload Link

Joni Mitchell- Blue (1971)- DCC Gold Disc- CD Rip (APE/FLAC)

There are times when I feel completely foolish trying to describe an artist like Joni Mitchell or an album like Blue. What I can say is that Blue completely kicks Court and Spark's ass, and it stands beside the Hissing of Summer Lawns as my favorite album of hers. There's nothing better than Joni Mitchell on a quiet Sunday morning...unless it's a Dylan or Belle and Sebastian Sunday...or a Red House Painters Sunday.

Well, you know what I mean. Enjoy the album while I keep arguing with myself.




From Paul Lester at BBC Music:

Joni Mitchell may have been Canadian but, like fellow Canuck Neil Young, she was also the archetypal Laurel Canyon troubadour, at least at this point in her career. But there was always a sense that she was apart from any putative scene, reflecting on rather than immersed in it – even her famous, eponymous song about Woodstock, penned just after the legendary rock festival, had a ruminative, even sorrowful quality about it, as though she was contemplating a moment that had passed, gone forever.

And so it is with Blue, Mitchell’s fourth album. It has, as the title suggests, a melancholy atmosphere, one that functions on two levels: one personal, the other universal. It feels as much like the diary entries of a woman written in the wake of a breakup as it does a more general statement about a generation reeling after a series of shocks (Altamont, Manson, RIP the Fabs). Blue evokes the mourning after the nights of free-love before. If The Beatles’ split was symptomatic of the failure of the youth to come together, Blue felt like the net result. Orphaned by the death of the hippie nation, Mitchell was left to ponder a future alone, minus the comfort of community. Blue introduced a new paradigm for rock: the solo singer-songwriter confessing her woes, making her way in the world alone, without the solace of a band.




Blue invites such fanciful commentary. It feels like poetry set to music, and even though many of the lyrics are simple (“All I really, really want our love to do is to bring out the best in me and you,” from the opening track All I Want), often the music seems to be accommodating the words. As a consequence, the melodies, tracked by Mitchell’s swooping, soaring vocals, can be so hard to follow that it’s almost a miracle anyone can remember them, let alone the artist.

And yet that’s exactly what did happen: these songs became indelibly stamped on the minds of Americans and young people everywhere, isolated and bewildered at the start of a new decade. Carey (which was, tune-wise, Big Yellow Taxi’s slight return), the title-track and The Last Time I Saw Richard may have been highly personal, with speculation that they were about, respectively, former beaus James Taylor, David Blue and her ex-husband; A Case Of You may have been as private as a love letter; and Little Green, about giving up a child for adoption, may have been excoriating autobiography. Nevertheless, these songs, sparsely arranged on piano, acoustic guitar and Appalachian dulcimer, delivered with a jazzy looseness and enhanced by the sustained mood of quiet despair, soon became the property of everyone.




Technical Information:

Artist: Joni Mitchell
Album: Blue (DCC Gold Disc)
Year: 1971

Audio Codec(s): APE/FLAC8
Encoding: Lossless
Rip: EAC APE + .cue/FLAC split tracks
Avg. bitrate: 640 kb/s
Sample rate: 44100 Hz
Bits per sample: 16
Channels: 2
File size: 176 MB/185 MB
Length: 0:36:43


Tracklisting:

01. All I Want (3:36)
02. My Old Man (3:38)
03. Little Green (3:31)
04. Carey (3:07)
05. Blue (3:09)
06. California (3:56)
07. This Flight Tonight (2:54)
08. River (4:07)
09. A Case of You (4:27)
10. The Last Time I Saw Richard (4:17)





APE (img + .cue) Megaupload Link
FLAC8 (split tracks) Megaupload Link