• Joni Mitchell’s The Fiddle and the Drum

    I recently noticed a serious lack of Joni Mitchell music in my collection, despite my love for the one piece of her work I did have, Blue. I’ve set about remedying that and in doing so I realised that a song I first encountered on A Perfect Circle’s eMOTIVe, The Fiddle and the Drum, was in fact her work all along.

    Released in 1969 on her second album ‘Clouds‘ the song is an overt reflection on American foreign policy in places like Vietnam however like all great songs of it’s type, and to some degree regretably, it has just as much potency in today’s climate:

    And so once again
    My dear Johnny my dear friend
    And so once again you are fightin’ us all
    And when I ask you why
    You raise your sticks and cry, and I fall
    Oh, my friend
    How did you come
    To trade the fiddle for the drum

    You say I have turned
    Like the enemies you’ve earned
    But I can remember
    All the good things you are
    And so I ask you please
    Can I help you find the peace and the star
    Oh, my friend
    What time is this
    To trade the handshake for the fist

    And so once again
    Oh, America my friend
    And so once again
    You are fighting us all
    And when we ask you why
    You raise your sticks and cry and we fall
    Oh, my friend
    How did you come
    To trade the fiddle for the drum

    You say we have turned
    Like the enemies you’ve earned
    But we can remember
    All the good things you are
    And so we ask you please
    Can we help you find the peace and the star
    Oh my friend
    We have all come
    To fear the beating of your drum

    Get your hands on it some way or another; it is musically bare but extremely powerful all the same.
    As an aside, I had to smile a little bit when iTunes, on its completely random ‘shuffle’ mode, lined up Outkast’s ‘Bombs Over Baghdad’ after it recently.