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Album Art

Track: Lesson in Survival
Artist: Joni Mitchell
Album: For the Roses

Artist Bio

Joni Mitchell Image

Name: Joni Mitchell
Spotify Genres: folk, folk rock, singer-songwriter
Followers: 1,630,329
Popularity:

61/100

Biography

Canadian musician, singer songwriter and painter. Born on November 7, 1943, in Fort Macleod, Alberta, as Roberta Joan Anderson. In June 1965, she married [a3568909] and she kept his name when they divorced early in 1967, upon which she left for New York City and its folk music scene. (She had already begun singing in small nightclubs in her native Western Canada and then Toronto.) In New York, she quickly achieved fame first as a songwriter (e.g. with Chelsea Morning, Both Sides Now or Woodstock) and then as a singer in her own right. After David Crosby had discovered her playing in Florida, he introduced her to his folk rock friends in Los Angeles and its Laurel Canyon scene, where Mitchell would find a home. Early 1968 she recorded her debut LP for Reprise in Hollywood, and by the time of her third album she has her first gold album. Mitchell rose above the folk idiom and had pop hits such as Big Yellow Taxi (1970), Free Man In Paris and Help Me, the last two from 1974's best-selling Court And Spark. Mitchell's distinctive harmonic guitar style, and piano arrangements all grew more complex through the 1970s as she was deeply influenced by jazz, melding it with pop, folk and rock on experimental albums like 1976's Hejira. She worked closely with jazz greats including Pat Metheny, Wayne Shorter, Jaco Pastorius, Herbie Hancock, and on a 1979 record released after his death, Charles Mingus. From the 1980s on, Mitchell reduced her recording and touring schedule but turned again toward pop, making greater use of synthesizers and direct political protest in her lyrics, which often tackled social and environmental themes alongside romantic and emotional ones. Mitchell is also a visual artist. She created the artwork for each of her albums, and in 2000 described herself as a "painter derailed by circumstance." Mitchell stopped recording over the last several years, focusing more attention on painting, but in 2007 she released Shine, her first album of new songs in 9 years. In 2020, Mitchell started [l1930164], a series of releases containing previously unreleased material from her personal vaults, along with box sets of the studio albums. She was inducted into the Songwriters Hall of Fame and Rock And Roll Hall of Fame (Performer) in 1997. Blue, her starkly personal 1971 album, was voted #30 in Rolling Stone magazine's 500 Greatest Albums Of All Time list of 2003. See also [l285067].

Source: Discogs

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Discogs Release Info

Release Cover

Release: Joni Mitchell - For The Roses
Year: 1972
Genres: Rock, Folk, World, & Country
Styles: Folk Rock, Soft Rock

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Source: MusicBrainz

LYRICS

Lesson in Survival
Spinning out on turns
That gets you tough
Guru books-the Bible
Only a reminder
That you're just not good enough
You need to believe in something
Once I could in our love
Black road
Double yellow line
Friends and kin
Campers in the kitchen
That's fine sometimes
But I know my needs
My sweet tumbleweed
I need more quiet times
By a river flowing
You and me
Deep kisses
And the sun going down

Maybe it's paranoia
Maybe it's sensitivity
Your friends protect you
Scrutinize me
I get so damn timid
Not at all the spirit
That's inside of me
Oh baby I can't seem to make it
With you socially
There's this reef around me
I'm looking way out at the ocean
Love to see that green water in motion
I'm going to get a boat
And we can row it
If you ever get the notion
To be needed by me
Fresh salmon frying
And the tide rolling in

I went to see a friend tonight
'Was very late when I walked in
My talking as it rambled
Revealed suspicious reasoning
The visit seemed to darken him
I came in as bright
As a neon light
And I burned out
Right there before him
I told him these things
I'm telling you now
Watched them buckle up
In his brow
When you dig down deep
You lose good sleep
And it makes you
Heavy company
I will always love you
Hands alike
Magnet and iron
The souls