Joni Mitchell appeared on the cover of Don Juan’s Reckless Daughter disguised as a black man – an oblique comment, perhaps, about the shape-shifting nature of this album’s music. This sprawling work covers a lot of terrain, both sonically and thematically – from grandly-arranged art songs (“Paprika Plains”) to jittery jazz-pop tunes (“Talk To Me”) and extended percussion interludes (“The Tenth World”), there’s a lot to digest here. Don Juan may best be approached in pieces, starting with Mitchell’s slinky nightclub excursion “Cotton Avenue” and ending with the rueful love meditation “The Silky Veils Of Ardor”. An erotic charge animates tracks like “Dreamland” and “Jericho”, while “Otis And Marlena” offers a satiric snapshot of Florida tourists. Lyrically, Joni dives into a dense Hejira-like travelogue in the title track and delivers a pared-down account of two-timing love in “Off Night Backstreet”. Along the way, she coos and soars in jazz-chanteuse fashion over her deft guitar playing. The overall mood here is dreamily downbeat, defined by Jaco Pastorius’ throbbing bass and Wayne Shorter’s piping sax.

Regarded at the time as a slightly over-ambitious follow up to the much-loved Hejira, this is probably the most neglected album in Joni Mitchell's canon. Originally a double-album with each side a complete suite of songs (side 2 devotes exclusively to Paprika Plains), its one hour running time sits comfortably on a single CD, though maybe it wasn't intended to be heard in a single sitting. Judging from the lyric to the title track, and the pictorial and verbal allusions to American Indians, it would seem that the Don Juan of the title refers to the Yaqui Indian shaman of Carlos Castaneda, with Joni's self-image recast through childhood and dreams as a recurring motif in the songs.
Chaka Khan, Jaco Pastorius (on top form) and members from Weather Report (including Wayne Shorter), LA Express and the Eagles are among the main contributors but are all held very much in a supporting role to Joni's controlling vision. Jericho and the superb Dreamland were already familiar in other versions, but there had never been anything like Paprika Plains before – a 16-minute suite orchestrated by Michael Gibbs which begins as a conventional song but spirals into an impressionist painting in sound, with libretti not sung but printed in the accompanying booklet. The African drumming led by Airto, which informs Dreamland, also propels The Tenth World, the album's most unusual cut, on which Airto again plays surdo, Jaco Pastorius plays bongos and Manola Badrena plays congas and coffee cans and leads the wordless chorus consisting of Joni Mitchell, Chaka Khan and percussionists Don Alias and Alejandro Acuna.
The album is equally effective on unadorned songs such as the beautiful, traditional sounding closer, „Silky Veils Of Ardor“, on which Joni is accompanied only by her own guitar. That this album is not considered a masterpiece can only be because of the very strong competition offered by some of her other, more commercially successful albums.