It took Joe Muggs until his 30s to get into Mitchell’s grown-up music, but once it clicked, the whole history of music was rewritten in his head
Maybe appropriately, as she is the epitome of “grown-up” music, I didn’t get into Joni until my 30s. Her early albums had been in my parents’ collection but I’d never really paid much heed – until the boho folk revival of the early 2000s had me reassessing them along with their Bert Jansch and Incredible String Band LPs. But it was the music-blogging explosion of the same time, with crate diggers sharing rarities and bootlegs, that really turned my head. That’s how I found the acoustic demos for The Hissing of Summer Lawns – a record whose jazz-fusion and vaudevillian aspects had previously left me cold – and it all fell together.
Listening to these bare-bones sketches, I suddenly understood how the sonic and harmonic ambition of that record wasn’t surface-level affectation but written into the fabric of the songs themselves from the start. Hissing’s complexity wasn’t just 1970s excess, it was a masterpiece of word, sound and thought in Swiss-watch alignment. As I listened to her other albums again in this context, the totality of Joni’s achievement, her auteur genius, hit me anew.
