Spotify Release Info

Album Art

Track: Tax Free
Artist: Joni Mitchell
Album: Dog Eat Dog

Artist Bio

Joni Mitchell Image

Name: Joni Mitchell
Spotify Genres: folk, singer-songwriter, folk rock
Followers: 1,625,580
Popularity:

64/100

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

Special Offer

Joni Mitchell on Amazon

Check this out

Popular Tracks on Spotify

Discogs Release Info

Release Cover

Release: Joni Mitchell - Dog Eat Dog
Year: 1985
Genres: Electronic, Rock
Styles: Pop Rock, Synth-pop

SEE ALSO

Related Artists

Related Works

No additional relationship information found.

Source: MusicBrainz

LYRICS

Front rooms
Back rooms
Slide into tables
Crowd into bathrooms
Joke around
Cheap talk
Deep talk
Talk, talk, talk around the clock
Crawl home
Lie down
Teeth chatter
Heart pounds
I don't feel so good
I don't feel so good
Push a button to escape
Preacher on the tube crying "Lord!"
There's evil in this land

Evangelist:
"Rock and roll music!"
"Cast down these dope-fiends
And there noisy bands!"
"Damn their souls!"

Preacher preaching love like vengeance
Preaching love like hate
Calling for large donations
Promising estates
Rolling lawns and angel bands
Behind the pearly gates
You know, he will have his in this life
But yours will have to wait
He's immaculately tax free

"Mulitiple hundreds of thousands of ..."
Tax free
"Hundreds and millions of dollars"
Tax free
"A hundred billion dollars!
And who is paying the price?
Who, who
"Your children are"

Pissed off
Jacked up
Scream into the mike
Spit into the loving cup
Strut like a rooster
March like a man
God's hired hands and the devil bands
Packing the same grandstands
Different clothes
"Pot in their pockets!"
Different hair
"Sexually active"
Raise a screaming guitar or a bible in the air
Theatre of anguish
Theatre of glory
God's hired hands and the devil bands
Oh come let us adore--ME!
Lord, there's danger in this land
You get witch-hunts and wars
When church and state hold hands

Fuck it!
Tonight I'm going dancing
With the drag queens and the punks
Big beat deliver me
From this sanctimonious skunk
We're no flaming angels
And he's not heaven sent
How can he speak for the Prince of Peace
When he's hawk-right militant
And he's immaculately tax free

"Our nation has lost its guts!"
Save me
"Our nation has lost its strength"
Tax free
"Our nation has whimpered and cried"
Save me
"And petted the Castros"
Tax free
"The Khomeinis' and the Kaddafis'"
Save me
"For so long"
Tax free
"That we don't know how to act like a man"
Save me
"I think that we should turn the United States Marines
loose on that little island south of Florida and
stop that problem!"
"I am preachin' love, I am!"