Night Ride Home by Joni Mitchell

Night Ride Home, Joni Mitchell's fourteenth album, came out on Geffen in February 1991, the last of her four records for the label and the first of her career not to go through the WEA distribution machine. It's a warm, unhurried folk-jazz record, her open-tuned guitar and deepened voice sitting close to the mic, and the songs look back hard.

"Cherokee Louise" tells the story of a girl she grew up with who was sexually abused, "The Windfall (Everything for Nothing)" turns on a maid who tried to take her to court, and "Come in from the Cold" weighs childhood against middle age. The title song, once called "Fourth of July" and first aired while she was promoting her previous album in 1988, grew out of a moonlit night in Hawaii. No single charted, but critics loved it, AOR stations played "Come in from the Cold", and a home video of the same name gathered promo clips for five of its songs.

Written with AI assistance from RockLists chart data, MusicBrainz and Wikipedia.