Joni Mitchell Shadows And Light Analysis

Joni Mitchell : Shadows and Light Joni Mitchell is an accomplished musician, songwriter, poet and painter. In her own words: “I looked like a folksinger, even though the moment I began to write, my music was not folk music. It was something else that had elements of romantic classicism to it.” Hard to classify, Mitchell has pursued her ways of self-expression, heedless of commercial outcomes. She connected with a huge audience in the mid-Seventies when a series of albums – Court and Spark (1974), The Hissing of Summer Lawns (1975) and Hejira (1976) – established her as one of that decade’s pre-eminent artists. From the beginning, she played guitar in different tunings to make up the fact that her left hand had been left weakened by
This song is about music agent/promoter David Geffen, a close friend of Mitchell in the early 1970s, and explains Geffen during a trip Geffen and Mitchell made to Paris with Robbie and Dominique Robertson.‪ "Free Man in Paris" went to number twenty-two on the Hot 100 and to number two on the Easy Listening chart.‬
The home key of the song is A-major. The frequent substitution of "flattened" scale degrees (flat-6 and flat-7; that is, in A-major, F-natural and G-natural in place of F# and G#) adds a jazzy folky sound to the song. The time signature is 4/4 except the compound quintuple meter intro counted as 15/8 or simply 2 bars of 6/8 plus 3 eighth notes.
The opening melodic lick E-F#-E-E-A is the fundamental source of the song's vocal line. It also explains some of the dramatic chord progressions. The pattern is made of two simple motions. The first is E-F#-E, a neighbouring-tone pattern in which the upward step to F#, and immediate return to E serve to embellish the E. The second is the upward motion from E to A in which the upward skip to A embellishes the E. The primary melodic tone E is said to be prolonged over the entire lick. In scale step notation, these motions can be notated as 5-6-5, and