The Night Ride Home Radio Program

Geffen Records
February 1991

This program featured an interview with Joni as well as songs from her new album. Geffen Records issued an edited version on a promotional CD for broadcast in Canada.

Geffen Records #GEFC/SD 24302, 1991
Transcribed from the audio by Lindsay Moon

John Major: This Joni Mitchell's "Night Ride Home." I'm John Major. During the next hour, we'll introduce you to the new album from one of the most innovative and influential musicians of our time, Joni Mitchell.

(Music up: "Nothing Can be Done.")

Joni Mitchell: See, I see the album as the modern form and has been for the last 30 years. It's, to me, the equivalent of a symphony.

(Music up: Excerpt from "Come in From the Cold.")

JM: The critics have not been kind to me for many years, but I get my nurturing and my will to go on from the man, or the woman, in the street.

(Music up: Excerpt from "Night Ride Home.")

JM: Pop music likes its happiness major and its tragedy minor and perhaps a blue note here and there.

(Music up: Excerpt from "Cherokee Louise.")

JM: I think if I'm a folksinger, then Marvin Gaye was a folksinger; Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young are folksingers. If I'm a folksinger, everything is folk music.

(Music up: Excerpt from "Slouching Towards Bethlehem.")

JM: I've been working on the fringes of the pop arena all the way along. I never wanted to be a star. I'm a Canadian (laughs).

(Music up: Excerpt from "Ray's Dad's Cadillac.")

John Major: We'll delve deeper into Joni Mitchell's "Night Ride Home" as well as hear Joni's thoughts on the album and other things right after this.

(Music up: Excerpt from "Night Ride Home.")

John Major: Welcome back to Joni Mitchell's "Night Ride Home." Since the release of her debut album in 1967, the only constant in Joni Mitchell's career has been change. It's been a very varied musical evolution. "Night Ride Home" is Joni's 16th album.

JM: See, I see the album as the modern form and has been for the last 30 years. It's, to me, the equivalent of a symphony which was a popular form in its time. Well, the symphony is a bit archaic. To make a good album, which is an extended piece of music with ten movements, as opposed to an extended piece of music with four movements, is a difficult thing to do.

To make it move well from side to side, you know, the programming plays a big piece of it. Symphonies generally are all in the same key, which means -- and they have a certain structure, I think. The loud part is in a certain place to keep the husbands in the audience from falling asleep, the ones that have been dragged there by their music-loving wives.

An album has different intentions. You can start with a ballad or it can start with a bang. The main thing is to keep the colors -- if you think of each piece, each of the ten pieces, as a color the juxtaposition of those colors must be placed in such a way that they augment each other, that they don't cancel each other out. So you wouldn't maybe put two similar grooves back-to-back, although you might to sustain a mood. So like I say there are no real rules.

Some people don't think of an album as a total work, they just think of it as a collection. And many albums only have a couple of good songs on it and the rest of it is filler just to get money for -- you know, bands will write a lot of things that aren't that good, but it doesn't matter if they get a hit off of it, it'll sell and they'll make money even if the songs are bad.

So to write a symphony now is kind of an anachronism. Symphonies sound like what they were, you know, horse and carriage times and winds blowing. We are mostly urban people now, and the sounds of our cities and the electricity that runs through them is a part of the music.

(Music up: Excerpt from "Come in From the Cold.")

John Major: "Night Ride Home"'s first single release was "Come in From the Cold," a song that on the album clocks in at seven and a half minutes.

JM: At the time we finished the album, it became apparent in playing it for company people that "Come in From the Cold" was sticking out. And they asked me at that time while we were mixing -- my husband said, you know, Joni, we've got to cut this down in case they want it as a single, and I was so close to it then, I said no way.

See, we finished it last summer. We turned it in around Christmastime, and when the feedback started coming back, we hadn't played it for about six or eight months, I guess. And when the call came to cut it, I said, okay, I know how to cut it, and we just thought of it this way like a teaser for a movie.

