Time Capsule: Joni Mitchell, Turbulent Indigo

Our Lady of the Canyon’s 1994 album, which turned 30 a few weeks ago, was a triumphant, Grammy-winning comeback about how it is up to us to make a mess in the dumb luck of our collective living.

by Matt Mitchell
Paste Magazine
November 16, 2024

Last month, I got to see Joni Mitchell perform at the Hollywood Bowl in Los Angeles, in what may very well be one of the very last concerts she ever puts on - and thus, one of the last times any of us will get to see her sing. The Joni Jam is a complicated endeavor, one that has to balance two wolves: commercialism and homage, two forces equally measurable and, likely, incredibly necessary. On one hand, the Joni Jam format is an opportune vehicle for the greatest songwriter of all time to take a victory lap in the presence of the very musicians she paved the way for; elsewhere, it's hard to watch such brilliant musicians crowd-source timeless work into such an ingenuine experience. Now, I don't think Jam bandleaders Brandi Carlisle and Blake Mills are patronizing Joni, but I do think their reverence for our lady of the canyon often guides them closer to pity than sentimentality - even if it's unintentional. But then there would come moments where Joni's timeless outmuscled the unavoidable consequence of her aging, like her rousing, unforgettable renditions of "A Case of You" and "Raised on Robbery."

If being chronically online in the Year of our Lord 2024 has taught me anything, it's that the idea of our heroes failing in their art is somehow a taboo practice. The powers that be - over-zealous, problematic fans - do not want to accept that their longtime favorites missed the mark, and anyone who says otherwise should be crucified, doxxed and even black-balled for even insinuating as much. We saw it recently with the whole Halsey vs. Pitchfork debacle, which was preceded by this very publication's pan of Taylor Swift's The Tortured Poets Department inciting a world-wide-web-spanning discourse around artist-fandom relationships and disruptive, detrimental takedowns parading as music criticism. The unfortunate truth is that there are no winners in this game, nor is there a solution - unless you know a good recipe for curing millions of fans of their sycophancy disguised as devotion.

But if you comb through the annals of popular music, you will find some of its greatest visionaries making some of the most god-awful music of their careers. It happened with Bruce Springsteen and the Human Touch/Lucky Town mess, and Bob Dylan has nearly as many clunkers as he does generation-defining albums. Madonna, Paul McCartney, Elton John, Mariah Carey - all of them have made horrendous LPs that most of their fans would rather forget. It's inevitable, and it happened to Joni Mitchell more than once, too. But you can come back from it; possibility is not finite in this business. Turbulent Indigo was, upon its release in October 1994, considered to be Joni's best album in more than a decade, at least since Don Juan's Reckless Daughter in 1977. Her work with Geffen Records, spanning from Wild Things Run Fast in 1982 through Night Ride Home in 1991, was a lackluster addendum in Joni's catalog - and the David Geffen-centric string of letdowns was awfully similar to another Canadian's work with the famed labelhead: Neil Young. In the same period of time, too.

So when Joni joined Neil at Reprise, the label that effectively resurrected the latter's reputation with a triplicate of releases (Freedom, Ragged Glory, Harvest Moon) between 1989 and 1992, the former's addition to the roster seemed like a no-brainer - and maybe it was, later on. Turbulent Indigo is better than the four records that came before it, but it will never exist in the same conversation as anything Joni made between 1969 and 1977 - nor should it. Turbulent Indigo won a Grammy Award (for Best Pop Album), a final turn in Joni's great, generational comeback.

When Joni made Turbulent Indigo, she was 51 years old and hadn't made a groundbreaking, life-altering record since she was 33. Pop music certainly has an ageism issue and always has, but folk music and jazz, those are the genres that are supposed to be allergic to mortality. And maybe that's why Joni was able to take the Grammys stage last winter and deliver a performance of "Both Sides, Now" that only an octogenarian who has, quite literally, looked at love and life from both sides could ever think to muster. And I suppose a part of me felt rejuvenated enough by that one performance to lock in for her Hollywood Bowl show - especially after seeing how, the night before, she was unearthing some deeper cuts, namely "Harlem in Havana" and "Dog Eat Dog." On top of that, she welcomed three Turbulent Indigo tracks into the conversation: "Sunny Sunday," "The Sire of Sorrow (Job's Sad Song)" and "The Magdalene Laundries."

