Most Helpful Customer Reviews
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30 of 31 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
The First, the best, the yardstick by which to judge her., 29 Oct 2000
By A Customer
This, Joni Mitchell's first album is still, in my opinion her best. The anguish in her voice, especially on the haunting "I Had A King", the first track, grabs your attention and keeps it through all ten tracks. Tracks 1, 2, 3, 5 and 9 would grace any album by any singer. The lyrics could stand alone.Rumour has it the album was originally entitled "Song To A Seagull" (see the cover). It could also have been called "Joni Mitchell meets Crosby, Stills and Nash" as Crosby produced it, Stills played bass guitar and Nash was her partner at that time. But any other title would do it an injustice, for this IS "Joni Mitchell". Buy it and enjoy it, as I have done for over thirty years, yes it was first released in 1968.
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10 of 10 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Song To A Seagull, 6 Aug 2004
Joni Mitchell was 25 when she first went into a recording studio to record the enviable inventory of songs that became Song To A Seagull. By this time she had been performing professionally for several years and her songs had already been recorded by some of folk's biggest names, notably Tom Rush and Judy Collins, whose orchestral version of Mountain From Mountains can be compared directly with the starker, simpler version heard here. The album was thematic with one side titled I Came To The City and the other Out Of The City And Down To The Seaside and comprised mainly Joni Mitchell accompanying herself on guitar and piano, with the occasional banshee and Stephen Stills on bass, thanks to David Crosby's sensitive production. This put the focus squarely on Joni's performance and the remarkable strength of her writing. Only a moderate success at the time it nevertheless set in motion the relentless trajectory of her fame, and still sounds fresh and perceptive, grating only when her voice enters the higher registers.
In the UK, Night In The City was released as a single and raised her profile with some radio plays on programmes such as Top Gear
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4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Beautiful, fragile and seriously under-rated..., 7 May 2007
As a long time Joni Mitchell fan how did I miss this one? Well, like many others who got into her music after her first rush of success her debut, devoid of any "hits" and rarely played on the radio, then & now, somehow just passed me by. My loss... because, it's a fragile, haunting and impeccably played & sung album. David Crosby's production extracts the best from what was, as time has shown, an incredibly talented artist putting everything into her first release and its pared-down, at times almost sparse arrangements are a huge credit to both artists in capturing "singer/songwriter folk music" at its very highest levels.
A lot of what of what was to follow was better and justifiably more successful but "Song To A Seagull" has that rarest of things - a level of purity and sincerity in its lyrics and execution that makes it absolutely timeless. So much so that its most successful track, "Night in the City", with its excellent, folk/rock orientated delivery ends up as an almost uncomfortable distraction from the spellbinding simplicity of what surrounds it. A seriously under-rated and quite beautiful record.
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