Various Artists - The Unreleased and Unknown Joni Mitchell Songs

Here's a very curious thing I came up with. In trying to figure out which unreleased Joni Mitchell songs I had on bootleg, I used jonimitchell.com as a resource. It has a very good webpage listing the known 41 still unreleased songs written by her:

http://jonimitchell.com/music/album.cfm?id=1

As I mentioned in a previous post, I found 21 of them, mostly from bootlegs of early concerts she did. But what about the other 20?! It turns out that while no publicly available versions are known, either official or unofficial, some people have made cover versions of some of the others, apparently due to a songbook that came out in the late 1960s with the lyrics and music written for them.

I found seven more songs of hers covered by someone, mostly from YouTube videos. One case, the first song here ("Midnight Cowboy"), is something of an anomaly, since it came out on an album in 1972. I'm guessing Mitchell wrote it in 1969 after watching the movie with that title that came out that year. The rest have all been done by people in the last decade or so. I could find only one of them who actually put out a record with one of these songs on it. The rest are just folks who wanted to make YouTube videos of themselves singing.

That said, I was surprised at how good these are. Most are sung by women in a very Joni Mitchell-esque fashion. I consider every song she wrote from the early part of her career to be precious. Chances are, these versions are the only way to hear these songs until some distant day when hopefully the versions by Mitchell are officially released for at least some of them.

Unfortunately, I could only find seven such songs, which totals up to just 24 minutes. That's not enough for a "real" album in my opinion, but I figure seven otherwise totally unknown Joni Mitchell songs is a lot better than zero!

If any of the people who recorded their versions of songs on this album ever see this and don't want to be included, please let me know and I'll change the album accordingly. On the other hand, if you have the talent and want to record more of Mitchell's lost songs, please do!

Based on what I've heard from these seven songs, the 21 unreleased songs done by Mitchell which I put on the two early albums I put together are not necessarily any better than the 20 unreleased songs that haven't shown up anywhere on bootleg. It's likely that most or all of the 41 songs were done by her in concert at some point, but it's a matter of luck that some managed to get recorded by bootleggers and others didn't, since only a few shows got recorded in 1966 and 1967.

Don't be dissuaded by the fact that these are largely done by unknown people on YouTube. All of them are talented singers singing quality lost songs. If the performances weren't good, I wouldn't include them. The only quibble I have is with the guitar sound to one of the songs ("Who Has Seen the Wind"), no doubt due to the primitive recording condition.

I wonder if I had complete access to all the material in the official archives... I could make three solid pre-1968 albums by her, or even four! There probably are even more songs that the people behind jonimitchell.com don't know about, since they're basing their information on what's in the public record, such as mentions in old newspaper articles, and not from direct access to private archives. Some record company would be smart to make a box set just of her early unreleased stuff.

If anyone knows of cover versions of other lost Joni Mitchell songs that I've missed, please let me know and I'll include them.

Midnight Cowboy (Donal Leace)
Love Is like a Big Brass Band (Pamela Luccarelli)
Here Today and Gone Tomorrow (Pamela Luccarelli)
Moon in the Mirror (Sue Tierney)
Who Has Seen the Wind (Sue Tierney)
I Won't Cry (Christina Friis)
Strawflower Me (Camille Peruto)
Cara's Castle (Sue Tierney)
Daisy Summer Piper (Sue Tierney)

https://www.upload.ee/files/16701191/VA-JONMTCHLLUnreleasedndUnknwnJoniMSongs_atse.zip.html

I don't actually know where the cover art comes from, but I like the look.