(Music up: "Come in From the Cold.")

John Major: From her new album "Night Ride Home," that's Joni Mitchell, "Come in From the Cold." For the album "Night Ride Home," Joni used all the available modern musical tools, including the Fairlight synthesizer to create the sound of instruments like the oboe.

JM: I wrote on the liner notes that I had played the oboe. In fact, I played the Fairlight oboe, but I thought what difference does it make whether I play it with my lips or my fingers. You know, I played it; it's my composition. Some of these sounds do not have names. They're sort of like strings or they're sort of like an organ or their sort of like -- and usually you list it technically profit keyboards, or it will say Joni played keyboards. Well, that's a very vague thing. So this time I thought where an instrument has a name, I'm going to name it and bypass all of this technical talk.

And it was interesting because everybody said, I didn't know you played oboe (laugh) you know, but all of the string arraignments, all of the violins on this record and the horn arrangements with the exception of what Wayne Shorter plays and even the arrangement of Wayne because he played 10 or 12 tracks on each piece and from that I made a composition of what I felt were his best ideas are under my supervision.

John Major: And here's a song from the album featuring Joni Mitchell on the Fairlight oboe. This is "The Only Joy in Town."

(Music up: "The Only Joy in Town.")

John Major: Joni Mitchell with "The Only Joy in Town" from her latest album "Night Ride Home." More of Joni Mitchell and "Night Ride Home" coming up after this.

(Music up: "Ray's Dad's Cadillac.")

John Major: You're listening to Joni Mitchell's new album "Night Ride Home." Joni, who's always aware of an album's overall shape and form, paid particular attention to the sequencing of songs on "Night Ride Home."

JM: With this album, I probably tried about 50 to 100 -- I didn't count -- but a lot of different combinations of sequence, and pockets would develop where a mood would be created that would be unwanted. You know, it would get too somber or -- I don't think I could even articulate all of the things -- the reasons why I nixed them. It was all more intuition than intellect, I think. You know, just, 'nope, that doesn't work, they're killing each other off.'

And once the sequence was right, not only do I think it's the best sequence that it could have been from band to band in ten linear movements, but if you have a tape, it even goes round and round, you know, like the tenth piece leads back to the first piece nicely. So I'm pleased with the sequencing on it.

John Major: Another song on "Night Ride Home," "Cherokee Louise," features one of Joni's favorite musicians, saxophone great, Wayne Shorter.

JM: Oh, Wayne Shorter is a genius. He really is a genius. He thinks in pictures. I mean he's -- every definition that I've ever read of a genius applies to Wayne. Once you've played with him, there is no horn player on the planet that can hold a candle to him. And I tend to like the soprano sax better than lower saxes, and he can play the lower saxes as well. But on soprano he is just a giant because he's assimilated so many idioms and he's still evolving like Miles Davis. There aren't a lot of people who maintain a growth level like that for such a prolonged period of time, for life. Picasso, Miles, Wayne.

John Major: Despite its obvious appeal musically, "Cherokee Louise" deals with a painful subject.

JM: "Cherokee Louise" came to me in a moment of self-pity. I had all kinds of unattractive changes stacking up on me, multiple betrayals, and I was feeling sorry for myself one night. And suddenly -- I was saying look at this injustice, injustice after injustice after injustice, and I suddenly remembered Cherokee Louise -- which is a fictional name but there's a real person -- what had happened to her and I thought, oh, gee, you know, here's a greater, you know, miscarriage of justice that she was sent to prison because no one would take her in and because she was an Indian and because this man had molested her. Through no fault of her own, this innocent child was sent to prison. The song doesn't even cover that.

(Music up: "Cherokee Louise.")

John Major: From Joni Mitchell's new album "Night Ride Home," that's "Cherokee Louise."

John Major: While we know what Joni the singer is like and we know Joni the songwriter, what's Joni like in the recording studio as a producer? She says she likens her style to that of a film director.

