Joni Mitchell performs Both Sides Now at this year's Grammy Awards. Photo / AP
OPINION
The Grammys scene-stealer has released 19 albums, with lyrics about disillusionment, age and longing. Which will stand the test of time?
Mitchell once said of her 30s that “things start losing their profundity; in middle-late age, you enter a tragedian period”, and The Boho Dance draws the curtain away on the artistic values she once valued in her youth. With its bassline hinting at a jazz lounge waltz, it’s a sad song, but one you could dance to.
From 1969′s Clouds, the folky Chelsea Morning was previously recorded in a celebrated 1968 version by Judy Collins, cited by Bill and Hillary Clinton as the inspiration for naming their daughter Chelsea. Mitchell’s own recording of her song is brighter, the warmth in her voice tripping easily across the richly sweet images (”The sun poured in like butterscotch / and stuck to all my senses”).
Playing with the title metaphor all the way through, this upbeat country-tinged hit from 1972 is self-aware enough to transcend its cheesy country-rock vibe. Mitchell admits in the chorus, with a knowing wink, that she’s “a little bit corny”. Her sense of humour shines through the summery songwriting as she plays the good-time hippie chick, promising that “if your head says forget it / But your heart’s still smoking / Call me at the station / The lines are open”.
Trouble Child is a bleak song bursting with vivid images — peacocks, dragons mental illness and breaking waves at Malibu Beach — but the overriding power is in Joni Mitchell’s despairing vocals (”So why does it come as such a shock / To know you really have no one”) blending with Max Bennett’s bass playing.
This warm, shimmering love song from Court and Spark is Mitchell’s biggest commercial hit, reaching No 7 in the US chart. The track’s jazzy soft-rock textures come courtesy of backing band the L.A. Express, who would also perform on Mitchell’s double live album Miles of Aisles, released later that year. The track’s simple refrain “Help me / I think I’m falling in love again” isn’t Mitchell’s most literary or enigmatic — but is one of her most effective.
After a late-70s period punctuated with increasingly experimental albums — culminating in 1979′s Mingus, a minimalist jazz album recorded with dying double bassist Charles Mingus — the 80s heralded Mitchell’s return to more-recognisable pop song form. Chinese Cafe is a sombre yet hooky ballad, with syncopated rhythms and guitar harmonics that aped the day’s popular bands such as The Police.
Mitchell’s lyrics, meanwhile, are a wistful lament to the passing of time. Most painfully, she finally addresses a matter first alluded to on Blue’s Little Green: “My child’s a stranger / I bore her / But I could not raise her”. Mitchell and Kelly, the daughter she had given away in 1965, were eventually reunited in 1997.
Mitchell’s life often seemed to be an open book, which invited the listener to read between the lines. Willy from Ladies of the Canyon is obviously about Graham Nash, and the Free Man in Paris detailed on this sweetly chiming, lilting folk-rock hit from 1974′s Court and Spark was close friend David Geffen.
Taken from the loose, sprawling, sometimes wilfully difficult — try the 16 minutes of piano and orchestra improvisation on Paprika — 1977 album of the same name, Don Juan’s Reckless Daughter shone like a beacon of gleaming guitar strums and tangible melodies. What makes it so utterly compelling, however, is Mitchell’s lyrics, sometimes abstract (“And it howled so spooky for its eagle soul”), sometimes starkly sincere (“There is danger and education / In living out such a reckless lifestyle”), but always wrestling with bitterly engrained personal demons.
One of the two greatest songs on Blue and most enduring and beloved songs of Mitchell’s entire canon, The Last Time I Saw Richard is surely among the most poignant songs about romantic disillusionment ever written, in which a former lover’s fate is delineated with a devastating precision. “Richard got married to a figure skater / And he bought her a dishwasher and a coffee percolator / And he drinks at home now most nights with the TV on / And all the house lights left up bright.”
After a series of (by her standards) relatively lacklustre albums, Turbulent Indigo marked a resounding return to form for Mitchell, winning the Grammy Award for Best Pop Album of 1994. This is its crowning piece, Mitchell’s rewriting of the trials of Job, presented as a dialogue between Job and a chorus of “antagonists” (all parts sung by Mitchell, of course). “Oh you tireless watcher! What have I done to you?”, she sings, “That you make everything I dread and everything I fear come true?” Chiming acoustic guitars, a wash of synthesisers and Wayner Shorter’s keening alto saxophone create a deliciously lush setting for Joni’s voice, burnished with nicotine, indignation and, yes, sorrow. Simply magnificent.
