Night Ride Home Reviews

Night Ride Home drops much of the bullshit that had marked Joni Mitchell’s previous Geffen Records albums. There’s no random celebrity guests, no odd synth-heavy Elvis covers, the growing self-righteous political speak, Night Ride Home is a stripped down return to the folk-jazz that made her an icon. I’m still amazed at the sounds she can bring forth from a guitar and the harmonies she can recreate with layering her voice on top of itself.

“Come In from the Cold” is an exquisite song about childhood and middle-age. The introspective lyrics, silky vocal delivery and strange harmonics recall Hejira, her last good album before this. The jazzy introduction to “The Only Joy in Town” recalls the sounds of Hejira even more so, there’s something slightly Arabic about the way the horns slink. But nothing can top “Slouching Towards Bethlehem,” Mitchell has taken W. B. Yeats poem and set it to music. Patti Smith did something similar with “Spell” on Peace & Noise, which just makes me even more convinced that Joni Mitchell and Patti Smith both decided to take folk music and distort it to their own passions.

While Night Ride Home is a very good album, there’s something preventing it from being as great as anything between Ladies of the Canyon and The Hissing of Summer Lawns. It’s about as good as, you guessed it, Hejira. Which isn’t a slight, for that is also a rich, deeply rewarding effort that is quite often highly difficult to listen to because Mitchell has chosen to follow her artistic muse so far out into uncharted territory that we’re just not familiar with it. But that is why she is an icon, an influence upon generations of women (and men) and not some flash-in-the-pan pop tart. DOWNLOAD: “Slouching Towards Bethlehem”