To break with the last few days’ tradition, let me annotate my choices for my nine favorite Joni Mitchell albums.
1. Hejira (1976)
An album that should’ve been titled Don Juan’s Reckless Daughter, Joni Mitchell’s eighth album follows a road as gnarled as Jaco Pastorius’ fretless bass. She reassures a lover that she has no regrets, stays in blue hotel rooms listening to Furry sing okay blues, has a few drinks with pal Sharon and confides that she’s a fool when love’s at stake. Her best album because she, her guitar, and her band mates never shut up.
2. Court & Spark (1974)
In which middle America embraces feminism in the form of a sexually curious, intellectually ruthless, and fearless bandleader.
3. The Hissing of Summer Lawns (1975)
Steely Dan’s Gaucho five years early, Bowie’s Station to Station a few months early: trapped in El Lay, telling myths about yourself, observing Edith and her kingpin telling stories about themselves, with John Guerin’s drums and Larry Carlton’s sparkler guitar the only hints that life exists beyond curtains drawn on an August afternoon.
4. For the Roses (1973)
The most difficult album of Mitchell’s classic period; she clings to acoustic forms as if she can’t bring herself to embrace what Russ Kunkel’s drums push her toward on “Blonde in the Bleachers” yet those acoustic forms comprise her densest writing to date. When critics say she influenced Prince, it’s this album he was listening to when recording Parade and Around the World in a Day‘s “Tambourine” and “Condition of the Heart.”
5. Blue (1971)
Her most beloved album moves me less than others, but as an anatomy of melancholy — of arranging guitar, piano, and judicious dulcimer for surgical ends — it’s indomitable.
6. Night Ride Home (1991)
Her voice a slow-burning cigarette in a Styrofoam glass, Mitchell looks backward: to make-out sessions in Ray’s dad’s Cadillac, to dancing a foot apart, to night rides home when the crickets chirp as loudly as your guitar strings snap forty years later. The concluding “Two Grey Rooms” competes for being the most beautiful melody she ever arranged. Key lyric: “One day I’ll just…disappear.”
7. Ladies of the Canyon (1970)
In which she finds her voice, and transitional albums often satisfy like fully realized albums don’t.
8. Don Juan’s Reckless Daughter (1977)
Lots of received gestures — outtakes, experiments better achieved earlier. But the sumptuousness of “Paprika Plains” and the title track offer compensatory pleasures. “Talk to Me” is one of the better jokes told at the expense of Bob Dylan and the acolytes who approach him.
9. Both Sides Now (2000)
Because you really need to hear how she deepens the unbearable title song.
Humanizing The Vacuum 
Alfred, you’re making this on purpose!
See my comment on the E.Costello thread.
And Hejira!! (Heart attack!)
My DID from here. Court and Spark second!.
I am a Woman of Heart and Mind. Now you tell me this is one of your faves from her and that’s it.
I’ll forgive you for ranking “Music” behind “Like a Virgin” and whatever derivative thing Madge were making after “Confessions…”
See Prince, also, in “Sometimes it Snows in April”. That way of intertwine the piano and acoustic guitar, that’s all HERS.
Long live Pastorius! ! “Coyote” one of his most underrated singles. I prefer “tururi-domdidururu”/Song for Sharon”, but that’s too long for a single cut and besides, Amelia, it was just a false alarm:))
And you may not know this: One of the formative bands in Argentina, Serú Girán (known as the “Argentines Beatles” had the best bassist this country ever knew (Pedro Aznar), a total NUTS for that fretless sound.
You can check our Hejira’s influence in Spanish here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d5jjeTDKzTM
That is considered by a local poll one of the best 5 songs here, ever. Joni/Jaco should receive royalties. It’s an amazing song about suicide, too.
Neil Tennant has said “Coyote” is one of his favorite songs. How’s that for praise? And of course I love “Woman….,” boo. Check out where it lands in my ranking of her best songs.
Your posts have been a delight and educational. Send me a private message, for I’d love to know your name.
Oh, excellent. Do you have like an official mail or somehing? My name is Fernando (not Alejandro, not Roberto) Yours aere very insightful, too! Thanx!
Soto.alfred@gmail.com
Just did.
Hejira is in my top 5 LPs – full stop. I bought it as a teenager and almost forty years later, I’m still not tired of it.
I’m listening now!
I cannot possibly agree with you more about the version of “Both Sides Now” from that 2000 record. Its my favorite between it and the original, though both clearly show how art, even when arguably stagnant (as the song remains the same lyrically and roughly musically), can change as the artist ages.