Joni Mitchell - Taming The Tiger

Joni's remarkable life has been documented in thousands of articles, interviews, press releases, music, and art over the course of her career. The JoniMitchell.com library contains 3008 titles and counting, including articles written and interviews conducted exclusively for the website that cannot be found anywhere else. The Chronology of Appearances is another comprehensive database that provides the dates and venues of Joni's performances chronicling every known appearance from Joni's coffee house days to some of the biggest venues in the world.

It is probably safe to say that the Library and Chronology of Appearances contain the most exhaustive collection of publically available information in existence about Joni Mitchell. Sifting through all of this material to distill an accurate biography of the artist is an impossible task and no-one but Joni herself knows all of the incidents, feelings, thoughts, motivations - the many facets of the personality that make up both the inner and the outer life of this complex human being. But by utilizing the site's invaluable resources, supplementing it with material from books and other people who have played important parts in her life, and, of course, by listening to the wealth of incredible music she has created, we at JoniMitchell.com feel that it is possible to search out the most reliable and comprehensive information available to piece together a portrait of the great artist.

- http://jonimitchell.com

Joni Mitchell - Paprika Plains

Most experimental of all (in Don Juan's Reckless Daughter) is “Paprika Plains,” a 16-minute song played on improvised piano and arranged with a full orchestra; it takes up all of Side 2. In it, Mitchell narrates a first-person description of a late-night gathering in a bar frequented by Indigenous peoples of Canada, touching on themes of hopelessness and alcoholism. At one point in the narrative, the narrator leaves the setting to watch the rain and enters into a dreamstate, and the lyrics – printed in the liner notes but not sung – become a mixture of references to innocent childhood memories, anuclear explosion and an expressionless tribe gazing upon the dreamer. The narrator returns inside after the rain passes. In speaking to Anthony Fawcett about working on “Paprika Plains,” Mitchell said:

“The Improvisational, the spontaneous aspect of this creative process – still as a poet – is to set words to the music, which is a hammer and chisel process. Sometimes it flows, but a lot of times it’s blocked by concept. And if you’re writing free consciousness – which I do once in a while just to remind myself that I can, you know, because I’m fitting little pieces of this puzzle together – the end result must flow as if it was spoken for the first time.”[8]

- Wikipedia