Joni Mitchell
Court and Spark (Asylum)
Vicki Peterson of The Bangles, currently writing and performing in a duo with husband John Cowsill (The Cowsills, Smithereens, Beach Boys), told us about her love for a Joni Mitchell gem.
Vicki Peterson: Whenever I am asked about my favorite, well, anything really, I immediately become apprehensive. Favorite when? Today? Last month? When I was twelve? I balked at the idea of choosing a favorite album because there are so many that have become beloved over the years. There’s music that helped shape me as a person or an artist, albums I loved falling asleep to as a kid, songs that never fail to cheer me or make me want to dance…but a favorite album?
Okay, here’s one. As someone who has proclaimed her never-ceasing love for the Beatles since kindergarten, I am choosing a Joni Mitchell album, 1974’s Court and Spark. I had long admired Joni Mitchell, with her perfect blonde bangs and inscrutable guitar tunings, ever since I first heard her angelic folk songs, but this expansion into jazz arrangements and layered voices seemed so… grown up. I was in high school, starting a band with my best friend and writing songs using pretty simple rock and folk guitar chords. I was not then and likely never will be well-versed in the world of jazz, so the musicianship on this record blew my mind.
I have read that Joni struggled to find the right crew to collaborate with, ultimately choosing Tom Scott and the LA Express to help bring her ideas to tape. Here’s the thing, though. As much effort and attention as must have been spent on these arrangements, they feel so natural, perfectly supporting and surrounding her exquisite songs. And the songs! Personal, confessional, revealing in that unique Joni way, they also painted me a very clear picture of what it was like to be an adult—and a woman—in the music industry in Los Angeles at that time. That absolutely fascinated me. You fall in love with a “sweet-talking ladies man”; feel out of place at fancy parties with stylish, manipulative people; get into therapy; sit alone in the Hollywood hills, waiting for a lover who may or may not ever show up…The band creates a soundscape of traffic, beauty fresh and fading, an underlying sadness—it could only be LA.
Court and Spark is an album I listened to over and over wearing headphones and lying on the floor of our family’s living room, until one of my parents would bust me, sternly informing me that it was three am and a school night. I learned it by heart. I know that I am not alone in this because, years later when I actually was a young woman in the LA music scene, I stood in the kitchen at a party in the Hollywood Hills and—along with my friends Susan Cowsill and Michael Steele—sang the entire album a capella, beginning to end. People were jostling us, trying to get to the beer in the fridge, and we sang out the harmonies and words that were ingrained in our hearts—for the sheer joy of it.
Vicki Peterson & John Cowsill's album Long After The Fire is out now. They perform at McCabe’s Guitar Shop on March 14.
Photo by Pamela Springsteen.
