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Album Art

Track: Shadows and Light
Artist: Joni Mitchell
Album: The Hissing of Summer Lawns

Artist Bio

Joni Mitchell Image

Name: Joni Mitchell
Spotify Genres: folk, singer-songwriter, folk rock
Followers: 1,632,873
Popularity:

60/100

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 - Shadows And Light
Year: 1980
Genres: Rock
Styles: Soft Rock, Fusion

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Source: MusicBrainz

LYRICS

Every picture has its shadows
And it has some source of light
Blindness, blindness and sight
The perils of benefactors
The blessings of parasites
Blindness, blindness and sight
Threatened by all things
Devil of cruelty
Drawn to all things
Devil of delight
Mythical devil of the ever-present laws
Governing blindness, blindness and sight

Suntans in reservation dining rooms
Pale miners in their lantern rays
Night, night and day
Hostage smile on presidents
Freedom scribbled in the subway
It's like night, night and day
Threatened by all things
God of cruelty
Drawn to all things
God of delight
Mythical god of the everlasting laws
Governing day, day and night

Critics of all expression
Judges in black and white
Saying it's wrong, saying it's right
Compelled by prescribed standards
Or some ideals we fight
For wrong, wrong and right
Threatened by all things
Man of cruelty-mark of Cain
Drawn to all things
Man of delight-born again, born again
Man of the laws, the ever-broken laws
Governing wrong, wrong and right
Governing wrong, wrong and right
Wrong and right