JM: Well, a lot of it's visual first. You know, you envision the imagery and you transcribe it into words and you parquet it to the melody, hopefully keeping the natural inflection as much as possible of spoken English -- Canadian spoken English (laughs) with a bit of a lilt, you know, an Irish and Scottish lilt.

John Major: And here's another song from Joni Mitchell's "Night Ride Home" album, "Nothing Can Be Done."

(Music up: "Nothing Can Be Done.")

John Major: "Nothing Can Be Done," Joni Mitchell from the "Night Ride Home" album. We'll hear more after this.

This is a one-hour listen to Joni Mitchell's latest album "Night Ride Home."

(Music up: "The Windfall (Everything for Nothing).")

John Major: Despite her years in the spotlight, Joni has never played the "Hollywood game." In fact, in the big picture, what really counts for her is the response of her fans, and Joni's had some moving responses.

JM: The critics have not been kind to me for many years, but I get my nurturing and my will to go on from the man, or the woman, in the street. And there was an incident particularly touching -- I mean there are a lot of them -- but one kind of stands out in my mind, mainly, I guess, because it's a mystery to me and I didn't ask questions at the time that I perhaps should have.

But I was in Bath. I was recording "Chalk Mark..." at Peter Gabriel's studio which is near the city of Bath, and I was walking alone up the street and I heard my name called and a black woman came charging uphill and threw her arms around me in gratitude for my music. It was very touching and I should have asked her what it meant or what in particular had reached her or how she felt as a South African woman coming from an Apartheid situation. I don't know how long she'd been in England that she could rush up to a total stranger, a white woman, and throw her arms around round her in this sisterly clasp, you know.

These are the things that make you feel -- especially myself because my work can get quite intimate and self-revealing, not all of it, but some. You know, so I am out on a limb because people assume that everything is about me. Even when I'm not out on a limb, I'm out on a limb.

John Major: The title track to Joni Mitchell's "Night Ride Home" creates a musical picture of a magical evening. An uncredited addition to the song is a very musical cricket.

JM: It's a charming, friendly sound, and he sat behind the curtain for several nights. You know, we couldn't really catch him. We left the door open and thought, well, he'll find his way out again, but it's a welcome guest as a bug (laughs.)

(Music up: "Night Ride Home.")

John Major: That's the title track from Joni Mitchell's new album "Night Ride Home." Over the years, critics have referred to Joni as a folksinger. That label has bothered her in the past. But lately, she's come to terms with it.

JM: I've done some thinking about it. I asked myself why I was so offended by that title. There was a book auction last year or the year before -- time goes so quickly, I'm not certain now. And I forget what the organization was. But these books were raffled off. We were to pick a book that was important to us, a book that we loved in hardback version, and we were to sign it and it was auctioned off and Jane Siberry auctioned a book and so did Leonard and so did I. Leonard Cohen was listed in the program as a poet. Jane Siberry was listed, I believe, as a pop composer. And I was listed as a folksinger. And I found that offensive. You know, I thought Canada doesn't really understand me, my talent. Because I entered the game there as a folksinger, singing folk songs. The moment I crossed the border into the United States, I began to write my own music.

My music has roots in classical music. The harmony that came out of my playing in open tunings, of which I have about 45 now, modalities, almost like Eastern ragas, and the internal harmonies that I heard, harmony being a depiction of your internal emotion, my emotions internally being quite complex. Never is my joy completely joyous, there is always a thread of dissonance running through it. The dissonance today is the black oil washing up on Middle Eastern shores, and there's always a dissonance, especially if you think a lot. So my joy is always against a backdrop of a world in trouble. So the chords are more complex than simple emotions.

Pop music likes its happiness major and its tragedy minor and perhaps a blue note here and there. I think if I'm a folksinger, then Marvin Gaye was a folksinger; Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young are folksingers. If I'm a folksinger, everything is folk music.

John Major: Now from Joni Mitchell's "Night Ride Home" album, let's listen to "Two Grey Rooms."