These three songs, in the context of the Joni Jam, sounded best on the Hollywood Bowl stage, if only because they best mirrored their original constructions: jazzy, wayfaring and smooth. Much of that is because Turbulent Indigo welcomed the great Wayne Shorter into the fold, and his soprano saxophone sets songs like "Turbulent Indigo," "Not to Blame" and "Yvette in English" aglow. His patterns, coalesced with a wall of guitars from Joni and, sometimes, Greg Leisz, are often bold like the Henry Lewy-led production on Hejira was 18 years earlier. Sonically, Turbulent Indigo is near the top of Joni Mitchell's discography; lyrically, it's a sector of love and loss as brutal as ever and, often, just as unflinching and sharp - even if "How Do You Stop" is, remarkably, one of her greatest-ever efforts despite being a cover of Dan Hartman and Charlie Midnight's 1987 song penned for James Brown. Joni's version features backing vocals from Seal, drums from James Taylor percussionist Carlos Vega, guitar from Eagles touring picker Steuart Smith and is, in its velvety wash, resound.

Elsewhere, "Not to Blame" - rumored to be about Jackson Browne's alleged domestic violence against Daryl Hannah - is Joni behind a piano nurturing the fortunes and sacrifices of womanhood, in both the name of celebrity and the name of love: "600,000 doctors are putting on rubber gloves and they're poking at the miseries made of love," she sings. "They say they're learning how to spot the battered wives among all the women they see, bleeding through their lives." "The Magdalene Laundries," a recounting of the tortured Irish women confined to the Magdalen Asylums by the Roman Catholic Church, is Joni and Larry Klein building reparations out of sorrow piece by piece. "Prostitutes and destitutes and temptresses like me, fallen women sentenced into dreamless drudgery," Joni bemoans. "Why do they call this heartless place our Lady of Charity? Oh, charity!"

"Sex Kills" was Joni's ode to epidemics, her focus ranging from climate change to capitalism and the AIDS crisis. "All these jack-offs at the office, the rapist in the pool," she wagers. "Oh, and the tragedies in the nurseries, little kids packin' guns to school, the ulcerated ozone, these tumors of the skin, this hostile sun beating down on the massive mess we're in." Sauntering through a soundscape featuring Michael Landau on a thorny, unforgiving electric guitar, "Sex Kills" is one of Joni's toughest efforts, galvanized by her remark that "You can feel it out in traffic, everyone hates everyone." Considering where we're at now, it's a couplet that capsizes a bit firmer today. "Last Chance Lost" reckons with the "tyranny of a long goodbye" and love spoken of as "sacrifice and compromise." Everything is a side-effect. Everything is a cause-and-effect. The world isn't as forgiving as it once was, if it ever was.

On the cover of Turbulent Indigo, Joni Mitchell styles herself as a Vincent Van Gogh type. The title track is about the tragic painter, but it's also about the debts artists settle through their work. A good metaphor for Joni's Reprise comeback, "Turbulent Indigo" is a measurement of access - a question of where art goes when the artist is forbidden such intimacies. "Brash fields crude crows in a scary sky, in a gold frame roped off," Joni sings. "Tourists guided by tourists talking about the madhouse, talking about the ear. The madman hangs in fancy homes they wouldn't let him near!" Joni, ever the provocateur, is famous for having a canon of self-portraits - images that blur the self and the world around us into an intertwined, messy convex mirror. The truth bends toward the light; the cruelty inching onward.

At the Hollywood Bowl, Joni sang the sobering "Sunny Sunday" with some of her greatest admirers seated behind her and some of her greatest admirers seated in front of her. A confluence of stars ached with her beneath the twinkling Los Angeles nightfall; Beck sat in front of me, taking videos of Joni's singing while his daughter sang along; Carly Rae Jepsen, a few rows back, swayed with the Jam; Mark Ronson, Meryl Streep, Chappell Roan, Jane Fonda and Anjelica Houston all took up the same space as me, lingering in the crowd while Joni sang "She always misses, but the day she hits, that's the day she'll leave. That one little victory, that's all she needs" and singing it back to her. Even at her most somber, Joni's music is a gesture of faith that erases barriers between those who decide to listen.

Dylan Thomas once wrote: "Rage, rage against the dying of the light"; Joni Mitchell once wrote: "I was awaited like the rain." And she sang those words to a crowd of thousands last month, her tongue wrapping around "I've lost all taste for life" like a lie. Turbulent Indigo, arched into the thesis of "Sunny Sunday" and its gun-toting protagonist who sits in the darkness of her own home, is not about redemption. No, Joni Mitchell's 15th album is about how the freeway hisses now that the canyons have tumbled into the horizon - how borderlines are barbed wire fences and it is up to us to make a mess in the dumb luck of our collective living. She has soundtracked each of our lives, through the grief and through the glow, for almost 60 years, outliving everything she dreaded and everything she feared would come true. In the wake of the atrocity that plagues Turbulent Indigo, maybe we ought to take a moment to relish the splendors of survival. As Joni demands of us on "Yvette in English": "Please, have this little bit of instant bliss."