Joni Mitchell - Clouds (LP)

Clouds is the moment Joni Mitchell takes the reins and quietly rewrites the rulebook. Released in 1969 on Reprise, her second album strips the arrangements back to wood and wire, and suddenly the spotlight falls where it belongs, on that voice and those startlingly clear songs. Even before the needle drops, the hand-painted self-portrait on the sleeve tells you this is a self-defined world. She produced the record herself, a big step after David Crosby shepherded the debut, and you can hear the difference from the first guitar figure. It is intimate, unfussy, and honest.

Everyone knows “Both Sides, Now,” but hearing Joni sing it here after Judy Collins made it a hit is a small revelation. The composition was sparked, she has said, by reading Saul Bellow’s Henderson the Rain King on a plane, and her version lands like a private confession. The tempo is unhurried, the guitar breathes, and each verse peels away another layer of youthful certainty. “Chelsea Morning” is the flip side, all sunlight and color, a downtown postcard that later inspired Bill and Hillary Clinton when they named their daughter. That kind of cultural reach says something about these melodies. They lodge in the world as easily as they lodge in your head.

The album moves with a spare grace. Recorded in Los Angeles with engineer Henry Lewy, Clouds keeps accompaniment to a minimum, so the focus stays on Mitchell’s open tunings and the way she threads melody through ringing chords. “The Fiddle and the Drum” is a brave a cappella address to a country at war that still chills, a reminder that her protest songs came from moral conviction rather than sloganeering. “That Song About the Midway” has a steely calm, the vocal smiling while the lyrics take stock of a lopsided romance. “Roses Blue” tilts toward the era’s obsessions with mysticism and fate, but the guitar part cuts through the haze. And “I Don’t Know Where I Stand” remains one of her great early balancing acts, poised between hope and retreat.

There is portraiture here, too. “The Gallery” sketches an artist and his muses with a scalpel, and “Songs to Aging Children Come” floats like a nursery rhyme refracted in stained glass, its harmonies stacked in close, eerie intervals. Even the deep cuts feel essential. “Tin Angel” opens the record with a rolling guitar pattern that feels like a curtain lifting. “I Think I Understand” offers one of her most delicate piano-led moments, a clue to where she would go on Ladies of the Canyon and Blue. Taken together, the songs show an artist consolidating power, sharpening her pen, and trusting silence as much as sound.

The impact was immediate and long lasting. At the 1970 Grammy Awards, Mitchell won Best Folk Performance for Clouds, a rare case of the trophy landing squarely on the right doorstep. Critics took notice of the leap in songwriting, and fans who had first met her through other people’s versions began seeking out the source. If you love Joni Mitchell vinyl, this is one of those records that never feels dated. The space around her voice works in your living room the way a good gallery lets a painting breathe.

On the technical side, Clouds has been well served on wax. Early Reprise pressings are satisfying, and the 2021 box The Reprise Albums 1968–1971 brought fresh Bernie Grundman remasters that give the guitars a little more air and tighten up the low end without sanding off the grain. If you are hunting for Clouds vinyl, you will find plenty of options, from clean originals to recent reissues that make it easy to buy Joni Mitchell records online without gambling on condition. Digging in person has its own charm, of course. Flipping through bins at a Melbourne record store, seeing that blue-sky cover peeking out, still delivers a small jolt. Retailers who specialize in vinyl records Australia wide tend to keep her catalog in stock, and most shops can order from the current Rhino pipeline if the title is momentarily out.

Clouds sits in that sweet spot where folk tradition meets art-song daring. It is lean, humane, and unpretentious, yet it keeps opening up after the fifth or fiftieth listen. If you are building a shelf of Joni Mitchell albums on vinyl, this belongs near the front. Not just as the home of a standard, but as a clear, ringing document of her finding her true voice and inviting the rest of us to lean closer.