2000: Both Sides Now - Joni Mitchell
Looking back at 30 years of music | Joni Mitchell, Warren Zevon, Bob Dylan & Various Other Artists
We’ve made it through the 90s, covering some great albums and songs along the way and ended up in the year 2000.
This has been the first time I’ve looked at the album release schedule for a year and struggled to single one out to write about. It’s the first year we’ve hit where I’ve looked at the album releases and not had a real emotional connection or history with any of them.
Looking back now, it doesn’t look like there were really many enduring classics or lasting albums released this year. There were some minor works from major artists (such as Patti Smith, Tracy Chapman, Van Morrison and Lou Reed), some major releases from acts I’ve never become acquainted with (Radiohead’s Kid-A, OutKast’s Stankonia, which featured their smash-hit Ms Jackson, and Eminem’s The Marshall Mathers LP, featuring Stan and The Real Slim Shady) and a whole lot of albums from bands I’d either never heard of, or forgotten about entirely.
One real stand out album, though, came quite early in the year in the form of Joni Mitchell’s Both Sides Now. An incredible concept album, the record rows and flows through every emotional state and stage of a relationship - from flirtation to infatuation, dissolution and despair, devastation and finally, acceptance - over the course of 12 richly orchestrated and carefully selected pieces.
Blending American standards such as At Last, Answer Me My Love, Don’t Go To Strangers and Stormy Weather with A Case of You and Both Sides Now, Mitchell places her songs in the pantheon where they rightfully belong, as modern standards.
This is an enormous album. Not in the sense that is has a lot of songs on it, or that it sold an extraordinary amount of copies, but in the sense that it feels enormous when you listen to it. Mitchell is backed by a 64-piece orchestra, and at times it sounds like there are even more parts playing than that, and yet her full and mature voice is one of the strongest instruments on the record. It stands up alongside the orchestration; weaves with the woodwinds and breathes alongside the bass clarinets while strings swell and soar and leave you holding your breath at times in disbelief and on the verge of tears at others.
Her inflection is drenched in an appreciation of Jazz (and its great practitioners), but this album almost feels like a movie score at times. It’s a visual album. Joni Mitchell is a painter (she even lives inside a box of paints), but here she uses her voice to paint the picture for us, utilising every shade in her palette, to such evocative effect.
There is magic in every song.
Whilst Rolling Stone only gave Both Sides Now a 3 star rating, they hailed Warren Zevon’s 2000 album Life’ll Kill Ya as his best since Excitable Boy. That probably says more about the albums in between than it does about this one. There are good songs and good moments on the record, but it’s still more exciting to just listen to Excitable Boy itself.
I turned six at the end of 2000, so Joni Mitchell and Warren Zevon weren’t on my radar then, and wouldn’t be for a long time to come. My tastes were not nearly so refined as all that. I’d have been more interested in listening to the big songs from new albums by The Hives (Veni Vidi Vicious, featuring the infectiously fun Main Offender and Hate To Say I Told You So), The White Stripes (De Stijl, featuring You're Pretty Good Looking (For a Girl) and Hello Operator) and Green Day’s Warning (featuring Warning) or, alternatively, all of the pop singles that were inescapable on the radio and music TV channels that year; things that would have endlessly played on the Capital and Heart stations or on music video shows on MTV and C4.
Brilliantly crafted and constructed pop songs like Spinning Around by Kylie Minogue, which was everywhere that summer, or the equally ubiquitous Oops!…I Did It Again by Britney Spears, both complete with iconic and era defining music videos.
Songs like Yellow from Coldplay - taken from their major label debut Parachutes, which hit the top of charts upon release - or the hilarious bad-boy breakthrough from Shaggy, It Wasn’t Me.
Even songs like Rock DJ or Life Is A Rollercoaster and When You Say Nothing At All from boy-band breakaways Robbie Williams and Ronan Keating.
And, slightly outside this mainstream pop bubble, one of the more interesting songs from the year, The Avalanches’ Frontier Psychiatrist. How do you describe a song like this? It’s a patchwork; a musical collage pulled together by the debuting Australian electronic group with elements drawn from other songs, films and comedy routines from the 1960s and onwards. It’s got strings and it’s got mariachi brass, it’s got hip-hop beats and record scratching. It’s got Cowboys and Indians, golden eyeballs, false teeth and talking birds. And yes, some birds are funny when they talk.
Bob Dylan was back with one of his coolest ever songs (and one of my favourite tracks of all time), Things Have Changed.
Written for the Curtis Hanson movie Wonder Boys (the film has quite a cast; it stars Michael Douglas, Tobey Maguire, Frances McDormand, Katie Holmes, Rip Torn and Robert Downey Jr. among others) and went on to win both a Golden Globe and an Academy Award for Best Original Song. Dylan, a lifelong movie lover, was so proud of his academy award that his Oscar statue took pride of place on stage with him every night from the time he won it right up until the end of 2019.
Dylan was obviously proud of the song, too, playing it live in concert nearly 1,000 times in the same period. It was always a highlight.
This song, perhaps more than any other, might be the one that most perfectly captures and distils the essence of all of Bob Dylan’s music. In his own words, this “obviously is a song that doesn't pussyfoot around nor turn a blind eye to human nature”.
He could have written and performed this during any point in his career and been just as believable with it. The song features characters whose names wouldn’t be out of place in either his mid-60’s writing or on Rough and Rowdy Ways (Mr Jinx and Miss Lucy), religious allegory that would work just as well on John Wesley Harding or Slow Train Coming, a sense of humour and cinematic storytelling that would fit right in on Brownsville Girl and “Love and Theft”, and the sign off in the chorus is the perfect summation of Dylan’s hipper-than-hip attitude, “I used to care, but things have changed”. You can just picture him sneering the line in Don’t Look Back, ironically intoning it during Renaldo & Clara, or telling it to the camera with a twinkle in his eye in No Direction Home. The more some things change, the more they stay the same.
Maybe 2000 wasn’t so bad for music, after all.
Elsewhere in 2000…
1st (new) UK Number 1 of the 2000’s: Manic Street Preachers - The Masses Against the Classes
1st (new) USA Number 1 of the 2000’s: Christina Aguilera - What a Girl Wants
Notable releases:
D’Angelo - Voodoo
Fatboy Slim - Halfway Between The Gutter And The Stars
Johnny Cash - American III: Solitary Man
Linkin Park - Hybrid Theory
Madonna - Music
PJ Harvey - Stories from the City, Stories from the Sea
Queens Of The Stone Age - Rated R
Richard Ashcroft - Alone With Everybody
U2 - All That You Can't Leave Behind
Yo La Tengo - And Then Nothing Turned Itself Inside-Out
Coming up in 2001. Bob Dylan releases one of his greatest ever albums. The Strokes bring rock music back to life. Wilco embarrass their label and Leonard Cohen releases Ten New Songs.
Life’ll Kill Ya is fine but there are absolutely better records between that and Excitable. That’s a terrible RS take. Check out The Envoy and Sentimental Hygiene to start.