Courtesy of expectingrain.com:
the spectator
The Best Joni Mitchell Song Ever
An ode to obsessive listening.
By Ron Rosenbaum
Posted Friday, Dec. 14, 2007, at 10:56 AM ET
[What follows is an excerpt from Rosenbaum's article.]
I have to play it over and over again for hours on end. I can't get enough of it. It's not just a love song: It's a road song, it's a motel song, it's a Southwestern desert song, it's a disappearance and death song. It's a Joni Mitchell song. It's "Amelia."
People get that way about Joni Mitchell songs.
Bob Dylan once told me that he'd written "Tangled up in Blue," the opening song of the much-celebrated Blood on the Tracks, after spending a weekend immersed in JM's Blue (although I think he may have been talking about the whole album, not just the song).
I'm subject to similar bouts of musical addiction, periods when I get tangled up in a song like "Amelia" and play it over and over again for hours, sometimes days at a time.
It's not just Joni Mitchell, not just a certain type of female singer-songwriter I have an obsession with. (Although I do revere Rickie Lee Jones and Rosanne Cash.) It's a certain kind of song, one that seems to activate some sort of hard-wired emotional cell cluster in my brain, I'm (unscientifically) convinced. Songs that do for me what crack does for other people.
http://www.slate.com/id/2180012/
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