Joni Mitchell - Dreamland Remastered Tracks

Visit btbeat.com for more great music reviews & torrentsrnrnrnrnCompressing the diverse highlights of Joni Mitchell\'s four-decade career into the hour-and-change confines of a single CD seems like an unfair challenge. But with Mitchell herself tackling the anthologizing, Dreamland plays like a warm reintroduction to an old, if ever mercurial, musical friend. Taking nothing for granted, Mitchell shrewdly anchors the set with two of her early jazz-infused commercial breakthroughs, "Free Man in Paris" and "In France…," before charting an elliptical course through one of the most consistently inspired song canons in all of pop music. While familiar hits are well-represented, the collection also widens to include her forays with Afrocentric rhythms ("The Jungle Line," title track) and her tribute to a beloved blues legend ("Furry Sings the Blues"). Indeed, the choices here are often as playfully surprising as the tantalizing omissions: "Dancin\' Clown," her unlikely \'80s collaboration with Tom Petty and Billy Idol, is included yet there\'s nothing from the sublimely challenging Mingus. It all wends to an elegiac triptych from her latter-day symphonic reinventions (Travelogue and Both Sides Now), their postmodern elegance informed by the bittersweet knowledge that Mitchell undertook a self-imposed recording hiatus thereafter. rnrn- amazon.comrnrnrnrnrnFormally extricated from the grubbiness of the music industry--her farewell speeches eluded to cesspools, no less--and now officially retired from songwriting, "Dreamland" is a valedictory glance back at Joni Mitchell\'s uniquely distinguished oeuvre featuring choice tracks selected by the lady herself. Received wisdom has it that Mitchell began as a folkie in the Sixties, turned to jazz in the mid-Seventies and that somewhere along the way her music became a stranger to the charts and incrementally impregnable to all but a diehard coterie of chin-stroking pseuds. While partially true, this basic premise is rumbled by the vexingly non-chronological track selection which highlights just how much Mitchell blurred boundaries ( "Carey" and "California" from 1971\'s Blue, for example) way before the chattering rock classes argued the toss over her categorisation. There\'s no "Woodstock" but the album\'s scansion ( the ethnic pairing of "Dreamland" and "The Jungle Line", the revolutionary finale of Travelogue\'s "Both Sides Now" and the original "The Circle Game") works perfectly. Polished peaches abound; "Come In From The Cold", addressing post-war socio-sexial etiquette and female emancipation, is enduringly marvellous.rnrn- amazon.co.ukrnrnrnrnThe 77-minute compilation, selected by the artist herself, overlaps slightly with 1996’s Hits collection, but it offers a better representation of the complexity and variety of the peerless singer-songwriter. The early signature tunes are here, of course: “Carey,” “Big Yellow Taxi,” and “Help Me” in their original versions; “For the Roses” and “Both Sides Now” in their recent orchestral re-creations. But Dreamland also makes room for more adventurous choices, such as the rhythmic “The Jungle Line,” the stark “Furry Sings the Blues,” and the pulsing “Nothing Can Be Done.” Only one of the 17 tracks hasn’t aged well: The poppy “Dancin’ Clown” suffers from the slick and busy production typical of the late ‘80s. But that’s a quibble -- throughout her career, Mitchell’s uncompromising vision, whether as a lyricist or a composer/arranger, allowed her songs to stand outside the mainstream even while she was influencing it, and Dreamland is an excellent single-disk overview of a massive, and massively important, body of work. rnrnrnrnrnsource: music.barnesandnoble.comrnrnArtist: Joni MitchellrnAlbum: DreamlandrnDate Of Release: 2005rnGenre: CompilationrnBitrate: VBR --alt-preset standard