Fairlight Instruments Corporate Promo
1985

Fairlight Corporate video promoting the CMI (Computer Musical Instrument), CVI and Voicetracker and includes interviews with Joni as well as Tom Bailey. Joni speaks of the CMI as an "inspiring instrument" and is impressed by the seemingly endless reproduction of sounds on this "awesome machine."

The Fairlight CMI is credited in the Album Notes of Dog Eat Dog, Chalk Mark In a Rainstorm, Dreamland and The Beginning of Survival.

Joni is interviewed at 1:54 to 2:58

The use of modern technological machines, such as the Fairlight CMI, has had, and continues to have, a profound effect on Joni's music.

Joni Mitchell: I wrote on the [Night Ride Home] 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.")
-----The Night Ride Home Radio Program (1991)