Music / Joni Mitchell

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Roberta Joan "Joni" Mitchell CC (née Anderson, born November 7, 1943) is a Canadian singer, songwriter and painter. She was born in Alberta, and began singing around the age of nine, after a case of polio.

To get the biographical data out of the way: she made a short attempt to go to college, leaving after a year; in 1965, she gave birth to a girl, but gave her up for adoption not long after. She married Chuck Mitchell later that same year.

Now on to the important bits. Mitchell made her breakthrough in the mid-1960s, relocating to New York City and traveling up and down the Northeast coast playing in cafes and bars. Many of the songs she had written and sung were covered by other artists during this time, a trend that would continue as her popularity grew. Many of these covers allowed these artists to eclipse Mitchell's own career, including Judy Collins' cover of "Both Sides, Now", which became a top ten hit in 1967.

It wasn't until 1970 that Mitchell reached mainstream success under the guidance of producer David Crosby (of Crosby, Stills & Nash), winning the Grammy Award for Best Folk Performance for her album Clouds. She continued to receive critical and commercial success, and incorporated more and more jazz-influenced songs compared to her previous acoustic work. By the 1980s, her work failed to reach the same success as before, with 1979's Mingus (a collaboration with Charles Mingus) being her first album not to sell at least half a million copies.

This trend continued until the 1990s, particularly after the release of the CD Turbulent Indigo in 1994. This is largely thanks to a return to her original sound and playing style. Mitchell's newfound success would continue until her retirement in 2002, though she later released several new CDs since then. A memoir is also supposedly in the works. She suffered an aneurysm in 2015 that caused her to take a step back from the spotlight for physical and speech therapy but performed live at the 2022 Newport Festival, which was made into a Live Album that won Best Folk Album at the 2024 Grammy Awards.

Mitchell was inducted into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame in 1997 and the Canadian Music Hall of Fame in 1981. She also received a Companion of the Order of Canada citation and the Governor General's Performing Arts Award for Lifetime Artistic Achievement.

Mitchell's musical style consists of non-standard guitar tuning, elaborate orchestration (occasionally verging on Baroque Pop territory), lush vocal harmonies, and borrowing elements from various genres (rock, jazz, new wave, folk and pop, for starters).

Her official website is here.

Discography:

• Song to a Seagull (1968)
• Clouds (1969)
• Ladies of the Canyon (1970)
• Blue (1971)
• For the Roses (1972)
• Court and Spark (1974)
• Miles of Aisles (1974) [live album]
• The Hissing of Summer Lawns (1975)
• Hejira (1976)
• Don Juan's Reckless Daughter (1977)
• Mingus (1979)
• Shadows and Light (1980) [live album]
• Wild Things Run Fast (1982)
• Dog Eat Dog (1985)
• Chalk Mark in a Rain Storm (1988)
• Night Ride Home (1991)
• Turbulent Indigo (1994)
• Taming the Tiger (1998)
• Both Sides Now (2000)
• Travelogue (2002)
• Shine (2007)
• Amchitka, The 1970 Concert That Launched Greenpeace (2009) [live album]
• Joni Mitchell at Newport (2023) [live album]

I've looked at tropes from both sides now:

