[Click here to read Part 2 of this profile.]
Mitchell never confounded her devoted fans, but she occasionally confounded their expectations from one album to the next. More experimental endeavors always take some getting used to, but if the artist is genuine and believes in a particular artistic vision, the core or the truth of their art is always recognizable, always present, even when the sounds aren’t necessarily familiar or what we’ve grown comfortable hearing. Above all else, Mitchell’s music has always been eminently listenable. That’s important for obvious reasons, but with so many of the songs in Mitchell’s catalog, that quality is a gift that keeps on giving. Her music grows richer, deeper, more remarkable on repeated listenings; one apprehends the layers of lyrical and musical complexity, the originality of her phrasing, the kind of pushing and pulling emotional tension in both the words and the music, and the contrapuntal quality of what she plays and what she sings. One develops even more admiration for the grace and fluidity of her writing, something that is still unrivaled even among the many artists whose work she has profoundly inspired and influenced.
Much of this, I think, has to do with Mitchell’s musical influences, which are primarily classical. She has frequently cited Rachmaninoff’s Rhapsody on a Theme of Paganini as a touchstone composition, as well as the works of Debussy, until she reached her teen years and started dancing to the likes of Louis Jordan. When she taught herself string instruments – bass ukulele, guitar, dulcimer – and began performing, she began with folk. But the folk scene in the early sixties was very territorial. Different folk singers were “known” for covering certain songs; those songs were like the property of their acts, and for other, especially new artists, to perform them was seen as a kind of appropriation and frowned upon. Mitchell saw little choice but to start composing her own music.
Ironically, she quickly established a reputation among folk singers of the time who were struck by her songwriting ability and began covering her compositions. Folk singer Tom Rush, who first heard Mitchell playing the coffeehouses and folk clubs in Toronto, recorded “Urge for Going” (a song you probably couldn’t write today without being mocked as an anthem for sufferers of overactive bladders), and country singer George Hamilton IV quickly recording a country version after hearing Rush perform it. Other artists, like Buffy Sainte-Marie and Judy Collins, covered Mitchell songs and soon brought her music to new audiences. David Crosby happened upon her playing in a club in Florida, convinced her to follow him to Los Angeles, and helped produce her first recording, Song to a Seagull, released in 1968. When her second album, Clouds, was released in 1969, songs from that recording—“Chelsea Morning,” “Both Sides Now,” “Tin Angel”—were already hits for other artists. The album earned Mitchell her first Grammy, for Best Folk Performance.
Mitchell’s enduring popularity among generations of musicians probably stems from the maturity of her sound and her lyrics. Listening to a song like “Both Sides Now,” it’s almost hard to grasp the fact that Mitchell was only 21 years old when she composed it. The song is a meditation, contrasting the idealism of youthful dreams and impressions with the realities of love and the passing of time—the melancholy reflections and regret of an older, experienced person. How did she come to write such a piece at such a young age? (It’s a haunting bit of listening to hear her original version following by her re-interpretation of the song on 2000’s Both Sides Now.)
So much of her catalog is like that. Her work as a painter and photographer (for as many years as she’s been recording) also informs the structure and the content of much of her music. She elaborates themes and sets moods through painterly observation, balancing different elements, creating set pieces. Mitchell never comes out and tells us how she feels; she shows us, through words and chord shapes. From the title cut from Hejira, an album that Mitchell wrote entirely on the guitar while driving alone from Maine to California, and exploring the metaphor of journeys:
We’re only particles of change I know, I know
Orbiting around the sun
But how can I have that point of view
When I’m always bound and tied to someone
White flags of winter chimneys
Waving truce against the moon
In the mirrors of a modern bank
From the window of a hotel room
“There’s comfort in melancholy,” she writes elsewhere in that song, “when there’s no need to explain. It’s just as natural as the weather.” All of Hejira is rich with such reflection: small pleasures and consolations mapped against larger and more enduring emotions and conditions. From “Refuge of the Roads”:
In a highway service station
Over the month of June
Was a photograph of the Earth
Taken coming back from the moon
And you couldn’t see a city
On that marbled bowling ball
Or a forest or a highway
Or me here least of all
Mitchell’s lyricism extends far beyond words. Hejira could easily be subtitled “Nine Compositions for Guitar and Voice.” Her incredibly sophisticated gift for lyric writing often overshadows her musicianship, the originality of her chord progressions, tunings, and phrasing. Many of her compositions are asymmetrical, free of standard format but always rigorously structured, themed, and with a (frequently complex) strong melodic line. Perhaps it is a matter of being damned by faint praise, but Rolling Stone ranked her 72nd on its list of greatest guitarists; she is, however, the highest woman on the list.
For her music-buying public, there’s always been something of a divide over Mitchell’s work. The enthusiasm of her early listeners seems to culminate with her 1974 recording Court and Spark, her most commercially successful album. Her forays into the jazz idiom from that point involved a more challenging brand of music and seemed to confuse fans of her earlier recordings (or, as Mitchell put it, “People seem to have a problem after Court and Spark – everything was measured unfavorably against it”). Other listeners, who came to Mitchell around that time, have great affection and allegiance to the later, jazz-influenced recordings (The Hissing of Summer Lawns, Hejira, Don Juan’s Reckless Daughter, Mingus).
But musicians, across the board, tend to see progression where the casual listener sees divide, and many have an almost reverential devotion to Mitchell, her gifts, her work, and the way she’s conducted her career. Prince has called The Hissing of Summer Lawns one of his favorite albums of all time, and the last one he can remember enjoying listening to from beginning to end. Morrissey has called her “the greatest lyricist that has ever lived.” Artists from a surprising array of genres—pop, rock, punk, country, jazz, alternative—have cited her influence on their work and careers. Perhaps Joni Mitchell always be principally considered a musician’s musician; they have always been more willing to overlook her flops and stumbles than critics and casual listeners, and more embracing of her experiments, transformations, and departures.
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Thom Palmer is a writer, designer, and very amateur musician. His most recent novel, Desire, was published last year.
