'Only a Dark Cocoon' by Caley Conway
You’d be foolish to try to figure out where Caley Conway will go next. Musically, that is. While it is fair to guess that Joni Mitchell has loomed large in Conway’s art for any number of reasons, here on her new EP Only A Dark Cocoon, Conway draws direct inspiration from “The Last Time I Saw Richard,” from Mitchell’s album Blue, to connect a trilogy of songs.
“The Last Time I Saw Him” opens with modern production sounds—perhaps a nod to Mitchell’s forward-thinking model in use of musical technologies and techniques.
The centerpiece, “You’ve Got Tombs in Your Eyes,” refracts Mitchell’s words in an impressionistic, half-recalled dreamscape—or maybe that’s reading too much into it? What began as Mitchell recalling a conversation has become a way for Conway to interpret her own version of the song’s conversation? The notion that Mitchell’s record—entombed for all time in vinyl instead of amber—turned out to be a cocoon when Conway saw fit to transform it, half a decade later.
