Joni Mitchell - Love Has Many Faces: A Quartet

Facts Limited eight vinyl LP pressing. Joni Mitchell curates this collection featuring 53 newly remastered songs recorded throughout her landmark career that evoke her vision of love. Mitchell selected the material from 40 years of recording. She designed the package. The package is a book containing 53 lyrical poems, six new paintings, and an autobiographical text illuminating her recording process. It is funny, mystical, and informative. The collection was first conceived as the music to a ballet about love, but after spending 18 months trying to distill everything she'd written about love-and the lack of it-down to a single disc, Mitchell opted to abandon the ballet. "I wanted the music to feel like a total work-a new work," she explains in the liner notes to the set. "No matter what I did, though, at that length, it remained merely a collection of songs." Rather than give up, she kept on sequencing and re-sequencing the material, eventually hitting creative paydirt. Putting Love Has Many Faces together felt decidedly cinematic to Mitchell, which is only fair when one considers the epic life she's lived. "I had forty years of footage to review," she writes. "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." And now you have one, too.