Autumn Music 1: Joni

Yesterday I knew. It was the combination of pulling out sweaters, turning on the heat, putting a comforter on the bed, and feeling cool breezes that told me. It was the season for Joni Mitchell, Aimee Mann and Bryan Ferry. Autumn. Real autumn. Not that tease of autumn where the weather flirts with cold and then bounces back to ninety the next day. No, the kind of autumn where in the afternoons you leave the house in a cardigan and don’t need it, but by the time you walk home that evening, there’s a chill and the wind brings goosebumps.

Seasons bring music with them for me. I’m not talking about Christmas music which sometimes feels all wrong for winter, but rather subtle feelings that are linked to albums, chords, voices, lyrics and the right kind of evocation of a mood. Radio has always known this when it comes to summer. You need good car songs for the summer, songs that you can hear from other cars at stoplights and sing along to, songs that waft across alleys and down streets from parties that spill outside. Summer is the realm of the catchy hook, the thumping hypnotic backbeat, the earworm, the chorus that you regret hearing and love secretly. Justin Timberlake’s “Summer Love” is a perfect specimen – and not just because he named it as such. This is a windows-down song. Rihanna’s “Umbrella” is the same way. Summer songs are shared and public because we spend the warmer months outside remembering that other people live outside.

Autumn brings the windows down, or open halfway for delicious chills. Autumn brings private moments of music listening. Autumn brings mugs of hot apple cider and, for me, Joni Mitchell’s Night Ride Home from 1991. This is later Joni, the beginning of her third phase, after her folkie popularity, her explorations through jazz, she came out the other side with quieter songs that hit hard with deep issues. Not that, as my friend over at Black Tie and Bloody Marys pointed out to me recently, she hadn’t always been ragging on the problems of America and its obsessions with consumerism. But her humor and her bite and acid matured at the same time that she became nostalgic and cozy in her arrangements. Night Ride Home is intimate, filled with the sounds of late summer evenings and the uncomfortable noises of bedsprings creaking in the night. Joni’s voice is pulled in close to you as she tells you about her childhood in the lush beautiful and jazzy “Come In From the Cold.” “The Windfall (Everything For Nothing)” with its circling background music is uneasy and cautionary. In “Passion Play” she sings one of my favorite lines, “Who ya gonna get to do the dirty work when all the slaves are free?” The question always cuts at me the way it’s intended to, asking about the limits of so much. When Joni puts W. B. Yeats’ famous poem “The Second Coming” to music in this album she plays up its apocalyptic nature, its uncertainty as we all slouch towards Bethlehem.


I slouch here on the sofa, in a cardi, with a cup of tea.