not it.

I hadn’t played this for a while, and dug it out to listen to during one of the many rainstorms buffeting Britain at the moment. Along with “Night Ride Home”, “Turbulent Indigo” marked a welcome return to form for Joni after the hideous digital 80s Geffen years. As the rain drummed down, Joni railed against the world.

The centrepiece of the album is the awesome “Magdalene Laundries”, a description of the Church run workhouses for unmarried/”fallen” women peopled by the “bloodless brides of Christ” married to the Irish Catholic Church. The casual cruelties and indifferences of the place are captured in the lines “Peg O’Connell died today/She was a cheeky girl/A flirt/They just stuffed her in a hole!”.

The moods of injustice and simmering anger bubble up throughout the words on the whole album, which contrasts with the gentle lilting jazz inflected sounds of the songs themselves.

Other subjects covered include urban psychosis, the impermanence of love, the process of making art, domestic violence, the stratification of American society and the sense that we’re all going to hell in a handbasket.

The album ends with “The Sire of Sorrow (Job’s Sad Song)” which contains one of my favourite lyrics ever: “Let me speak, let me spit out my bitterness”.

This is another great set of songs to add to an already formidable catalogue.