Top Artists – Joni Mitchell

Joni Mitchell – Wild Things Run Fast

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  • This copy has Joni rockin’ like you will not believe, with a STUNNING Shootout Winning Triple Plus (A+++) side two mated to a superb Double Plus (A++) side one – exceptionally quiet vinyl too
  • Her last great record – fortunately for us audiophiles, it’s spacious, open and powerful with present vocals and solid bass
  • A desert island disc for me and one of the few good reasons to listen to new music in the 80s.
  • “On her first new studio album of original material in five years, Joni Mitchell achieved more of a balance between her pop abilities and her jazz aspirations, meanwhile rediscovering a more direct, emotional lyric approach. The result was her best album since the mid-70s.”
  • This is a Must Own album from 1982, one that deserves a place in any audiophile’s pop and rock section
  • We’ve recently compiled a list of records we think every audiophile should get to know better, along the lines of “the 1001 records you need to hear before you die,” with an accent on the joy these amazing audiophile-quality recordings can bring to your life. Wild Things Run Fast is a good example of a record audiophiles may not know well but we think would benefit from getting to know better

Both sides are lively, dynamic, and tonally Right On The Money. The vocal clarity is excellent, allowing you to appreciate every last nuance of Joni’s performance. The bottom end is wonderful with punchy drums and lots of deep bass. The overall sound is smooth, sweet, rich, and full-bodied with a lovely, silky top end.

Wild Things Run Fast is a TAS list super disc with many good qualities, but you’d never know it from the typically lean, bass-shy pressing. Since this record can be a little cold sounding — it’s a modern recording after all — filling it out and warming it up a little is just what the doctor ordered.

Another Masterpiece?

I absolutely love the album. I think it’s one of Joni’s best, one of her many masterpieces if I may be so bold. One is only supposed to be allotted one masterpiece, but considering all the stylistic changes she’s been through, Joni has clearly earned the right to have as many as she likes. I count at least three so far and perhaps there will be more coming down the road, although I very much doubt it.

Wild Things Run Fast is an album we’ve been playing since it came out in the early 70s, and we think we know it well,

It checks off a number of key boxes for us here at Better Records:

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Joni Mitchell – Blue

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Reviews and Commentaries for Blue

  • Boasting two solid Double Plus (A++) or BETTER sides, we guarantee you’ve never heard Joni’s 1971 masterpiece sound this good – exceptionally quiet vinyl too
  • Side two was sonically very close to our Shootout Winner – you will be amazed at how big and rich the sound is
  • This copy is only a half plus shy of our Nearly White Hot Stamper pressing, which sold for 1199 just recently
  • We lucked into a couple of quiet copies this time around, but in our experience that is something we would not expect to happen very often, but we’re glad it did in the case of this wonderful pressing
  • Full-bodied and balanced with the kind of smooth, natural musicality that’s difficult to find for Blue
  • A Better Records Top 100 title that belongs in any audiophile music collection worthy of the name
  • 5 stars: “Sad, spare, and beautiful, Blue is the quintessential confessional singer/songwriter album. Forthright and poetic, Joni Mitchell’s songs are raw nerves, tales of love and loss (two words with relative meaning here) etched with stunning complexity…”
  • Everything changed for us in 2007 with the release of the Hoffman/Gray-mastered Rhino pressing of Blue, a record that made us ask ourselves, “Why are we selling records that we would not want to own or listen to ourselves?”
  • It was truly a kicked-by-a-mule moment for all of us here at Better Records, and I am glad to say one kick was all it took to get the rocks out of my head

The best copies bring out the breathy quality to Joni’s voice, and she never sounds strained. They are sweet and open, with good bass foundation and transparency throughout the frequency range.

The best pressings (and our better playback equipment) have revealed nuances to this recording — and of course the performances of all the players along with it — that made us fall in love with the music all over again. Of all the tough nuts to crack, this was the toughest, yet somehow copies emerged from our shootouts that made it easy to appreciate the sonic merits of Blue and ignore its shortcomings.

Hot Stampers have a way of doing that. You forget it’s a record; it’s now just Music. The right record and the right playback will bring this music to life in a way that you cannot imagine until you hear it. That is our guarantee on Blue — better than you ever thought possible or your money back.

