JoniMitchellFilter.

March 5, 2006 9:17 AM

Tell me what Joni Mitchell means to you.

This isn't an objective question, really, just a matter of personal curiosity.

I've read just about everything extant on Joni Mitchell, and I'm not really old enough to have any sense of how she fit into the times in which she was at the peak of her artistic and commercial success. (I'm 29.)

The professional reviewers have their say in the history books (hated Hissing of Summer Lawns, loved Blue, ambivalent about Hejira), but I'd like to challenge all the historical assertions in the minds of real folk. Did she stop "speaking" to you personally after Court and Spark? Was Mingus a useless, jazzy abstraction? Did you continue to pay her any attention in the '80s? Was she part and parcel of any particular "scene" in your mind? Did she stand out or blend in? Has she been "bettered" by anyone since?

I'm not terribly interested in more critical analysis, just real thoughts/feelings from people who invested in her music - or who didn't - and why. Stories, thoughts, comments, if you please.

posted by mykescipark to media & arts (45 comments total)

I'm not a chronicler of her career or anything, but I've always thought A Case of You is arguably the best love song ever written.
posted by Saucy Intruder at 9:29 AM on March 5, 2006

Once had an office mate, and we took turns playing music for the other. She played a ton of Joni Mitchell. I'm sorry, but I hated every minute of it. I'll paraphrase The Commitments and just say that jazz and folk are the enemies of soul.
posted by frogan at 9:34 AM on March 5, 2006

Ditto, nothing critical here. Just a memory from some years back of driving back to SF from a fall visit to my uncle in the Sonoma Valley, drunk from too much wine, listening to Blue and watching the sun set over the ocean. One of the few moments that life seemed to make perfect sense.

In my book, she's a living saint.
posted by felix betachat at 9:34 AM on March 5, 2006

Not a fan. She's one of these people whose music basically makes me go "Hmm. Nice. I can see why people rate that. Wonder why it doesn't say a single thing to me or generate the slightest resonance in my soul?"
posted by Decani at 9:38 AM on March 5, 2006

I join the 'Blue' lovers. Tangled Up In 'Blue', really
posted by matteo at 9:49 AM on March 5, 2006

She never really did it for me, other than maybe Big Yellow Taxi. My one memory of her is this. She's playing at a huge charity show (not Live Aid, but in the mid-eighties) at the Meadowlands, if memory serves. Restless audience wants to hear GnR or some other more uptempo stuff, and so throws many cups and other crap on stage. Joni says "Stop chucking stuff up here" which only increases the barrage. She leaves the stage in tears.
posted by fixedgear at 10:00 AM on March 5, 2006

Back in the late '60's and early '70's, to me, Joni was "cool," in the Marshall McLuhan sense of the word. Joni's work pulled images from your own imagination, whereas Janis and Grace and many other women in rock "layed it on you." Generally, for a time and culture that was fairly drug addled, "hot" media and most rock acts did better. "Cool" was kind of old school, jazz, maybe folk, and Joni was pretty much always working in that kind of groove, and in this interview, she describes herself that way as well. She never could have fronted an act with screaming leads and stacks of Marshall amps, and she never would have been as out of control as Janis or Grace.

In performance, she was kind of small, didn't tend to project a lot of sex, didn't wear flash costumes. You didn't go to a Joni show with the same kind of expectation of having a good time as you did when you went to see Credence, or Ike & Tina, or the Doors. There wasn't as much raw energy coming off the stage, and there was a certain sense that Joni was some kind of queen artiste, deigning to spend a few hours with us, her audience, although we were only the great unwashed, the hoi polloi. She didn't give much sense of liking performing, or of liking her audience, and she certainly didn't come across as having looked forward to the performance, like Grace Slick often did. And Janis, hell, Janis was the damn party, and the 50,000 people in the arena any given night were just the welcome excuse...

You went to see Joni, you knew you were going to be home, sober, by 11:00, and sleeping alone...
posted by paulsc at 10:00 AM on March 5, 2006

Been a big fan for many years, but I'm no great critic and have nothing profound or insightful to contribute, just love a lot of her music.

I first heard Joni Mitchell as a teen, on Radio 2 in the UK - Mum liked to listen to it in the car. Found myself in a record store later that day by accident and ended up buying Hissing of Summer Lawns and loved it. My friends were into U2, Depeche Mode, Human League, and the whole New Wave thing that was happening in the UK in the 80s at that time, so I was labelled, in that way teenagers are so capable of, as something of a freak and outcast in my musical taste. Always suspected I was born 20 years too late.

