Track Listing

1. I Had A King
2. Michael From The Mountains
3. Night In The City
4. Marcie
5. Nathan La Franeer
6. Sisotowbell Lane
7. Dawntreader
8. Pirate Of Penance
9. Song To A Seagull
10. Cactus Tree

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #15321 in Music
• Released on: 1999-10-01
• Number of discs: 1
• Dimensions: .20 pounds

Amazon.co.uk Review
Also known as Song To A Seagull, Joni's David Crosby-produced debut is simpler and more stark than the meticulous tapestries of her later and more celebrated work. It showcases the fragile Sixties style Crosby called "art-folk": hushed and demure, courtly and mannered. The young Joni sometimes sounds cloyingly virginal, and the flowery mooncalf affectations grate, but her unique sense of rhythm and melody is already blooming, most beautifully on "I Had A King", "Michael From Mountains" and "The Dawntreader". Raw and clear, Joni Mitchell is the sound of arguably the 1970s finest songwriter warming up, her approach, musical and lyrical, coming into focus, her vision ghosting past the boundaries of the folk form. --Taylor Parkes

CD Description
This David Crosby-produced album is a sparse and beautiful folk record. This was Joni Mitchell's debut, yet already it was apparent that here was an immense lyrical talent. Her great melodic gift developed more fully later on, as these arefairly standard-fare folk items. Still, few writers had used such a conversational style in song, and for that alone, this was a milestone of a record. The listener was encouragedand welcomed into a stream of dialogue and tales without needing to know what they were all about.

Customer Reviews

The First, the best, the yardstick by which to judge her.
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.

Song To A Seagull
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

Beautiful, fragile and seriously under-rated...
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.