(Credits: Alamy)
Thu 11 December 2025 18:30, UK
The greatest Joni Mitchell songs don’t even sound like they come from the same musical hemisphere half the time.
Whereas most artists would be content to make the best music that they can whenever they walk into the studio, Mitchell always saw her records as a new opportunity to take the craft further than it had ever been before. No one could have imagined what she did with a guitar in her hand, but she would be the first to say when one of her projects was flawed.
Then again, looking through Mitchell’s discography, there aren’t too many blemishes that are all that noticeable. She doesn’t have a Cut the Crap or Chinese Democracy that we can all point and laugh at and wonder how the hell it even got made, so that should be a good sign, right? I mean, if someone doesn’t have anything egregious in their catalogue, that should be a plus, but that doesn’t save fans from the boring albums, either.
While anyone can at least be mystified by a bad album, the albums that get forgotten along the way are the ones that are technically worse by a wide margin. Music is supposed to have a strong effect on the listener no matter what it’s trying to say, and while you can feel something when listening to albums like Hejira and Court and Spark, the same can’t be said for the albums that had problems right out of the gate.
But the biggest detractor from any artist’s album isn’t due to anything they did. The songs might be fantastic for what they are, but there’s one thing that none of them can escape: time. Each of them has a limit on how far they can take their music, and when they don’t know which way to go next, that’s when people start talking about working with people that are interested in whatever new sound is out there.
And while Dog Eat Dog is far from an 1980s-soaked fever dream or anything, you can definitely tell that something isn’t working. There are pieces of the album where the synthesisers sound very good, and Mitchell has great food for thought on every one of the tracks, but it took her less than a decade to realise that some of the production could have used more work by the time she walked out of the studio.
She had the potential to make a great album, but she readily admitted that Dog Eat Dog was never going to stand the test of time like it should have, saying, “I don’t think this stuff dates that much, you know. Probably the one that will date the most ultimately is Dog Eat Dog. That was me looking out at what was going on in the world because nobody else was.”
But, really, was anyone about to blame Mitchell for that? Sure, she was the one who was destined to have the final say in everything, but it’s not like she could afford to make another version of Blue or even Ladies of the Canyon again. Everyone was expecting a next chapter for her, and it was about time that she started shaking things up before she started to look like a relic from the past.
Not all of it worked, and fans will have to endure more than a few head-scratching moments on the record, but it’s not like Mitchell was going to give her version of Wang Chung to her audience. The whole thing sounded like the 1980s condensed into a few minutes, but her songwriting hadn’t gone anywhere, and she was still reminding everyone why she was one notch above the pop crowd.
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