photo: Denny Renshaw
Sufjan Stevens
“Free Man In Paris”
From Joni Mitchell’s 1974 Court & Spark
LISTEN TO SUFJAN’S VERSION
LISTEN TO JONI'S ORIGINAL
Assembling a cover of Joni Mitchell’s “Free Man in Paris” required more than a few musical somersaults. Who can possibly surmount Joni’s rollercoaster vocal lines with all those odd syntaxes and off beat pronunciations? My final attempt was less homage and more deconstruction, unfortunately. But I was most unprepared for one unlikely obstacle: David Geffen.
The song is built around one long speech tag, attributed to Geffen, laid out verbatim, extracted, perhaps, from some offhand remark he let slip in passing: a complaint about the headaches of the music industry. If taken at his word, Geffen comes off as wary of the work and responsibilities of the entertainment business, pining for a romantic vacation in Paris. The obvious irony, of course, is that Geffen’s indignation is aimed at the very industry he helped create. His imprint on the business spans from discovering celebrated songwriters (including Joni Mitchell herself) to producing movie blockbusters (like “Risky Business”) to fashioning one of the largest new Hollywood film companies (DreamWorks), making him one of the most successful men in the industry.
Self-righteously, perhaps, I pretend not to understand Geffen’s point of view on matters of the music business. I consider myself part of the New Populist Approach, in which artists no longer rely on the “star-stoking machinery” of the music industry, and instead focus on more sustainable means motivated by modesty, autonomy, community, loyalty (and other benign abstractions). I’ve embodied the voices of presidents, writers, and killer clowns, but David Geffen seemed like a stretch. What could we possibly have in common?
Probably more than I’d like to admit. On closer inspection, I came to find the song is not so much a pretentious tirade but more a simple gripe. It summarizes a universal predilection of the workingman: The Day Job. Even a job in music can be tedious, drudging, infuriating, and monotonous. Haven’t we all grown wary of phone calls? Wouldn’t we all love to outrun the marathon of work schedules and business calendars? Haven’t we all objectified the cobbled streets, the cafes and cabarets of Paris?
In this light, my approach became less an exercise in empathy, and more an experiment of the imagination. What would it sound like if David Geffen had, in fact, left the humdrum of the music industry for a fantasy weekend getaway to Paris? I decided to conjure up a party song, with strings and trumpets and trombones and vibraphones marching in a parade down the Champs Elysees to the Arc de Triomphe, all lit up with fireworks. Wouldn’t we all like to be there right now, dancing around bare-foot, tipping a glass of Champagne?
- Sufjan Stevens
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