#338
Album: The Hissing of Summer Lawns
Artist: Joni Mitchell
Year: 1975
Length: 42:34
Genre: Jazz Pop / Folk Jazz / Art Rock / Avant-Pop
“Truth goes up in vapors
Don’t Interrupt The Sorrow
The steeples lean
Winds of change patriarchs
Snug in your bible belt dreams
God goes up the chimney
Like childhood Santa Claus
The good slaves love the good book
A rebel loves a cause”
Why is it so hard to be productive?
I find myself in another one of those dips in life where doing anything seems incredibly difficult. I know it’s not completely abnormal for these moments to occur, but it doesn’t change how crappy it feels going through them. I just feel completely and utterly creatively bankrupt. Not that I don’t have any ideas or any projects I would love to be doing, but the issue is when it comes time to sit down and tackle them, my mind is incessantly blank. I’ve found my motivation and determination have been killed and my sense of purpose is just non-existent. There’s obviously a ton of factors contributing to this dip in productivity that is getting me so incredibly down, but the big problem is finding a solution on how to overcome this dip and get back on track, which seems even more difficult.
It’s hard not to find myself spiraling, lying on the couch, wallowing in my own misery when I start thinking about all the things I wish to be doing. Take this blog for example, when I think about when i started, I would crank out a post a day, and although I know that’s not the most sustainable because life happens, I find myself in a position now where I have all the time in the world and am doing absolutely nothing with it (which then has me spiraling more). I keep trying to write these posts and when I sit to write, again I find myself completely blank and unsure what to write. I had told myself that I would just keep writing these posts, even if I had nothing to say or couldn’t think of anything, but even that started to wear thin on its own. Another issue was I haven’t taken any photos for the photoshop covers in an incredibly long time and I just saw these posts filling up my backlog but never actually getting posted. I’ve been doing this since the Bad Company post and it’s to the point that when I finally release those early posts… what I said in them will be completely irrelevant to what’s currently happening in my life as it’s me talking from god knows how many months ago.
So, I’ve decided to finally just release the posts and stop wasting time on them. When I eventually do do the photoshop covers, I’ll just go back and add them to the post! Regardless they seem to be better off through my Instagram than here anyway. Point is, I shouldn’t stop myself from being productive due to small factors like that. You can always work around things, there’s always a solution. Even in regards to my other projects, I think I’m always in a state that I’m waiting… waiting for what sometimes I don’t know, but waiting for something, something that feels like it’s missing… or waiting for the thing to just happen on its own (which is impossible). It’s time to stop waiting and just to do regardless if things feel ready or not because let’s be honest, nothing is ever truly ready now is it? Hopefully I can stick to it…
I should probably say something about this album, an album I actually enjoyed fairly well. I always like Joni Mitchell and so far it seems every album of hers that’s thrown my way I end up enjoying thoroughly and this was no exception. Coming off the heights of Court and Spark you’d think it’d be hard to follow, but for me it not only continued what Court and Spark did wonderfully but also managed to do its own things as well. I was shocked when I read up on it to hear that upon it’s initial release it was met with widely mixed reviews. People just did not seem to enjoy it at all with the biggest criticism being the music itself, highly praising her lyrics but feeling the music was too distracting from what she was trying to say. This is a totally valid feeling if that is indeed how they felt, but for me, in my own experience, I didn’t feel that way at all. In fact, I felt the music supported the lyrics quite well and the blend of the two seemed to fit rather nicely. I never once felt distracted by it or at any moment felt like it took me out of the experience as a whole. But that’s just me.
With a title like The Hissing of Summer Lawns, it already evoked imagery of summer and for some reason I went into this expecting those kinds of sounds, taking the title of the album a little too literally. I would have enjoyed an album like that as well that made me think of grass and trees and nice breezes as well, but that being said I am just as pleased with the album I did get.
Favourite Song: In France They Kiss on Main Street
-Bosco
Bosco's Modern Life 