Joni Mitchell: Song To A Seagull [RHINO]

Why you'll love it

This remastered 180g reissue brings back the album that introduced Joni Mitchell, produced by David Crosby. Its songs were soon picked up by Buffy Sainte-Marie and Cass Elliot, and they earned her a devoted following.

This edition

• Remastered
• 180g vinyl
• Stereo mix

About the album

Before the hits, before Laurel Canyon fame, there was this: a young Canadian songwriter, newly signed to Reprise, recording at Sunset Sound in Hollywood early in 1968 with David Crosby in the producer's chair. Mitchell plays guitar and piano and sings almost everything herself, and the songs are already startlingly her own, full of open tunings and unexpected turns.

She split the record into two halves. Side one, "I Came to the City," opens with "I Had a King" and moves through the bright bustle of "Night in the City," with Stephen Stills on bass, and the bittersweet "Marcie." Side two, "Out of the City and Down to the Seaside," drifts toward the coast with "Sisotowbell Lane," "The Dawntreader," the title song and the closing "Cactus Tree," a portrait of a woman too free to be pinned down.

Mitchell also designed the cover, with art direction from Ed Thrasher, and the first pressings were labelled simply Joni Mitchell because the printing clipped the title. She dedicated the album to Mr. Kratzmann, her Grade 7 English teacher, "who taught me to love words." On this evidence, his marking was spot on.

Also at Kops: more Joni Mitchell on vinyl · browse CDN Pop / Rock

Tracklist

Listen

On Reprise / Rhino (cat# R1 6293), a reissue of the 1968 album.