“It’s a man’s world,” Joni Mitchell told interviewer Elio Iannacci in 2014. “Men wrote most of the songs for women and they were mostly tales of seduction. I wrote my own songs. That ended that.”
Arguably the most influential female singer-songwriter of our time, Joni Mitchell not only redefined women’s roles in rock and pop, but she also set the standard for others to follow.
Her poetic lyrics are the equal of Bob Dylan or Leonard Cohen in their prime. On a musical level, she blossomed from a coffee-house folkie into a roving experimentalist, weaving sophisticated song cycles from jazz, blues, pop and world music. And then there’s her voice, a soprano supple enough to trace the agonies and rhapsodies of human emotion, and most everything in between.
Mitchell’s interest in the arts developed during her teenage years in Saskatoon, Canada, where she began to paint and write poetry. A Pete Seeger songbook introduced her to the possibilities of guitar, leading to an open-tuning style. Having married, given birth, divorced and moved to the US, her reputation as a gifted songwriter grew apace.
She signed to Reprise Records and cut her 1968 debut album, Song To A Seagull. The real lift-off moment came two years later when third album Ladies Of The Canyon – which included the epochal Woodstock and her first hit single, Big Yellow Taxi – became an international success.
Mitchell’s golden years spanned the 70s. In a run of impeccable studio albums, she brought a candour and complexity to her work that ranged from the stark autobiography of Blue and the funky exoticism of The Hissing Of Summer Lawns to the spacious Hejira and the free-flowing jazz textures of Don Juan’s Reckless Daughter.
Such high standards took a dip during the following decade, as Mitchell grappled with electronica and the demands of new technology. The 90s saw a resurgence, and she released a handful of well-received albums before announcing her retirement in 2002. She returned to the studio for 2007’s Shine, after which she disappeared again.
Sadly, in 2015 she suffered a brain aneurysm. Her rehabilitation has been steady. And while it’s unlikely that we’ll ever hear new music from Joni Mitchell again, there’s still so much to savour, including an emotional return to the stage at the Newport Folk Festival in 2022.
...and one to avoid
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