Friday, 1 March 2019

Joni Mitchell - Previews Of The Past (Live 1994)


Rating: 4/5

Review:
Great music, lots of talk

This is a recording of an interview interspersed with live songs broadcast on the day of release of Turbulent Indigo in 1994. The cover says it is a Canadian broadcast, but the interviewer says clearly that it’s a Southern Californian station.

The music is great. It is always a pleasure to hear Joni play live and she’s terrific here. The word genius is now overused and devalued, but I think she is genuinely someone to whom it can be justly applied; she’s fantastically talented and skilful, and she also thinks and composes in ways that ordinary mortals don’t, however good they are. There’s a good mix of songs, with several from Turbulent Indigo, of course, and her voice and guitar work are sensational, as always.

Much of the disc is talk. The interviewer isn’t bad; she sounds a little out of her depth sometimes, but fair enough – I most of us would be if we were interviewing Joni Mitchell. It’s interesting to hear Joni talk, of course, but as an album to keep and play repeatedly...hmmm. There are just six songs here among the talk (around 25 minutes of music in total) and, excellent though they are, that’s not a lot of music really.

So...I’d say this is one for the completists. There’s absolutely nothing wrong with any of it and the sound quality is fine, but you’ll need to decide whether it’s something you’re really going to play enough to make it worth buying.

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