Holy-guacamole! What an astonishing debut. Joni Mitchell just knocks me off my feet. I’m winded, as if with a hefty punch to the solar plexus. And tears come. The music is just so powerful. The swift one-two combination of I Had A King and Michael From Mountains is a pair of knockout blows right from the get go.
The other and most notable thing, for me, is the emotional register of it all. It’s beautifully and very powerfully melancholy. Even Night In The City, the most overtly or ostensibly ‘jolly’ song – track three (a perfectly good song, but the weakest here, for my money) – has an inescapable element of that Joni blue.
After the slight anomaly of Night In The City, come Marcie and Nathan La Franeer, and we’re plunged back into the cold icy waters of Joni’s oceanic Northern consciousness. When we get to Sisotowbell Lane, any dam on my constipated emotions is obliterated. I love the entire album. But Sisotowbell Lane is a snowy peak of Himalayan stratosphere piercing sublimity.
But, as if to confound my gushing hyperbole, she follows this with the magnificence of The Dawntreader. This album could easily be the dictionary or Brewer’s definition of the phrase ‘an embarrassment of riches’.
Mercifully the intensity let’s up a fraction with the slightly strident mildly experimental Pirate of Penance, and remains at a lower ebb for the title track. Every single track, save perhaps Night In The City, gives the lie to the ‘female folkie’ label occasionally applied to Joni (esp. in her early days*), as they are all far more richly complex, more ‘compositional’…
And so we come to journey’s end, with Cactus Tree. And once again we’re stood atop a mountain, or are we riding the crest of an emotional wave of titanic oceanic proportions? How could such a slight willowy polio afflicted young woman become the lightning rod for such powerful elemental forces?
As long as I live I will love Joni with an unrequited passion. Who was it – Woody Allen, perhaps? – that said unrequited love was the only kind that really lasts! Song to a Seagull is an astonishing album. A masterpiece. And that it was Joni’s debut is even more astounding.
The version I’ve just listened to, which ended with uncanny Joni-esque perfection just as I arrived at work (how will I explain my puffy red teary eyes?), is the recent 2021 remaster, from the Reprise Records reissue box. It’s been ‘improved’, from the original David Crosby produced sessions, apparently.
I have to confess that I don’t find the engineering or production interventions particularly noteworthy, or even very noticeable (mind, this particular listen was whilst driving, so the music was competing with all the noises associated with that). Although STAS is sonically different to the following albums, that’s also part it’s period charm.
The remaster certainly doesn’t spoil that. But nor, so far at any rate, to my ears, does it radically alter or improve it. STAS simply remains a sublime slice of early Joni. Totally essential, in my world.
* One has to go back to her pre album café gig era, some of which is documented on the terrific Volume 1, The Early Years, 1963-1967, from the marvellous Joni Mitchell Archives series, to find her sounding like a more typical ‘60s folkster.