Joni Mitchell’s Turbulent Indigo and Taming the Tiger

Love

Everybody loves Joni Mitchell, and everybody has a favorite Joni Mitchell album. That album is Blue (1971). No, not really. It’s Court and Spark (1974). Ladies of the Canyon (1970). Hejira (1976). What’s that? Is your favourite Mingus (1979)? That’s a good, left-field choice—the culmination of her jazz explorations through the 1970s. Nobody’s favorite came out in the 1980s, a tough time for many of the classic pop, folk, and rock artists of the 1960s and 1970s—who? What’s that? Your favorite is Dog Eat Dog (1985)? You must be Joni Mitchell. Ha ha. 

What’s that? You are Joni Mitchell? Thanks for voting, Joni, and for all the beautiful music through the decades, from the early acoustic folk to the jazz-pop explorations to the embrace of electronics to the orchestral rendering of standards.

As I was saying, many of the classic pop, folk, and rock artists of the 1960s and 1970s had a tough time of it in the 1980s. They’d learned their craft, changed pop culture and nonpop culture, been treated like sages, geniuses, and royalty, become icons, then been declared dinosaurs by the late 1970s punk rockers and new wavers. Hippie aesthetics were passé, embarrassing. By the 1980s, synthesizers, processed beats, electronic sheen, and generally airless production were in. Artists who’d turned the analog vinyl album into an art form had to adapt, or die trying to adapt, to digital CDs.

Like her contemporaries Bob Dylan and Neil Young (though not only them), Joni Mitchell struggled to find a comfortable place in the 1980s. All three had started as 1960s folk singers, established folk-rock and folk-pop, and by the 1970s were preeminent singer-songwriters. In the 1980s, profoundly uncomfortable, Dylan produced some of the worst music of his career (with some delights scattered in there). Young created some of his least characteristic music, to the point that his label in those years, Geffen Records, sued him for deliberately being noncommercial in his off-brand excursions into techno, rockabilly, and country.

Mitchell was also on Geffen. Her albums on that label aren’t as weird as Young’s, but while they’d be few listeners’ favorites, they all have much to appreciate, starting with the artist’s embrace of new materials. The standard complaint about the results is that the use of electronics sounded like bandwagon-jumping, not a good fit for Mitchell’s style overall, and not a way to make her sometimes unsubtle songs more appealing. 

By 1991’s Night Ride Home, however, Mitchell had fully overcome any of the harshness and stridency of the 1980s and entered into rich territory, much as Dylan and Young did in that decade. It’s as though the freeze had thawed, people had relaxed, and the sunshine let some warmth in. Check out Night Ride Home’s “Come in from the Cold” for Mitchell at her most winning as observer, songwriter, and sonic sculptor, working variations on the ideas of changing and of increasing the temperature, while in a sense staying in place, a place she returns to with the title refrain. The backup singers’ repetition of “Come in” serves as a verbal invitation and an aural hook.

Command

Night Ride Home ended Joni Mitchell’s tenure with Geffen, and she spent the 1990s on Reprise, for whom Young had recorded until he moved to Geffen. Mitchell’s two albums during this period, 1994’s Turbulent Indigo and 1998’s Taming the Tiger, show an artist in full command of her materials, at home in herself and her work, replacing 1980s gloss with intimacy.

On these albums, Mitchell paradoxically comes across as both a veteran and a newcomer. Comfortably drawing on styles she’d honed over decades, she seems to hope listeners will enjoy these offerings, but she doesn’t take it as her due. At the same time, she isn’t humble. She’s a major artist doing her best, and the work’s reception isn’t in her hands; she’s seen her best work underappreciated before, and the gap between inspiration and reception becomes part of her aesthetic.

In this attitude, she feels a kinship with the painter Vincent van Gogh (1853‒1890). In life, he dedicated himself to expression, sought understanding and recognition and a living, struggled with and finally succumbed to mental illness. In death, he has achieved a level of renown reserved for only a handful of humans. His iconography has become an industry.

Mitchell has, of course, achieved iconic status and material success within her lifetime. Awards aren’t an accurate measure of anything’s worth, but they signify recognition. Among Mitchell’s 19 Grammy nominations and 11 wins are two for Turbulent Indigo: best pop album and best album package. Taming the Tiger received no nominations, yet I find this one warmer and even more appealing than its predecessor. The entertainment industry enjoys a comeback and doesn’t necessarily care about the follow-up. Attention can be fickle.

Mitchell’s identification with Van Gogh’s artistry becomes manifest in the CD booklets for Turbulent Indigo and Taming the Tiger. The cover of the former sports a self-portrait of Mitchell modeled on his own self-portrait with a bandaged ear. The interiors of both booklets display Mitchell’s paintings, landscapes and portraits, influenced by the Impressionists and Post-Impressionists and sometimes featuring Van Gogh-esque brushwork. The combined music and artwork of Turbulent Indigo and Taming the Tiger constitute a diptych and summary statement. I’ve given you so much of myself, Joni Mitchell is saying. Here’s what that life’s work represents.

