NOT EXACTLY A duets album, Chalk Mark In A Rain Storm nonetheless opened Joni Mitchell's music up to a wide cast of guest voices. While some proved to be simpatico - Don Henley, Willie Nelson, Peter Gabriel - the appearance of Billy Idol's comedy mugging on the MTV rock of Dancin' Clown ("C'moan! Wow! Woo!") may have further revealed Joni's soft spot for a rebel, but possibly marked the nadir of her recorded career.
It was but a blip, though. Instead, Chalk Mark found Mitchell, on what was her best album of the '80s, re- discovering her voice amid the omnipresent synths and samplers and drum machines of the era. Made with the core trio of herself, co-producer, bassist and husband Larry Klein, and guitarist Michael Landau, it saw Joni herself pick up the guitar again after ditching it entirely on 1985's Dog Eat Dog.
Work on this record began in 1986 when Mitchell and Klein visited Peter Gabriel at his Ashcombe Farm home, near Bath, where he'd converted the barn to a studio and was putting the finishing touches to his commercial breakthrough LP, So. Gabriel offered Joni studio time and the result was the pair duetting as whispering lovers on Chalk Mark's opener, My Secret Place.
The more atmospheric parts of So seem to have been the template for Mitchell's 13th studio album, not least in the way she employed the same drummer, Manu Katché, whose polyrhythmic parts were then over- engineered in the gated, gunshot fashion of the period, ultimately dating the sound of the LP. The stripped- out production - a bit cold and thin, while weirdly glossy - was apparently more to Larry Klein's taste. "I would have made Chalk Mark In A Rain Storm denser but Klein stopped me," Mitchell claimed in 2007.
It was in its warmer, more layered passages that Chalk Mark was at its best. Number One tackled '80s money-grabbing and ladder-climbing over an angular drum machine beat and the hushed vocal support of The Cars' Benjamin Orr. An update of Bob Nolan's 1936 dustbowl country ballad Cool Water, with new couplets by Mitchell, became about pollution, and fittingly featured Willie Nelson. "Some devils had a plan," Mitchell sang, before Nelson responded with "buried poison in the sand". "Don't drink it, man," Joni warned him. The fact that the song's production echoed the urban noir of The Blue Nile made the overall effect all the more unusual.
Equally striking was the slow-burning The Tea Leaf Prophecy (Lay Down Your Arms), which was based on the strange circumstances surrounding the singer's parents' meeting in Canada during the Second World War (as foretold to Joni's mother by a fortune teller) and invited Wendy and Lisa (fresh from the break-up of Prince's The Revolution) into the fold. Elsewhere, there were plenty of other highspots - Henley's line-swapping turn on game-of-love study Snakes And Ladders, the portrait of a Vietnam vet suffering PTSD in The Beat Of Black Wings - to offer proof that, after a tough decade, Joni was right back on track.
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