Love Has Many Faces (box set)

Love Has Many Faces is a box set by Canadian musician Joni Mitchell. It was released on November 24, 2014, through Rhino Entertainment. The box set compiles songs spanning Mitchell's fourth album, Blue to her most recent album, Shine.

Background

Compiled over a period of 18 months, Love Has Many Faces collects romantically themed songs from Mitchell's back catalogue, organized into four "acts". Included in its packaging is new paintings and poetry by Mitchell.
While the set was originally planned as one disc, creating what Mitchell referred to as an "emotional roller coaster", it was eventually expanded to four discs, allowing certain themes to be emphasized and "moods sustained". This single-disc compilation was intended to accompany a ballet to be performed in 2014 by the Alberta Ballet, until Mitchell made the decision to expand the project.
The set notably does not include any material from Mitchell's first three albums—Song to a Seagull, Clouds, and Ladies of the Canyon. In an interview with Billboard, she attributed the exclusion of the latter two albums to a dislike of her vocal performances on them.

Reception

In a review for AllMusic, Mark Deming awarded the set four stars out of five. While he felt that some fans may have been disappointed by its emphasis on less-popular and overlooked later material, he also opined that the lesser-known material "play significantly better than they did on her uneven projects of the '80s and '90s", and also stated that the "lyrical strength and bold musical vision that inform music are genuinely remarkable on nearly every tune." Writing for Paste, Douglas Heselgrave gave the set a rating of 9.5 out of 10 and also commended it for featuring work from the latter part of Mitchell's career, highlighting "Chinese Café/Unchained Melody", "Love Puts on a New Face" and "Borderline" and praising them as being "as lyrically and musically interesting as anything she recorded during the first decade of her career".