Something I've found curious about her is that her most commercially successful work, to my ear at least, is her least interesting and satisfying. But I suppose many fans might say the same of their most favorite musicians. I still think Hissing of Summer Lawns is a great album. Blue and Hejira are good, Court and Spark only so-so, but Don Juans Reckless Daughter and Mingus are still amazing. I did grow up listening to a lot of my parents' jazz records, so I guess that must have had an influence. I agree that her later stuff in the 80s was nowhere near as interesting - not necessarily all bad, just not as beguiling as previously. Never had the chance to see her live, but would have loved to.
posted by normy at 10:08 AM on March 5, 2006

My wife loved here years ago and still admires her. I paid scant attention to her. Once though I heard her sing some silly song about coyote something or other and realized that it had perhaps the most convoluted lyric I had ever heard. I now have moved her over from a list of indifference toavoid.
posted by Postroad at 10:08 AM on March 5, 2006

She's a major piece of my adolescence. I've listened to Ladies of the Canyon a thousand times, easily, Song to a Seagull half as much. I wore out several vinyl albums, weighing them down with dimes, pennies, nickels & quarters.Then I went to college, life took over, and she kind of drifted away. I liked Court & Spark & Blue, but not obsessively. I don't know much of her music after that. When I got my first iPod, though, she was one of the first things I loaded on to it. She's an aural reminder of certain friends and times.
posted by clarkstonian at 10:11 AM on March 5, 2006

"Blue" and "Court & Spark" are, imho, masterpieces.

"Hissing of Summer Lawns" and "Hejira" are great.

"Mingus" is dire.

Anything else of hers I can take or leave.

I can only listen to her in small sections, I find her voice a little shrill. But her songs take me back to those horrible teenage years when I was trying to find a voice inside and she seemed to be able to say the words I was thinking.
posted by essexjan at 10:16 AM on March 5, 2006

Her quote that she and Mr. R. Zimmerman are the two greatest songwriters ever made me want to injure someone. YMMV.
posted by docgonzo at 10:22 AM on March 5, 2006

I never saw Joni in person. I don't need screaming guitars, flash, drinks or drugs. Given the choice between style and substance, I'll take substance.

Joni is a goddess, IMHO.

From Blue in 1971 to Night Ride Home in 1991, Joni has assembled a body of music that will stand the test of time. These are desert island discs.

While Blue is on many lists of all time great CD's, I love Night Ride Home even better. The voice is older and deeper but the album is one of great depth, beauty and finesse. It's the perfect capstone to a remarkable career.

And the remake of the song Both Sides Now with a full orchestra not long ago (at the end of her career) gives me chills.

All I can do is say, "Well done, Joni."

...now excuse me while I go fire up some Joni music to listen to. :)

...and I do love Tina Turner too. Saw her when her career was in high swing for the second time. She put on one of the best shows I've ever seen.
posted by bim at 10:33 AM on March 5, 2006

Elvis Costello on Joni Mitchell

I guess it's a generational thing--chalk me up as another person linking mid-70s Joni Mitchell with early high school memories, mostly good feelings. Currently, I have Court + Spark, Summer Lawns and Hejira on CD--as someone who doesn't listen to folk or to much jazz, there's nothing much else like them on my CD racks. And unlike some of the other music of that era, it's aged well, and I'm not embarassed to have it around.
posted by gimonca at 10:40 AM on March 5, 2006

I just discovered Joni Mitchell & as a whole haven't fallen in love, except for Dry Cleaner from Des Moines on Mingus. If you haven't listened to it over and over for days straight, you're obviously missing something crucial!
posted by soviet sleepover at 10:50 AM on March 5, 2006

In general, Joni sux because of her faux elitism, but I have a soft spot for her version of Woodstock and Both Sides Now. My favorite is Cary, "The wind is in from Africa and last night I couldn't sleep". I can picture her and I in the tavern on Majorca but somehow we never really make it together because her moods keep changing and I can't figure out what this come away closer stuff is all about. I am get a bit sad thinking about how her cigarette smoking affected her voice.

BTW you can visit her web site here.
posted by Xurando at 11:00 AM on March 5, 2006

A couple of good songs, otherwise I never cared much for her. Context: back in the late '60s-early '70s (my college days), there was a growing breach between the rock-n-roll crowd and the (mostly younger) singer-songwriter crowd, and I was definitely among the former. I loved the Stones and Creedence, and I couldn't stand James Taylor and Jackson Browne and that crew, and I lumped Joni in with them. It may have been unfair to some extent, but there you go. We can't escape our past.
posted by languagehat at 11:16 AM on March 5, 2006

Unlike many other disks, I cannot part with my extensive Joni collection.