Turbulence 

Consider Turbulent Indigo’s title song. It’s not the collection’s catchiest or most ambitious track, but it’ll give you a sense of the material.

The music, produced by Joni Mitchell and her then-husband, Larry Klein, opens with Mitchell’s picked acoustic guitar. That sound could fit on any of her albums, going back to her bare-bones debut, 1968’s Song to a Seagull. A keyboard drone by either Mitchell or Klein rolls in like a fast fog, accompanied by booming, spacious drumbeats from Carlos Vega, and clicking percussion from Mitchell or Klein. The drone drops out, then returns ominously. Saxophonist Wayne Shorter adds riffs and flutters that suggest on-the-spot observations or questions. 

“You wanna make Van Gogh’s,” the opening line, might seem to be self-addressed. However, the next line problematizes the situation: “Raise ’em up like sheep” doesn’t sound like one of Mitchell’s goals, unless she’s somehow equating artistry with shepherding. She isn’t. She means sheep in the negative sense of timid, docile creatures.

Who’d want to produce timid, docile Van Goghs? The next series of lines condemns, let’s say, patriarchal imperialists. Perhaps they’re captains of industry. Perhaps they’re conservative educators. Perhaps they’re record-company executives. They rapaciously aim to “Make ’em out of Eskimos / And women if you please / Make ’em nice and normal / Make ’em nice and neat.”

In other words, they’re the forces determined to maintain the status quo of white men ruling by ruling out difference. Van Gogh, troubled, crazy, questing, questioning, seeing differently, artistic, stands in contrast to this bland conformity.

“You see him with his shotgun there? / Bloodied in the wheat?” These lines refer to Van Gogh’s suicide attempt, which he initially survived, only to succumb to complications from it. For Mitchell, the suffering and death take nothing from the nobility of the struggle to express. “Oh, what do you know about / Living in Turbulent Indigo?” the refrain asks rhetorically. The artist’s inner turmoil remains unknowable.

The second verse moves to a Van Gogh painting, where “Brash fields crude crows / In a scary sky” are tamed “In a golden frame”, which is then “Roped off”. The immediacy of the aesthetic experience has been cut off, circumscribed by the setting. In the museum, “tourists”—not necessarily art lovers or even viewers—are “guided by”, meaning escorted past the artwork, perhaps stopping briefly. Now, of course, they’d be taking photos or videos. Their conversation concerns Van Gogh’s mental illness, the fact that he cut off one of his ears. What else do they appreciate? What do they take away from the work? 

Mitchell concludes this verse by contrasting the harsh reality of Van Gogh’s life with the sanitized gentility of art consumption. “The madman hangs in fancy homes / They wouldn’t let him near! / He’d piss in their fireplace! / He’d drag them through Turbulent Indigo.”

You picture the painter’s hands, clothes, and more smeared with paint. Art materials, the stuff of life, body fluids merge. Creation and creativity get messy. The commodification of artwork neatens the picture to the detriment of the challenge, which was both the impetus and the point of the work. Elsewhere on the album, Mitchell laments the fact that “sex sells” is used to sell things. “Sex kills everything”: a truly counterintuitive statement from a seeming bohemian, and it may carry multiple meanings, but in this context, it mainly expresses disgust at the use of this life-giving and life-enhancing force as a marketing tool.

The final verse of “Turbulent Indigo” gives Van Gogh the last words. He’s “‘a burning hearth'”, but “‘no one wants to warm themselves'”. His works, images, and experiences “‘Stack up around this vacancy / Like dirty cups and spoons'”. The final line can be read two ways. Is Van Gogh giving viewers “‘No mercy from Turbulent Indigo'”, or is he expressing, explaining, complaining that for him, there can be no relief, no reconciliation between the inner turmoil and the external incomprehension and indifference.

A different singer might have emoted more, but Mitchell maintains a meditative steadiness. The song is ripe for a dramatic turn in a cabaret, say by Ute Lemper.

Taming

In the title track of Taming the Tiger, Joni Mitchell revisits her Romantic view of artistry. Here, her unnamed source is the poet and visual artist William Blake (1757‒1827). Rather than looking at Blake’s life and work, she refers to Blake’s poem “The Tyger”, which begins and ends with this verse:

Tyger Tyger, burning bright,
In the forests of the night;
What immortal hand or eye,
Could frame thy fearful symmetry?

Like Van Gogh’s “Brash fields” and “crude crows”, the tiger is raw reality, an embodied force. Whereas Van Gogh tried to represent what he saw, Blake addresses the animal as a representation created by a larger force.

Mitchell opens by emphasizing herself as a physical, perceiving presence: “I stepped outside to breathe the air / And stare up at the stars”. She tacitly contrasts those stars with human ones, mundane existence with the vastness of space. She turns out to be fleeing a music-industry gathering: “I’m a runaway from the record biz / From the hoods in the hood and the whiny white kids / Boring!”