(Music up: "Two Grey Rooms.")

John Major: Joni Mitchell with "Two Grey Rooms." More from Joni's new album "Night Ride Home" coming up after this.

You're listening to Joni Mitchell's "Night Ride Home" album.

(Music up: Excerpt from "Passion Play (When All The Slaves Are Free).")

John Major: As one of the world's most gifted singer-songwriters, Joni offers some insights into her craft.

JM: To me, boundaries make the soil sick. Boundaries cause drought. Boundaries cause war. You know, I really am an old Indian. I hate civilization basically at the roots of me, and my albums from the beginning have said so.

The first one was a conflict between the city and the seaside, you know, like nature versus urbanism and what man was doing to this gorgeous green and blue creation that he was given the custodianship of and forgot and gouged the mother, you know, gouged and dredged out the coal and the oil, and you know that oil, I bet you anything that oil -- it's not like it's down there for no reason, you know. It probably oils the plates. And when it's all sucked out, God knows what is going to happen. You know, man is a cancer on this globe and he was supposed to be the custodian, and I'm mad at my species and I always have been and it leaks into the pieces in varying degrees. You know, from "Woodstock," from the first record on.

John Major: One of the highlights of "Night Ride Home" is Joni's adaptation of W. B. Yeats's poem, "The Second Coming." Joni recalls how it came about.

JM: My husband was producing an artist in our house, we have a studio here, named David Baerwald, who is a good writer. And he had been laboring for five years to set a poem to music called "The Second Coming" by W. B. Yeats. And he'd been talking about this, and in the back room in the studio there was a stack of books and among them was a book of essays by Joan Didion called "Slouching Towards Bethlehem." And the poem was printed at the head of it. So he discovered this and one day he came running into the house and said, here's the poem I was telling you about.

Now, in the meantime, our cat had gone into heat and this was a very small cat, and without moving a muscle in her little face, she makes the most unbelievable sounds. So one day we took the DAT and we sampled her and we put her in the Fairlight and when you played the sound -- the sound comes up on the Fairlight at F above middle C, but then you can modulate it, so F down an octave below middle C, this sound was like all of the grief in the world. It was the most diabolical sound. And I said, ooh, scary, you know. Once the right piece of music comes along, we'll put it on there.

Now David shows me this poem by W. B. Yeats and in the second stanza, it says -- now I forget his actual words because I remember mine now, I changed them some -- 'shaped like a lion / it has the head of a man / with a gaze as blank and pitiless as the sun.' When I see this image on the page, a lightbulb goes off in my head and I say to myself, that's where El Cafe goes, that's where this sound that we have in the Fairlight goes.

So I set about to structure it, to make it singable, since the poem had an almost singable first verse and the second verse was pretty much prose. I arranged it into four verses along with choruses trying to be as true as possible to the text and keeping the style of his first stanza. The repeating words in the first line repeat in the verses that I reconstructed. And the Yeats estate has a policy generally of not allowing his poetry to be set to music unless it is by a classical musician, whatever that is by today's standards.

Anyway, blessedly, we sent them a pretty much finished piece with our fingers crossed, praying that they wouldn't reject it and they accepted it. So this was very good.

(Music up: "Slouching Towards Bethlehem.")

John Major: "Slouching Towards Bethlehem" from Joni Mitchell's latest album "Night Ride Home."

For the last hour you've been listening to selections from the album along with Joni's comments.

(Music up: Excerpt from "Night Ride Home.")

John Major: Joni Mitchell's "Night Ride Home" Special, was written and produced by Interviews Unlimited, Bob Mackowitz, Doug Thompson, and Alan Lysat. Special thanks to Gloria Boyce of Peter Asher Management, Christina Rood of Geffen Records, and Brian Eagle, and, of course, the 'Lady of the Canyon' herself, Joni Mitchell. Engineering, Jeff Sheridan, and I'm John Major. Thanks for joining us for Joni Mitchell's "Night Ride Home."