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James Taylor / Mud Slide Slim

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More Reviews and Commentaries for Mud Slide Slim

  • An amazing copy of JT’s classic followup to Sweet Baby James with INSANELY GOOD Shootout Winning Triple Plus (A+++) sound on both sides
  • This early Green Label pressing demonstrates the Tubey Magical Midrange that modern records almost never reproduce
  • Some of old JT’s strongest material: “You’ve Got a Friend,” “You Can Close Your Eyes,” “Hey Mister, That’s Me up on the Jukebox” and more
  • The sound of most of the tracks on the better pressings is raw, real and exceptionally unprocessed
  • 4 stars on Allmusic – it destroys the recent reissue, which lacks the texture and warmth you get in abundance on these killer originals
  • If you’re a James Taylor fan — and what audiophile wouldn’t be? — this title is clearly one of the best releases of 1971 and a true Must Own for the audiophile

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Joni Mitchell – Ladies Of The Canyon

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More Singer-Songwriter Albums

  • Ladies of The Canyon is a very strong album for Joni, with some of her most well known, seemingly timeless songs: “Morning Morgantown,” “For Free,” “Big Yellow Taxi,” “Woodstock,” “The Circle Game” and more
  • We guarantee there is dramatically more space, richness, vocal presence, and performance energy on this copy than others you’ve heard, and that’s especially true if you made the mistake of buying whatever Heavy Vinyl pressing is currently on the market
  • 4 1/2 stars: “Yet another essential listen in Mitchell’s recorded canon.”
  • If you’re a fan of this lady, and what audiophile wouldn’t be?, this title is clearly one of the best of 1970 and a true Must Own for the audiophile

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Joni Mitchell – Night Ride Home on Domestic Vinyl

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 More Singer-Songwriter Albums

  • This original copy of Joni’s hard-to-find 1991 release boasts solid Double Plus (A++) sound or close to it from start to finish
  • Side one is rich, full, and Tubey Magical for days, with remarkable immediacy to the wonderful breathy, clear vocals, and side two is not far behind in all those areas
  • Analog at its Tubey Magical finest – you’ll never play a CD (or any other digitally sourced material) that sounds as good as this record as long as you live
  • “Cutting back on the guest musicians of her previous effort and paring down to a basic small group of musicians helps add immediacy to Night Ride Home. Very involved and a rather tough listen, but well worth the attention….”
  • If you have some time, check out our overview of Joni Mitchell’s albums

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Joni Mitchell – The Hissing of Summer Lawns

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Hot Stamper Pressings on the Asylum Label

  • Boasting two INCREDIBLE Shootout Winning Triple Plus (A+++) sides or close to them, this early Asylum pressing was giving us the sound we were looking for on Joni’s superb 1975 release
  • Lots of Tubey Magic, textured synths, big bass and breathy vocals – this copy brings Joni’s jazzy folky fusion to life
  • Check out the big bottom end on “The Jungle Line,” which features the Drummers Of Burundi
  • Who made a more original, forward looking and interesting album in 1975 than this? I can’t think of anyone, can you?
  • 4 1/2 stars: “Joni Mitchell evolved from the smooth jazz-pop of Court and Spark to the radical Hissing of Summer Lawns, an adventurous work that remains among her most difficult records [as difficult as it is brilliant] … a strange and beautiful fusion of jazz and shimmering avant pop.”

Both sides here are airy, open, and spacious, with plenty of ambience. The bottom end is tight and punchy throughout with good solid weight, and the top end is silky sweet. Many copies of this album have a phony hi-fi “glare” that made us wince, but the sound here is warm and natural.

After hearing a few copies that bored us to tears years ago we had pretty much given up on finding good sound for this album, but once we found some truly hot Hot Stampers we found ourselves really enjoying this sophisticated Jazzy Folk Pop music.

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Wild Things Run Fast – A Personal Favorite

More of the Music of Joni Mitchell

Hot Stamper Pressings of Personal Favorites Available Now

One of our favorite Joni Mitchell albums. A Desert Island disc for me & one of the few good reasons to listen to new music in the 80s. 

My personal Must Own Joni Mitchell list includes:

  1. 1968 Song to a Seagull
  2. 1971 Blue
  3. 1974 Court and Spark
  4. 1982 Wild Things Run Fast

WTRF is a TAS list Super Disc with many good qualities, but you’d never know it from the typically lean, bass-shy pressing you might find on your turntable.

Also, since this record can be a little cold sounding — it’s a modern recording after all, and 1982 is sadly nothing like 1972  — filling it out and warming it up is just what the doctor ordered.

John Golden (JG) mastered the originals. The best of them prove that he did a great job at least some of the time. (To find “the best of them,” aka Hot Stampers, read on.)

You can count on the fact that our Hot Stamper pressings will be unusually rich and full-bodied, with lovely warmth and presence. (more…)

Joni Mitchell – Court and Spark

Hot Stamper Pressings of Court and Spark Available Now

Reviews and Commentaries for Court and Spark

  • The sound is rich, warm and natural, with wonderful transparency, ambience and loads of Tubey Magic
  • Musically this is one of our favorite Joni albums here at Better Records, and probably her Best Recording as well
  • A proud member (along with Blue) of our Top 100 Rock and Pop albums – yes, it’s that good sounding when it’s mastered and pressed as well as this copy is
  • 5 stars: “[A] remarkably deft fusion of folk, pop, and jazz … the music is smart, smooth, and assured from the first note to the last.”
  • Court and Spark, along with For the Roses, are two of the best sounding albums in Joni Mitchell’s canon. Roughly 100 other listings for the Best Sounding Album by an Artist or Group can be found here.
  • If you’re a Joni fan, and what audiophile wouldn’t be?, this title from 1974 is an absolute Must Own

Court and Spark deserves to be heard with all the clarity, beauty and power that our Hot Stampers reproduce so well. If there is a better sounding album with Joni Mitchell’s name on the cover, you’ll have to prove it to us.

