![Joni Mitchell At Newport [2LP] on Vinyl by Joni Mitchell](https://d3fa68hw0m2vcc.cloudfront.net/images/autosize/46830901.jpeg?width=228&height=285&format=jpeg "Joni Mitchell At Newport [2LP] on Vinyl by Joni Mitchell")
Released on vinyl for the first time and limited to 5,000 individually numbered copies, Love Has Many Faces is presented in a hard-bound deluxe folio package. It includes 53 songs on eight 180g LPs. Etchings of Mitchell’s artwork are featured on four individual album sides, each one signifying the end of an act in the ballet.
It truly is an artist-curated collection. Mitchell selected the material from 40 years of recording. She designed the package, which includes a book containing 53 lyrical poems, six paintings, and an autobiographical text illuminating her recording process. It is funny, mystical, and informative.
Love Has Many Faces: A Quartet, A Ballet, Waiting To Be Danced was first conceived as the music to a ballet about love. But after spending 18 months trying to distil everything she’d written about love – and the lack of it – down to a single disc, Mitchell abandoned the ballet. “I wanted the music to feel like a total work—a new work. No matter what I did, though, at that length, it remained merely a collection of songs,” she wrote in the liner notes to the set.
Undaunted, Mitchell did not give up. Instead, she continued to sequence her songs, determined to prove to herself that what she was after was possible. After two years, she had created a four-act ballet based on the 53 songs that make up this inspiring collection. “I am a painter who writes songs. My songs are very visual. The words create scenes… What I have done here is to gather some of these scenes (like a documentary filmmaker) and by juxtaposition, edit them into a whole new work,” she explains.