Court and Spark – Joni Mitchell

**Adam Maness** (0:30)
I'm Adam Maness.

**Peter Martin** (0:31)
And I'm Peter Martin.

**Adam Maness** (0:32)
And you're listening to the Youll Hear It Podcast.

**Peter Martin** (0:33)
Music explored.

**Adam Maness** (0:35)
Explored, brought to you today by Open Studio. Go to openstudiojazz.com for all your jazz lesson needs. Peter, we got a lot of cool stuff going on at Open Studio right now. We've got new courses coming out from Larry Goldings, Daniel Anastasio, Classical Piano.

**Peter Martin** (0:49)
Wait, say that again?

**Adam Maness** (0:50)
Daniel Anastasio.

**Peter Martin** (0:51)
I love the way you say that name.

**Adam Maness** (0:52)
Classical Piano.

**Peter Martin** (0:53)
Classical.

**Adam Maness** (0:54)
And by the way, a brand new course called Jazz Piano for the Bandstand from you and from me.

**Peter Martin** (0:59)
A collaborator affair, much as this podcast is.

**Adam Maness** (1:01)
Very much like this podcast, except we're sitting in front of two beautiful grand pianos.

**Peter Martin** (1:04)
You just looked at them.

**Adam Maness** (1:05)
I just danced over to them because I love them. Anyway, go to openstudiojazz.com. That's openstudiojazz.com for your jazz lesson needs. Peter.

**Peter Martin** (1:14)
Let's do this.

**Adam Maness** (1:15)
I am buzzing today.

**Peter Martin** (1:17)
You are.

**Adam Maness** (1:17)
I am buzzing today. This is not only is this one of my all time favorite albums, I think this is one of the greatest albums of all time. I really think this is peak performance from one of our peak performers, Joni Mitchell's 1974 masterpiece, Court and Spark. To me, this is where I step into Joni fully. I love folk music. I love.

**Peter Martin** (1:35)
You and quite a few other people.

**Adam Maness** (1:37)
I love all of that stuff. But to me, this is where I was like, went from interested to obsessed with Joni Mitchell. I listened to the hell out of this CD so much. I think I've bought three of these CDs in my lifetime because they kept getting soda and coffee on them in my pickup trucks over the years when I was a kid. I love it so much. Every song, musically, she goes to another level. But I also think lyrically, this might be her most slept on album because there's so many great stories, so many incredible lines in this album.
I'm so geeked that we get to listen to this music today.

**Peter Martin** (2:11)
Isn't it great? I love it as well. Isn't it great though when we have an album like this that you say that I bought at least three times, coffee stains on it. It's like a book that you put notes in and that you savor. And that if you lose, like if you give it away to someone, you almost want to because you want to go get another one because you get to kind of discover it again with that fresh copy.
Now we've got Spotify and Apple Music. Isn't that fun?

**Adam Maness** (2:34)
I mean, this will be with me for the rest of my life. I will have a physical media copy of this in some form or another for the rest of my life and I will cherish it.

**Peter Martin** (2:43)
And then it's also we should say, I mean, I think this of all, well, it's Joni Mitchell's most best selling record, I believe, of all time.
And so this is a lot of people's entry point, I think, either at that time or later. And it's always fun when there's a blockbuster album like this for an artist and there's a lot of, I think, artistic validation of that, because that doesn't always happen, right?

**Adam Maness** (3:05)
Yeah, I mean, this is very similar, I think, to Michael Jackson's Thriller or Herbie Hancock's Headhunters. Both of those albums were their best selling albums of all time.

**Peter Martin** (3:14)
Miles Davis kind of blue clamps.

**Adam Maness** (3:16)
And they're also some of their greatest artistic achievements. And I would put this, I would put Court and Spark in that category of yes, it's her best selling album, it's her most commercially successful album, and it's one of, if not, I think the most artistically successful albums. The achievement of this is unbelievable. And the story behind it is really cool. We'll get to it in a second. I just want to do a little bit of catching up with Joni. Yes, let's do it. So Joni discovered in 1967, she gets signed to an album, and really it's all through kind of David Crosby, who she was sort of dating, and then they produced her first album together called Songs to a Seagull in 1968 She was also, she's already writing songs for other people at this point too, but this is sort of her introduction as an artist to the world. It's Cactus Tree.