Joni Mitchell started the 2000s by doing what many artists of her generation have tried: releasing an album of standards.
Both Sides Now features Mitchell’s renditions of such classics as ‘At Last’ and ‘Stormy Weather,’ along with new versions of a couple of her best-loved songs. The album is sequenced as the arc of a love affair, from the first blush of new love through heartbreak, disillusionment and finally acceptance.
Joni Mitchell’s sophomore album, Clouds, came out in 1969, a year after her well-received debut. Mitchell took over the production reins, as she would on every subsequent album she released.
Clouds features two of Mitchell’s best-loved songs — ‘Chelsea Morning’ and ‘Both Sides, Now’ — recorded by her for the first time after charting for other artists (Judy Collins’s version of the latter song reached the top ten of both the Pop and Easy Listening charts, though Mitchell was reportedly not a fan of the recording).
The new season of Mad Men is around the corner and the anticipation has me remembering the lovely way the previous season wrapped up.
Season Six as a whole was one of the more scattered of the series’ run, at least partly by design. As the 60s started to bleed into the 70s, the outside world increasingly encroached on the usually insulated characters. The assassinations of Martin Luther King Jr. and Robert Kennedy, as well as the Vietnam War, left everybody shaken.