What you hear is the sound of the real tape; every instrument has its own character because the mastering is correct and the vinyl — against all odds — managed to capture all (or almost all; who can know?) of the resolution that the tape had to offer. (more…)

Back in the Day, Blue Was Just Too Tough a Nut to Crack

More of the Music of Joni Mitchell

Reviews and Commentaries for Blue

This commentary was written in 2006 or thereabouts.

I must tell you about a Blue shootout I tried to do at a friend’s house. The system he owns has some nice equipment in it (the EAR 864, a $4200 tube preamp, for one) and can sound very good — if not wonderful — on certain program material.

But it’s the kind of audiophile system that is easily overwhelmed by difficult to reproduce material. On my copy of Blue his stereo was a complete disaster: grainy, shrill, thin, flat, harsh, compressed, unmusical, no real extension at either end; in short, no magic, tubey or otherwise.

My copy of Blue, which had earlier in the day sounded so good at my house, now sounded so bad at his that I could hardly recognize it as the same LP.

Pieces of the Puzzle

Of course it was the same LP, and by the time I got home the pieces of the puzzle had all fallen into place. It takes a very special stereo to overcome the shortcomings of even the best domestic pressings of Blue in order to reveal the beauty of this music.

The new one isn’t better. It’s just easier to play on the average audiophile system.

Do you have one of those? Most audiophiles do; that’s what being average means. If you’ve been in this hobby for less than five years it’s almost certain you do. I would say a decade of serious dedication to home audio would be the minimum needed to acquire the knowledge and skill to build a truly hi-fidelity system.

Figure twenty grand minimum as a budget.

It can be done for less but only if you have the skills to make it work, and those skills are hard to come by. They can’t be bought, which is why so many megabuck systems sound so unbelievably bad.

And if you’ve only budgeted a modest amount of money toward your system, it stands to reason that you’ve probably only budgeted a modest amount of time and effort into improving the quality of its playback.

In 2005 We Gave Up

Hey, I’m living proof of how hard it is. In 2005 I gave up on Blue, remember? You can read about it here.

I didn’t have the equipment or the room I would have needed to crack that nut. That was in 2005, but it was before we had our EAR 324P (acquired in 2007), before we had discovered the Walker Record Cleaning System (2007, again), before we had all of our room treatments, and before we had made about fifty other changes to the system.

Here I was playing records all day every day, tweaking my stereo like crazy, trying all kinds of new equipment all the time, and even I found it hard to make much headway with Blue.

So don’t feel bad if your copy of Blue on domestic vinyl sounds terrible at your house. It sounds terrible almost everywhere. It used to sound terrible here. Most copies aren’t any good to begin with, and most stereos aren’t up to playing the few copies that are any good. Our stereo can play Blue beautifully now, but it took a lot of effort and a fair amount of money.

And now the new version sound positively sick in comparison.

So-Called Great Stereos

Audiophiles generally think they have great sounding stereos. I haven’t met too many that didn’t.

But most of these so-called great sounding stereos utterly fall apart when confronted with Difficult to Reproduce material played at anything above a whisper. Those are precisely the kind of albums we love to crank up good and loud here at Better Records, albums like Ambrosia, Fragile, Sticky Fingers, and on and on.

Got a Tough Nut like Blue? We say bring it on.

If your stereo is up to it, a good domestic copy of Blue will kill the new 180 gram reissue.

Joni Mitchell – For The Roses

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More Singer Songwriter Albums

  • With STUNNING Shootout Winning Triple Plus (A+++) grades or close to them on both sides, this early White Label Asylum pressing could not be beat
  • The sound is rich, warm and natural, with wonderful immediacy to Joni’s vocals and Tubey Magic for days – this is the amazing sound of Asylum in the Seventies, and nobody seems to talk about it but us
  • One of the best sounding Joni records, on a par with Court and Spark and Blue – fine company indeed
  • Marks and problems in the vinyl are sometimes the nature of the beast with these vintage LPs – there simply is no way around them if the superior sound of vintage analog is important to you
  • 4 1/2 stars: “The lyrics here are among Mitchell’s best, continuing in the vein of gripping honesty and heartfelt depth exhibited on Blue…. More than a bridge between great albums, this excellent disc is a top-notch listen in its own right.”

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