I've thought before that while Joni may well be a great songwriter, she's only a moderately good singer - all that upper register fluting can be pretty distracting, especially in conjunction with the frequent wordiness of her lyrics - and this album strikes me as a neat illustration of that principle. I found the first few songs on the record in particular to be quite hard to get into, with Mitchell's vocalisations sometimes feeling kind of like a curtain obscuring the melodies, dissolving it all into a drizzle of (a) high-pitched vocal flutters and (b) well, other bits. But by the second half of the album (say, from the title track onwards, it being one of my early favourites), she's well and truly hit her stride, and songs like "You Turn Me On I'm A Radio" and "Blonde In The Bleachers" show her at the top of her form, the songs benefiting from a more restrained vocal performance (and also being somewhat fuller musically than most of the others, which may mean that they'd be less beloved of the Joni purist). (Also, "See You Sometimes" is the first Joni song that has made me understand, in a more than intellectual way, the incessant comparisons that Tori draws to her.)
Anyhow, it's relatively early Joni - For The Roses was released in '72, the year after Blue - and quite piano-driven, but beginning to experiment and innovate more than on her previous recordings, including showing hints of the jazz influence that was later to become much more prominent (oh no, a saxophone!). She still comes across as perhaps somewhat too much the naïf at times, but it's not too intrusive and generally I think this is a pretty solid album, and maybe a bit of a transitional one. (Also, Joni records have a habit of suddenly speaking to me some time after I first listen to them - things need to be in their right place for her albums to find their voice with me.)