• A cappella: The song "The Fiddle and the Drum" from the album Clouds dispenses with instrumental backing altogether.
• Affair Hair: "Off Night Backstreet":
  Who left her long black hair in our bathtub drain?
• Age-Progression Song: "The Circle Game", which is also an Answer Song to her friend Neil Young's "Sugar Mountain".
• Album Closure: "Both Sides, Now," which looks back on a life and reflects on the embodiment of multiple perspectives, appears as the last track on Clouds (whose title it drops).
• Alternate Album Cover:invoked The 2024 reissue of Don Juan's Reckless Daughter replaced the original cover with a shot of Joni with a wolf, likely due to the Values Dissonance regarding the original image.
• Animal Motifs: Repeated references to snakes and serpents are a common lyrical theme.
• Anti-Christmas Song: "River". She confirmed this when asked, saying it was a song for the listeners who had nothing to look forward to during that time of year.
• Artsy Beret: A lot of photos from the '70s show her wearing one, including on the cover of Hejira. Usually alternates between this and large-brimmed hats in her old age to the point of Never Bareheaded.
• Berserk Button:
  • Although she later warmed to it in her old age, never compare her to Bob Dylan. Never.
  • Don't refer to her as a "folk singer" either.
  • She also doesn't like her songs being called "confessional". Some of the Crosby, Stills & Nash members did, to which she replied, "How?"
• Blackface: In the late 1970s, Mitchell arrived at a party as a Black male character called Art Nouveau, which fooled the guests completely (see more at Pretty Fly for a White Guy). She would pose as the character on the Don Juan's Reckless Daughter album (photo here◊; not intentional, Mitchell would later say in 2015, as she wanted to spite the assigned photographer) and donned the look twice more for one shot in the 1980 concert film Shadows and Light and again in 1982 for a still-unreleased short film.
• Celebrity is Overrated:invoked
  • A stance she has stayed with from the beginning of her career. Word of God was that she arrived at this conclusion after seeing a tearful Sandra Dee being mistreated by the tabloid press during her divorce from Bobby Darin. She also saw similar sensibilities in Sinéad O'Connor:
    I like [O'Connor]. She's a passionate singer. And I understand her saying "I hate this job." It's a horrible job. People don't realize how horrible it is. Making music is great. The exploitation of it is horrible. Maybe that's where Madonna has the edge on us. Maybe she doesn't think it's horrible. I think it's degrading, humiliating; so does [O'Connor]. Whereas Madonna's above being degraded or humiliated. She flirts with it. And perhaps that bravado is in some ways to be applauded, but at what cost to her soul, is my question.
  • She expresses this sentiment on the title track of For the Roses:
    Oh the power and the glory
    Just when you're getting a taste for worship
    They start bringing out the hammers
    And the boards
    And the nails.
• Combat Drugs: Mitchell's life long smoking addiction, once said to be a help against the long-term side effects and pain from surviving polio.
• Conlang: Mitchell created a mythological world with its own language. Naming is based on initial letters of important sayings: a race of tiny men are called Mosalm (Maybe Our Souls Are Little Men), and the tiny women are called Posall (Perhaps Our Souls Are Little Ladies). The queen, Siquomb, gets her name from the phrase "She Is Queen Undisputedly of Mind Beauty", and lends her name to Joni's official music publishing company. The king is Hwiefob, "He Who Is Especially Fond Of Birds". They live in a borderland, Fanta, on the border of Re-Al. Birds figure prominently in Joni's art for the kingdom. The song "Sisotowbell Lane" uses this language as well: "Somehow, In Spite Of Troubles, Ours Will Be Ever Lasting Love". In 1969, she says this was partly inspired by her reading of J. R. R. Tolkien; her husband Chuck was a big fan.^note Chuck Mitchell's note on her website talks about getting Tolkien's permission to name their publishing, production and recording companies after people and places in The Lord of the Rings. The line "fear is like a wilderland" in "I Think I Understand" also comes from Tolkien
• Contemplate Our Navels: "Refuge of the Roads" was partly inspired by the time Chögyam Trungpa Rinpoche induced her into a temporary, three-day state where the concept of "I" was absent from her.
• Cover Version:
  • The album Court and Spark ends with a cover of Lambert, Hendricks & Ross's "Twisted." Mitchell takes the Annie Ross lead vocal part, while Cheech & Chong goof around in the Dave Lambert and Jon Hendricks parts.
  • She interpolates another LH&R song, "Centerpiece", into "Harry's House", a song about a depressed businessman from The Hissing of Summer Lawns.
  • Mitchell had a surprise hit with a live version of Frankie Lymon and the Teenagers' "Why Do Fools Fall in Love?", where she harmonized with vocal group The Persuasions.
• Deadpan Snarker: Her reputation for being blunt with snide comments are as huge of a legacy as her music. Mitchell doesn't care and sometimes takes the negative or bemused reactions with an It Amused Me stance.