Okay, boomer, you don’t like 1990s music. That’s fine. Just when the listener might accuse her of crabbiness, though, Mitchell gets playful. “The old man is snoring,” she explains, taking the line from the nursery rhyme “It’s raining / It’s pouring” but not prettying it up. The old man may be snoring in response to what the young people are doing, but that doesn’t make him an appealing alternative. Who wants to hang out with, or sleep next to, a snorer? 

Meanwhile, what’s Joni Mitchell up to? “I’m taming the tiger / (You can’t tame the tiger).” That couplet makes the song more interesting than the generational lament it has seemed to be. Mitchell excoriates herself for what she has done in the previous lines, converting experience into “art”, an object for consumption. “Nice, kitty kitty”, she chides herself. Untamed, the “Tiger, tiger” of being, of motion, continues “burning bright”.

The next verse quotes someone named Sophia, who expresses a unique take on the tiger: “‘It’s hard to catch / And harder still to ride'”. What’s the artist to do? “The time to watch the beast the best / Is when it’s purring at your side.” The ornery Mitchell of “Sex Kills” rejects that domestic safety, equating the big cat’s purring with “Accolades and honors”. Such rewards sound great, but they’re as likely to trap the artist as to catch the artist’s aim—the hunter gets captured by the game. “One false move and you’re a goner”. What’s the bottom line? “Boring!” Again the old man nods off as the tiger keeps burning “In the forest of the night”.

That’s where we find Crabby Joni and her “hopeless plight”. The radio programmers deliver only “bland… Formula music, girly guile / Genuine junk food for juveniles… Mercenary style”. What’s a maker of nominally commercial music, the writer and performer of 1972’s “You Turn Me On, I’m a Radio” (itself written under record-company pressure for a radio-friendly single), to do?

We might as well acknowledge Crabby Joni, the dyspeptic aspect of her personality that sometimes turns people off. Here, in the final verse, after contrasting the lights of the stars (able to chuck spears) with those of a passing plane (merely blinking), the singer celebrates someone named Anna—”Wild and dear / Like fireworks in the sky”. Anna sounds like the real thing, whereas creating product for the music biz pales. Crabby Joni declares herself “so sick of this game / It’s hip, it’s hot / Life’s too short, the whole thing’s gotten / Boring!” 

The old man sleeps as Mitchell again fails to tame the tiger, which, of course, she doesn’t really want to do. This attitude may explain why Taming the Tiger wasn’t nominated for any Grammys. In any case, the tiger burns as Mitchell counsels herself or anyone listening to “Fight to the light”. It’s good advice, whether you’re in the darkness of commercialism, closed-mindedness, authoritarianism, or whatever enclosure.

The music, produced by Joni Mitchell with the compression of a home recording but without the insularity, opens with variations on the elements of “Turbulent Indigo”. This one opens with a keyboard drone, over which she strums a processed guitar. Keyboard washes and bass notes appear periodically. Mitchell once again stays cool, delegating the expressiveness to her backup interjections. Tweaked to sound more analog, this track might fit on Court and Spark, which was, of course, a landmark in converting diaristic observations into art-pop with mass appeal.

Put another way: Across the decades of Mitchell’s career, whatever turbulence led to, fed into, the creative act has been transmuted into the form of lyrics and music. Call that transmutation “taming” if you will, claim it’s impossible, say the materials of life always exceed the shapes of art. Still, what people in the art world would call Mitchell’s practice yields results worth considering, even if the result is the listener’s rejection of the artist’s premise.

That gap, that freedom of the audience not to comprehend or accept, might ultimately be the source of Mitchell’s feeling that the process always fails. The artist controls, and in controlling distorts, and so what the consumer perceives eludes control. Damn it.

Despite that conundrum, Taming the Tiger’s final track signals just how comfortable Joni Mitchell is with her sonic palette here, how much she loves making music of this kind. Called “Tiger Bones”, it’s the instrumental component of the title track, stripped of words, a mere four seconds longer. While the credits list Mitchell’s vocals, there don’t seem to be any. This form enables the listener to luxuriate in the music’s textures, as a viewer might trace brushstrokes.

Rest 

Joni Mitchell surely felt a sense of completion after her mid- and late 1990s recordings. They’re so strong that her break following them was a well-deserved rest. Rather than going on to deliver more of the same, which would indeed have been boring, she followed Taming the Tiger with Both Sides Now, the aforementioned collection of standards. Included there are two of her own songs, “A Case of You” and the title track, first recorded by her in 1971 and 1969, respectively and now sung in the huskier torch-song voice of her later years.

Those versions are worth hearing, as is all of Mitchell’s work, but they most likely won’t replace the originals in your estimation. Visit or revisit Turbulent Indigo and Taming the Tiger, however, and you just might have a new favorite. Alternatively, you might not like them at all. You will, however, have had experiences, as art-informed life.