Joni Mitchell Love Has Many Faces

Beloved singer-songwriter-painter-poet Joni Mitchell will turn 75 this year on November 7th . Rhino will start the birthday celebration a few days early by releasing Mitchell’s critically-acclaimed 2014 collection ‘Love Has Many Faces: A Quartet, A Ballet, Waiting To Be Danced’ on vinyl for the first time as a limited-edition, eight-LP box set.

‘Love Has Many Faces: A Quartet, A Ballet, Waiting To Be Danced’ was first conceived as the music to a ballet about love. But after spending 18 months trying to distil everything she’d written about love – and the lack of it – down to a single disc, Mitchell abandoned the ballet. “I wanted the music to feel like a total work – a new work. No matter what I did, though, at that length, it remained merely a collection of songs,” she wrote in the liner notes to the set.

Undaunted, Mitchell did not give up. Instead, she continued to sequence her songs, determined to prove to herself that what she was after was possible. After two years, she had created a four-act ballet based on the 53 songs that make up this inspiring collection. “I am a painter who writes songs. My songs are very visual. The words create scenes… What I have done here is to gather some of these scenes (like a documentary filmmaker) and by juxtaposition, edit them into a whole new work,” she explains.

Mitchell organized the music into different thematic acts, which allowed her songs to interact with one another in a whole new way. The process, she says, was a lot like making a film. “I had forty years of footage to review. Then, suddenly, scenes began to hook up. Then series began to form. Instead of it being an emotional roller coaster ride as it was before – crammed into one disc – themes began to develop. Moods sustained. I was getting there… When this long editorial process (two years) finally came to rest, I had four ballets or a four-act ballet—a quartet. I also had a box set.”

Long-term listeners should find the music familiar but fresh. Newcomers have an adventure before them – a journey into highly-original, harmonically innovative, unusually rhythmic music. Some of the greatest musicians in the world are gathered here – supporting this emotionally charged exploration of love’s many faces.

Limited to 5000 individually numbered copies, the set is presented in a hard-bound deluxe folio package. It includes 53 songs on eight 180-gram LPs. Etchings of Mitchell’s artwork are featured on four individual album sides, each one signifying the end of an act in the ballet.

It truly is an artist-curated collection. Mitchell selected the material from 40 years of recording. She designed the package, which includes a book containing 53 lyrical poems, six paintings, and an autobiographical text illuminating her recording process. It is funny, mystical, and informative.