• Domestic Abuse: "Not to Blame" is about a serial abuser who never takes responsibility for all of his failed relationships, some of which drove his partners to suicide. It's been alleged that the song's subject is Mitchell's ex-boyfriend Jackson Browne, who was facing down allegations that he physically abused his ex-girlfriend Daryl Hannah^note Ms. Hannah maintains that this did happen; as of 2014 she had a steady relationship with Neil Young, and in August 2018 they were married. at the time Turbulent Indigo was released. Mitchell has denied this, but the similarities between the song's lyrics and known events in Browne's personal life has allowed the rumors to persist.
• Drunken Song: "Talk to Me", about begging for conversation from someone not willing to speak, gains entirely new context from its opening line:
  There was a moon and a streetlamp
  I didn't think I drank such a lot
  Till I pissed a tequila anaconda the full length of the parking lot.
• Dual-Meaning Chorus: "Big Yellow Taxi"
• Granola Girl: The Bohemian, creative women in "Ladies of the Canyon" could be this.
• Greatest Hits Album: Mitchell declined to issue one of these for most of her career, but relented in 1996 with the release of Hits. One of the conditions for Reprise releasing that album was that Mitchell was also allowed to compile a second compilation, Misses, containing lesser known tracks (plus "A Case of You", which was left off Hits) that she considered to be personal favorites.
• Green Aesop: "Big Yellow Taxi", again.
• The Heart: Rolling Stone considered her to be this to all the male rock stars in L.A. in the '70s. The magazine called Mitchell the "Old Lady of the Year"^note In the 1960s and 70s, your "old lady" was a woman you were comfortable with, a relationship that really meant something, whether formally married or not. and the "Queen of El Lay".^note However, this may've also been a Stealth Insult as a newspaper once called Mitchell the "Warren Beatty of folk". The fact she left many heartbroken but amicable ex-lovers along the way added fuel to the fire.
  As a girl, I was kind of allowed to be one of the boys. I was told that boys were able to be themselves around me. Somehow I was, in my youth, trusted by men. And I was able to be a catalyst in bringing interesting men together.
• Hooker with a Heart of Gold: Subverted with "Raised on Robbery", where the character in question tries to make herself out to be one of these, but instead comes off as an abrasive, obnoxious Lower-Class Lout who manages to drive off a prospective john (not that he intended to hire her in the first place, as it's made obvious that he simply wanted to enjoy his drink in peace).
• Intergenerational Friendship:
  • With Cameron Crowe, who she first met when he interviewed her for Rolling Stone. If Crowe has something he wrote and directed coming out, Mitchell is most likely one of the first big names at its premiere or opening night.
  • With Brandi Carlile, who is credited and praised by many in Mitchell's music generation for being a huge support during Mitchell's aneurysm recovery. Although Carlile is known for befriending and supporting mid-20th century female singer-songwriters, their many stories about their adventures together imply Mitchell is the one elder stateswoman Carlile is the closest to.
• Kindhearted Cat Lover: Cats are Mitchell's go-to pet and had photoshoots with them (whether owned by her or not) throughout the 20th century. In 2020, a stray kitten became attracted to her home and after a week of constantly showing up and hanging around for hours with no sign of a worried owner, Mitchell adopted it.
• Lampshade Wearing: "People's Parties":
  Photo Beauty gets attention
  Then her eye paint's running down
  She's got a rose in her teeth
  And a lampshade crown
• Lighter and Softer: Crosby, Stills and Nash's cover of Woodstock was quite different from her original slow, sparse work.
• Like Brother and Sister:
  • With Neil Young. They met some time before Mitchell would date Graham Nash and Young would later partner with Nash's new Supergroup, and bonded over being "Canadian Scorpios" who loved folk music and songwriting (even showing future songs to each other before pitching them to their labels), having similar humour, and surviving polio as children. When Young and his girlfriend, folk singer Vicky Taylor, showed Mitchell "Sugar Mountain", she was so unimpressed by its Growing Up Sucks plot^note Not helping that its backstory was Young developing Heroic BSoD over being too old for a teen nightclub he and his friends would frequent at the weekends she wrote the optimistic "The Circle Game". Although there are not a lot of public photos of them together outside of performing in the 1960s and '70s, they speak highly of each other and Mitchell once called Young her little brother. Notably, they both removed their music from Spotify in protest against Joe Rogan's podcast in 2022, accusing Rogan of promoting guests with vaccine misinformation during the COVID-19 Pandemic.^note When Rogan's contract ended, Young announced his music would return and when it did, Mitchell's music quietly resurfaced on the platform shortly after. And, Mitchell's album archive collections? Young's idea!
  • With Herbie Hancock, who not only defended her Art character but would also receive a Grammy Award in 2008 for his jazz tribute album to her work.
• Name and Name:
  • Edith and the Kingpin (from The Hissing of Summer Lawns)
