Joni Mitchell - Born to Take the Highway - On TV and Radio (1965-1968)

In the past couple of months, I've posted a bunch of bootleg concerts of Joni Mitchell from her early years. Those concerts are all great, for their many unreleased songs, her commentary before nearly every song, their excellent sound quality, and more. But I also have other quality performances here and there from that era, mostly from various TV and radio shows. I'd already put together a series of albums for Dusty Springfield called "On TV and Radio," so I've decided to do the same for Mitchell. Here's the first of four such albums.

Note that I've also collected many of Mitchell's still unreleased early songs on three stray tracks collections. I avoided putting any of those exact performances on these albums as well. I also maintained high standards when it comes to sound quality, so I rejected some performances due to that. Furthermore, I generally dislike having two versions of the same song on one album, unless there's a special reason for it. In her early years, she often played the same songs for her limited mass media appearances, such as "The Circle Game" and "Both Sides Now." I don't have any duplicates on this album.

All the songs are originals, except for "Prithee, Pretty Maiden." I didn't include that one on the stray tracks albums because I felt it wasn't strong enough. It's a duet with someone I'd never heard of, named "Bob Jason."

UPDATE: On February 3, 2021, I drastically changed the mp3 download file. Thanks to the release of the "Archives, Volume 1" box set in late 2020, I completely overhauled my stray tracks dealing with her early career, turning two albums into three. In doing that, I ended up removing a majority of the songs from this album. I replaced them with other songs, and wound up with roughly the same amount of music.

01 Born to Take the Highway (Joni Mitchell)
02 Play Little David (Joni Mitchell)
03 Night in the City (Joni Mitchell)
04 Prithee, Pretty Maiden (Joni Mitchell & Bob Jason)
05 Just like Me (Joni Mitchell)
06 Urge for Going (Joni Mitchell)
07 Both Sides Now (Joni Mitchell)
08 Blue on Blue (Joni Mitchell)
09 Eastern Rain (Joni Mitchell)
10 The Dawntreader (Joni Mitchell)
11 The Circle Game (Joni Mitchell)
12 Sisotowbell Lane [Edit] (Joni Mitchell)
13 The Gallery (Joni Mitchell)
14 Nathan La Franeer (Joni Mitchell)

The download link has been removed due to copyright issues. However, check out the comments below.

Around 1967, the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC) filmed Mitchell playing some of her songs in various beautiful locales around Canada. They tried to use settings that matched the songs. The cover art comes from a screenshot of one such video, for the song "Born to Take the Highway." Naturally, they went with the idea of her walking down a highway.

At the same time I updated the mp3 download (February 2021), I updated the cover art photo. Starting from a slightly different screenshot taken from the same video, I used some tricks to make it look less blurry than before.