Technically speaking, the most popular album in Joni Mitchell’s sublime, defiantly variegated oeuvre is not the one for which she is now best loved. It doesn’t elicit the devotion that her fourth record, 1971’s Blue, does – but her sixth, Court and Spark, released 50 years ago, in January 1974, is Mitchell’s most commercially successful and in many ways artistically accomplished album. It reached No 2 in the charts, features her only top-ten single (“Help Me”), and was rapturously received by critics. If Blue was a breakthrough for Mitchell – an unprecedented and arguably unsurpassed exercise in self-exposure – Court and Spark was her breakout.
The album marks Mitchell’s triumphant return to Californian society after an austere spell in the Canadian wilderness where she had retreated, in the wake of Blue, to escape the fame the album had ignited and recover from the psychic toll of such incisive self-anatomisation. She lived monastically in a little stone house – “I stayed away from electricity for about a year” – emerging with the songs for her next album, For the Roses (1972). But she “couldn’t let go of LA”, as she sings on the title track of Court and Spark, and eventually returned, crashing with the impresario David Geffen, founder of Asylum Records, the label on which Mitchell would release the rest of her Seventies work.
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