  • Otis and Marlena (from Travelogue)
  • Me and My Uncle (from Archives - Volume 1)
• New Sound Album: For the Roses introduced the jazzy textures that would dominate her later work.
• The Odd Song Out: The album Clouds consists of folk-inspired singer-songwriter selections. All have the vocal line accompanied by arrangements featuring prominent acoustic guitar except "The Fiddle and the Drum," which is scored for solo voice alone.
• One-Man Song
  • "Carey". The significant other the song concerns just happened to have an androgynous name.^note The real Carey (Cary Raditz) was definitely a guy, and a "mean ol'daddy" par excellence. He's also the "redneck on a Grecian isle" in "California".
  • "Willy." Believed to be about Nash, whose middle name is William.
• One-Woman Song: "Amelia", which is (sort of, in a way) about Amelia Earhart.
• Orchestral Version: An entire album of these with Both Sides Now.
• Painful Rhyme: exaggerated with "For Free". The opening lines rhyme "jewels" with "schools," which is fine, but veer into trope territory when Mitchell insists on pronouncing them "jew-ells" and "skew-ells."
• Pieces of God: "Woodstock".
• Precision F-Strike: From "Woman of Heart and Mind"
  Drive your bargains
  Push your papers
  Win your medals
  Fuck your strangers
  Don't it leave you on the empty side?
• Pretty Fly for a White Guy: Beginning from her Genre Shift, Mitchell's mid-1970s albums drew heavy influence from jazz and Jazz Fusion. Part of this stemmed from folk music losing popularity but the biggest reason came from Mitchell discovering she related heavily to African-American music to the point of referring to her work as being from "a black poet". She defended her Blackface character Art Nouveau (inspired by a Soul Brotha-like stranger who complimented her on the street) as cultural appreciation and said she used it to show unconvinced labels that she could do a New Sound Album and still be successful as said labels didn't promote her jazz singles on appropriate stations. The moves have divided black audiences ever since; some famous music stars like Chaka Khan, Herbie Hancock, and jazz drummer Don Alias (he and Mitchell were in a relationship at the time) defended Mitchell and were not offended, whereas some historians and members of the public were disgusted said musicians didn't stop her.
• Radio Song: "You Turn Me On, I'm a Radio," which she wrote after being asked for a catchy love song to play on the radio.
• Really Gets Around: The narrator of "Just Like This Train" is the sexually dysfunctional version of this trope, dealing with a breakup by going on a relentless sex spree.
• Religion Rant Song: "Tax Free" is her Type 3 rant against televangelists preaching like Church Militants while living, well, tax-free.
• Reluctant Fanservice Girl: Upon noticing her contemporaries were doing photoshoots posing in lingerie, Mitchell wanted the cover of For the Roses to a Toplessness from the Back picture of her standing naked on rocks by the shore, but David Geffen talked her out of it because record store sellers would just cover her butt with the price tag. The photo appears on the inner album cover when you open it up, however.
• Self-Backing Vocalist: She uses the technique a lot on her recordings.
• Shout-Out: That Led Zeppelin song "Going to California" about a woman "with love in her eyes and flowers in her hair"? That's Joni. Robert Plant had a crush on her when he was writing the lyrics. (More obvious on the live version of the song from the Led Zeppelin live album How the West Was Won, in which Plant can be heard shouting "Joni!")
• Signature Style: Her open or non-standard guitar tunings, which she says her friends and colleagues call "Joni's weird chords". There are almost 50 different tunings.
• Smoking Is Cool: Joni began smoking at the age of 9, and it is reportedly one reason for her voice's decline in later years.
• Stage Names: Joni's birth name is Roberta Joan Anderson. "Joni Mitchell" is not really a stage name, though — she always went by Joni, a variation of her middle name, and she took the last name Mitchell when she married fellow musician Chuck Mitchell. She got famous as Joni Mitchell, and subsequently kept the name even though the marriage to Chuck dissolved fairly quickly.
• Terra Deforming: "Big Yellow Taxi".
• Title Track: "Blue", "Ladies of the Canyon", "For The Roses", "Court and Spark", "The Hissing of Summer Lawns", and "Hejira".
• Unusual Euphemism:
  • "Blue Motel Room":
    I know that you've got all those pretty girls coming 'round, hanging on your boom-boom-pachyderm
  • "Court and Spark" itself
• Vocal Evolution: Her voice became deeper and lower as she aged, and chain smoking took a toll on her vocal range.
• Wanderlust Song:
  • Hejira, written on a road trip from New York to Los Angeles, has two of them.
    • "Song for Sharon", where the protagonist concludes by telling Sharon:
      You've still got your music
      And I've got my eyes on the land and the sky
      You sing for your friends and your family
      I'll walk green pastures by and by
    • "Refuge of the Roads", based on Joni's road trip itself (as well as an episode of her life where her sense of ego was temporarily removed by a yogi.)
  • "Urge for Going"
• With Lyrics: Mitchell added lyrics to Charles Mingus' "Goodbye Pork Pie Hat" on Mingus.