Joni Mitchell
Wild Things Run Fast

*NOTE: There is a stitch that plays 3 times loudly at the start of track 1 on side 1, "Chinese Cafe/Unchained Melody."

One of our favorite Joni Mitchell albums. A Desert Island Disc for me and one of the few good reasons to listen to new music in the 80s.

Both sides are lively, dynamic, and tonally right on the money. The vocal clarity is excellent, allowing you to appreciate every last nuance of Joni’s performance. The bottom end is wonderful with punchy drums and lots of deep bass. 

It’s a TAS list super disc with many good qualities, but you’d never know it from the typically lean, bass-shy pressing. Since this record can be a little cold sounding -- it’s a modern recording after all -- filling it out and warming it up a little is just what the doctor ordered. 

If you exclusively play modern repressings of vintage recordings, I can say without fear of contradiction that you have never heard this kind of sound on vinyl. Old records have it -- not often, and certainly not always -- but maybe one out of a hundred new records do, and those are some pretty long odds.

What The Best Sides Of Wild Things Run Fast Have To Offer Is Not Hard To Hear

• The biggest, most immediate staging in the largest acoustic space
• The most Tubey Magic, without which you have almost nothing. CDs give you clean and clear. Only the best vintage vinyl pressings offer the kind of Tubey Magic that was on the tapes even as late as 1982
• Tight, note-like, rich, full-bodied bass, with the correct amount of weight down low
• Natural tonality in the midrange -- with all the instruments having the correct timbre
• Transparency and resolution, critical to hearing into the three-dimensional studio space

No doubt there's more but we hope that should do for now. Playing the record is the only way to hear all of the qualities we discuss above, and playing the best pressings against a pile of other copies under rigorously controlled conditions is the only way to find a pressing that sounds as good as this one does.

Another Masterpiece?

I absolutely love the album. I think it’s one of Joni’s best, one of her many masterpieces if I may be so bold. One is only supposed to be allotted one masterpiece, but considering all the stylistic changes she’s been through, Joni has clearly earned the right to have as many as she likes. I count at least three so far and perhaps there will be more coming down the road, although I very much doubt it.

What We're Listening For On Wild Things Run Fast

• Energy for starters. What could be more important than the life of the music?
• Then: presence and immediacy. The vocals aren't "back there" somewhere, lost in the mix. They're front and center where any recording engineer worth his salt -- Henry Lewy in this case -- would put them.
• The Big Sound comes next -- wall to wall, lots of depth, huge space, three-dimensionality, all that sort of thing.
• Then transient information -- fast, clear, sharp attacks, not the smear and thickness so common to these LPs.
• Tight punchy bass -- which ties in with good transient information, also the issue of frequency extension further down.
• Next: transparency -- the quality that allows you to hear deep into the soundfield, showing you the space and air around all the instruments.
• Extend the top and bottom and voila, you have The Real Thing -- an honest to goodness Hot Stamper.

Vinyl Condition

Mint Minus Minus and maybe a bit better is about as quiet as any vintage pressing will play, and since only the right vintage pressings have any hope of sounding good on this album, that will most often be the playing condition of the copies we sell. (The copies that are even a bit noisier get listed on the site are seriously reduced prices or traded back in to the local record stores we shop at.)

Those of you looking for quiet vinyl will have to settle for the sound of other pressings and Heavy Vinyl reissues, purchased elsewhere of course as we have no interest in selling records that don't have the vintage analog magic of these wonderful recordings.

If you want to make the trade-off between bad sound and quiet surfaces with whatever Heavy Vinyl pressing might be available, well, that's certainly your prerogative, but we can't imagine losing what's good about this music -- the size, the energy, the presence, the clarity, the weight -- just to hear it with less background noise.

A Must Own Record

We consider Wild Things Run Fast a masterpiece. It's a recording that should be part of any serious Popular Music Collection.

Others that belong in that category can be found here.

Side One

• Chinese Cafe/Unchained Melody
• Wild Things Run Fast
• Ladies’ Man
• Moon at the Window
• Solid Love

Side Two

• Be Cool
• (You’re So Square) Baby I Don’t Care
• You Dream Flat Tires
• Man to Man
• Underneath the Streetlight
• Love

AMG Review

On her first new studio album of original material in five years and her debut for Geffen Records, Joni Mitchell achieved more of a balance between her pop abilities and her jazz aspirations, meanwhile rediscovering a more direct, emotional lyric approach. The result was her best album since the mid-70s.

About the Album

Wild Things Run Fast is the 11th studio album by Canadian singer-songwriter Joni Mitchell. Her first of four releases for Geffen Records, it was released in 1982 and represents her departure from jazz to a more 1980s pop sound. This was her first album to work with bassist Larry Klein, whom she married in 1982. Klein would play bass on and co-produce her next four albums.

The resulting world tour took Mitchell through the U.S., Europe, Asia and Australia. A video of the tour was released in 1983, entitled Refuge of the Roads. The recorded performances were not performed in front of a live audience, but rather recorded live in a studio once the tour had been completed, with applause dubbed-in during post-production. There was also some Super 8 footage taken by Mitchell on the road. It has since been released on DVD.

Mitchell claimed that her inspiration for the album came from hearing the music of popular bands such as Steely Dan, Talking Heads and The Police at a discothèque during a trip to the Caribbean in 1981. She said that hearing The Police, especially, affected her sound, saying, "their rhythmic hybrids, and the positioning of the drums, and the sound of the drums, was one of the main calls out to me to make a more rhythmic album."

-Wikipedia