As a performer and composer, Joni possesses steady contrasts. Her singing is childlike, itself a rose-tinted false mirror to the heartbreak her songs derive from. The songs of debut album Things I Left Behind formed following Joni’s breakup with her partner and musical collaborator following their relocation from Los Angeles to London, yet some keep up the façade. Picturing herself “lying on the couch” with her lover, Joni breeds beauty from the unholy union of denial and idealism on Strawberry Lane, itself a Stella Donnelly fantasy, while the chorused jangle of Bucket List ventures back to Karen O’s singer-songwriter heyday, all to cutely shout the words “you’re my Everest; just you on my bucket list” from the rooftops, or, umm, mountaintops.
Reaching a fever pitch on Happy Birthday, Cupid’s arrow becomes one with the Grim Reaper’s touch; a soft-spoken splendour that celebrates a birthday with a partner, niceness intact, before dropping the act and noting that we’re “not in love like before”. Joni’s woodsy guitar tone – and the chords she plays, traditional yet inviting as if innovative – says as much as her words, and so does her gap in playing, in which which she stops to take a breath, and perhaps wipe a tear away, If that ain’t intimate, I don’t know what is.
Her guitar tones portray the pieced-back-together outcome Joni had hoped for. Following the documented extremities of her recording process with her former partner, her songs now sound comfortable and comforting, continuing a harsh-not-so-harsh balancing act whilst also offering a cushioning. Avalanches is all about reliving disaster, its twangy chorus reshaping it into a lullaby; the echoey plucking of PS guides Joni through her epilogue, her review of all that has come before. The Tide is a well-humoured opposite; razor’s edge folk rock sung with a fluttery voice, like a gentle soul in a biker bar.
Dreaminess – and the comfort it offers – exists even where guitars don’t; warm singing, warm vibraphones and warmer backgrounds console Joni’s delusion on Your Girl; a glowing piano waltz sparks on Castles as her voice arrives like fog on a window; the title track is somehow Radiohead-esque, a forward-thought in instrumentation that sends spiralling lyrics on the past and future into a surreal state.
There is something to console, to cry to, or to feel encouraged by on every corner of Things I Left Behind; an original guide to the overcrowded messiness of heartbreak and the contrasting hangers-on.