30 years ago today: Joni Mitchell released Turbulent Indigo

Originally published in Hot Press in 1994:

In the striking self-portrait which adorns the cover of Turbulent Indigo, Joni Mitchell styles herself as Vincent Van Gogh, the tortured genius of the album’s title-track. But once inside the grooves themselves, it’s clear that as a painter of words and music this woman still owes precious few artistic debts to anyone.

Like all the best self-portraits, Turbulent Indigo is at once introspective and outward-looking. Her first album in three years, it finds Joni Mitchell still singing personal songs of love and loss, but also gazing out at an increasingly brutal world with an unflinching eye for the telling detail.

Thus, the opening ‘Sunny Sunday’, set against her trademark jazzy acoustic guitar, meticulously personalises the issue of gun control in the plight of a desperate woman who sits in the darkness of her home, firing her pistol at the streetlight. “She always misses, but the day she hits, that’s the day she’ll leave,” Mitchell sings, making an unmistakable connection with what Dylan Thomas meant by the dying of the light.

‘Sex Kills’, wherein distant shards of electric guitar lend an icy edge, goes for the bigger picture.

Back in the days when they’d started to tear down paradise and put up a parking lot, there was still a sense of freedom to be explored on the white lines of the freeway and with it the likelihood of passing entertainment or solace, even if it was only in the arms of some late-night backwoods coyote on the prowl. In the world of Joni Mitchell looks out on now, she sees few possibilities for redemption: “The ulcerated ozone/Those tumours of the skin/This hostile sun beatin’ down on the massive mess we’re in/And the gas leaks/And the oil spills/And sex kills everything/Sex kills . . .”

In ‘Not To Blame’ she expertly and angrily nails the perverse doublethink of the wife-beater, and in ‘The Magdalene Laundries’, her bitter lament about one of Ireland’s national shames, she cleverly turns religious propaganda back on itself: “These bloodless brides of Jesus/If they had just once glimpsed their groom/Then they’d know and they’d drop the stones/Concealed behind their rosaries.”

If all this suggests a relentlessly heavy listening experience, the instantly accessible music of Turbulent Indigo seductively argues otherwise. The album is full of beguiling melodies while Mitchell herself is in splendid form, her voice, as ever, intimate but compelling – never in-yer-face but definitely in your ear. And the arrangements are illuminated by some memorable cameos, including Wayne Shorter’s soprano sax, wheeling and scattering like a flock of birds across the lush canvas of the title-track, or guest Seal’s multi-tracked backing vocals which lend an attractive pop/Philly appeal to ‘How Do You Stop’.

The opposite of the hard nut with the soft centre, Turbulent Indigo offers a rich and rare treat in mellow, late-night music. But listen just a little closer and you might find that sleep is slow to come.

– Liam Mackey