Has Mitchell ever written a song as irresistible as this? Dulcimers ring, tablas tap and pulse, and blissful, sun-kissed melodies gush through every bar of Carey, a bittersweet ode to the time Mitchell spent in a hippie community in Matala on the Greek island of Crete in 1970. From the moment Mitchell purrs the scene-setting opening line “the wind is in from Africa”, you can almost taste the Mediterranean Sea air on your lips.
Cane-wielding “Carey” himself was Cary “Carrot” Raditz, a red-haired chef Mitchell met on the island; the “Mermaid Cafe” a genuine spot where they’d go to drink and dance. The song peaks as the singer resolves to leave Matala in the final verse, half a dozen Mitchells chirruping in bird-like song behind her. As a window into her nomadic soul, it’s close to perfection.
Woodstock was the song that in her version, and the Crosby Stills Nash and Young cover, came to define all the idealism of the late-60s hippie movement — “We are stardust, we are golden” — notwithstanding the fact Mitchell herself did not attend the festival.
A homesick travelogue through Paris, Spain and Greece, the first track on side two of Blue is a mix of romance and realism. The briefly wistful story of a man who “gave me back my smile” is swiftly undercut: “But he kept my camera to sell”. It’s all sun-kissed longing amid wary observation of coldly fashionable Europeans, a love letter to North America with topical references to the Vietnam War and peace demonstrations too.
Some of Mitchell’s least chart-friendly work, The Hissing of Summer Lawns is the title track from the 1975 album. With brass and bass sliding over lyrics about a captive housewife in a suburban heatwave, it’s an oozing and eerie free-form jazz tale, co-written by Mitchell and percussionist John Guerin.
A jolly festive ditty this is not. But Mitchell’s River manages to sum up the feeling of escapism that can descend along with the annual Christmas paraphernalia — especially when there is nobody waiting under the mistletoe. It’s worth listening to for the interpretation of Jingle Bells alone.
One of the most recognisable songs of Mitchell’s early canon, The Circle Game was written as a response to her friend and fellow Canadian Neil Young’s Sugar Mountain. Speaking in concert in London in 1970, Mitchell said: “[Young] wrote this song that was called ‘Oh to live on sugar mountain’ which was a lament for his lost youth. And I thought, God, you know, if we get to 21 and there’s nothing after that, that’s a pretty bleak future, so I wrote a song for him, and for myself just to give me some hope. It’s called The Circle Game.”
As the last track on Ladies of the Canyon, following the intense, unsettling Woodstock, The Circle Game also acts as something of a bookend to Mitchell’s early folk career. Its sing-song, almost nursery-rhyming melody and hippyish lyrical sentiments would be all but replaced by the more challenging, confessional and cathartic songs on Blue.
A Case of You, snuck away on Blue, is one of the album’s gems, perfectly showcasing Mitchell’s delicate, swooping falsetto to a backing acoustic guitar played by James Taylor. While Mitchell references Shakespeare’s Julius Ceasar, (“I am as constant as a Northern Star”), it is her own lyrics with which the lonely painter Mitchell creates the strongest images.
Hejira is a transliteration of the Arabic word for early Islamic migrations. The title track from the 1976 album combines meditative and introspective lyrics (“But you know I’m so glad to be on my own / Still somehow the slightest touch of a stranger / Can set up trembling in my bones”) with the late Jaco Pastorius’s dreamy fretless bass.
Mitchell’s environmental anthem sounds surprisingly upbeat considering its subject, with catchy shoo-ba-bas and a jaunty guitar riff. But over 50 years later the lyrics, penned in Hawaii, still resonate for anyone in a neighbourhood that has been gentrified or who pines for a simpler time. When Big Yellow Taxi’s chorus, “Don’t know what you’ve got til it’s gone” was sampled by Janet Jackson in 1997, it introduced a new generation to Mitchell.
Joni Mitchell’s world-weary meditation on love and loss was the emotional centrepiece of the 2003 film Love Actually, playing as Emma Thompson’s character realised her husband was in love with someone else. Originally recorded in 1969, it was revisited in 2000 for Mitchell’s jazz album of the same name. The original has all the songbird innocence of young love, but the later version is darker and wiser, and all the more heartbreaking for it.
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