- last.fm: cactustreesmotel

- folk music, hockey, dulcimerposting, archiving

i have been pondering this for SO long. i did some scouring of lyrics and these are the songs that i think relate most directly to canadian prairie/small town life... many of her early albums are centred on the city and don't reach back to her earlier years as much as they do later, so much of this list comes from albums of the late 70s/onwards. and this is very subjective!!

a case of you, blue

let the wind carry me, for the roses

coyote, hejira

song for sharon, hejira

in france they kiss on main street, the hissing of summer lawns

chinese cafe, wild things run fast

come in from the cold, night ride home

cherokee louise, night ride home

ray's dad's cadillac, night ride home

i already have quibbles with this list and i just finished typing it lol. i was considering the categories of "small town" and "canadiana" and how they had to overlap, and how explicitly; a case of you interpolates a bit of the canadian anthem (canadiana!) but it isn't very "small town" unless you go based on vibes (drinking? in bars?) but i included it bc it just felt wrong to scratch it out. a bunch of these are about teenage life and rocknroll and cars and boys in a small town that doesn't read specifically canadian unless you know where she grew up (and pay attention to how much she brings up skating lol). the songs that have the strongest connection to me are coyote, chinese cafe (mentioning the saskatchewan uranium mining industry!!) and all the songs from night ride home.

i also want to say that joni is a difficult artist to categorize in any way, and trying to make her songs fit into a "canadiana" box is one of the most difficult. there sure are small towns in some of her songs, and skating, and the maple leafs (shoutout raised on robbery which got cut lol), and songs about canadians, but i don't feel like "canadiana" is the best way to describe these things when you take the entire context of her music into account and when you think about what gets included as fundamental to "canadian" culture and what doesn't.