Joni Mitchell: "That Song About the Midway" (1969)

"'Cause I'm midway down the midway slowin' down." Ein wunderbarer Story-Song von Joni Mitchell. Aus ihrem zweiten Album Clouds, einem Meilenstein des Singer-Songwriting, durchdringend, persönlich, atemberaubend. Vor allem: diese Stimme!

"All the songs on Clouds, Joni Mitchell's album, are her own. Her voice is pure, and she sings with spare acoustic guitar accompaniment. When I say that her songs are her own, I don't merely mean that she wrote them. She owns them, because each of them, different from the others, concerns herself, and paints - in a different part of the mind of a valuable person, unique in place and time, who affects us and enters us precisely because she will tell only her own story. (...) Life seems a gallery of mementoes, infecting her and her landscape. She has songs which have a Carson McCullers flavour: she gazes at objects so long and avidly that they become more charged with meaning than the people who are now gone who placed them where they are. (...) Joni Mitchell is extraordinarily talented and moving, because she is herself, and her self is beautiful." (Geoffrey Cannon, "Gentle Woman", Guardian, 24 June 1969)