I got on her bus in 1971 when I was hearing songs from Ladies of the Canyon on the radio. After I saw her on the Johnny Cash TV show, I bought that record, and played it to death. Blue came out the next year and the folk-hippie girls in school praised it even more so but it was several years before I got into it, but by that time (when For the Roses was new) I acquired her entire back catalog. Then, 1974, the peak of Court and Spark, she was everywhere, even the cover of Time magazine. Of course I liked that record too but now it's one I play the least. In my opinion she reached the absolute timeless summit with Hejira but curiously, many of those same folk-hippie girls lost interest after Court and Spark. But unlike most of my peers I continued following her career up until she stopped recording. Didn't think much of her last live efforts (making me sad I'd never seen her, and by then it was obviously too late) but there's still great numbers on her final studio albums.

One final anecdote: in 1986 I was searching all over town, high and low to get her single the B side of which was "Urge for Going" which I'd just discovered never made it onto an LP until the Hits & Misses collections. I still have that 45.
posted by Rash at 11:25 AM on March 5, 2006

Joni Mitchell was my next-door neighbor when I lived in Venice Beach in the early 90s. She lived in a Neutra-inspired angular white house from which I could occasionally hear a piano being played. My housemates used to steal the bad oil paintings that Joni discarded with her rubbish on the curb. A magnificent old oak tree overhung both properties but the year I lived there it took sick and began to shed its leaves. Joni called an ancient Japanese tree surgeon to see to the ailing thing and we watched the wizened man as he spent half the day crawling around the upper branches, muttering to the tree in Japanese, until he finally came down and spoke quietly and privately with Joni. He came back a few more times but never did more than look at the tree and mumble to it. I never found out what he was saying but the tree was alive and much healthier when I visited my old house last spring. I don't think Joni lives there anymore.
posted by soiled cowboy at 11:28 AM on March 5, 2006

She came along during the time when other women singer/songwriters were getting popular. What set her apart, and keeps, setting her apart was that she was the first, or one of the first, of these women to be first and foremost a MUSICIAN.

She could play, and at that time (late 60's, early 70's) few if any women were that powerful instrumentally, or if they were, it was not allowed to surface.

She continued to follow her muse, and fortunately for her got to the point, arguably, where the size of her audience did not much matter to her anymore. It seems like she'd done music which was wildly popular and accessible, and went on to stuff that interested her more.

And, like Neil Young, it's not all great but it's all interesting she she has not died as an artist.
posted by Danf at 11:33 AM on March 5, 2006

I have never been able to get into her music, at all.
posted by sluggo at 11:37 AM on March 5, 2006

Think I'm with sluggo. Tried but never interested. The music was always floating around while I was growing up in the late 60s early 70s (born in 65) but it never really struck a chord with me.
posted by smallerdemon at 12:03 PM on March 5, 2006

back in '75, and probably much earlier, every college woman with a guitar wanted to be joni mitchell ... she was certainly a big part of that time, musically

i'm still fascinated by her guitar playing and the different tunings she used ... when she came along, she was one of the pioneers of alternate guitar tunings and is still worth studying because of that

her first 3 albums mostly struck me as being too precious and too sparse ... things improved with blue, mostly because she had been listening to laura nyro and absorbed her style on piano ... for the roses was even better and court and spark her commercial peak ...

skipping over the live album, i find hissing of summer lawns to be a very good album, where she finally integrated her unusual chords with jazz backing ... and i liked that, for once, she'd gotten away from singing about herself and her romantic problems, for the most part ... hejira is my favorite of hers ... i think she'd lost a good deal of her fan base with that, but it's still her peak, with her best lyrics and a certain mood to the music that she's yet to duplicate

i didn't get into don juan's reckless daughter ... and the minges album fell flat to my ears ... but i think the shadows and light live album is better than miles of aisles

after that ... i haven't heard everything, but what i have heard makes me believe that she'd lost the knack of writing memorable songs, starting with don juan ...

by that time, she quit meaning much of anything to anyone but her hardcore fans ... i haven't kept up with her and haven't heard anything that makes me think i should have
posted by pyramid termite at 12:05 PM on March 5, 2006

When I was in high school and college in the early-to-mid-80s, I was into 60s-70s-era folkie-type stuff, so I definitely liked Joni Mitchell. I wasn't really deep into her, though; I think I had to become older to really understand what her lyrics were saying. As far as the jazz-influenced stuff, I love Hissing of Summer Lawns, and Hejira is still one of my favorite albums. I've never been able to get into Mingus, though; I think I find it a little cold.
posted by matildaben at 12:16 PM on March 5, 2006

I have a theory that she starts singing faster at the end of the song in order to cram in more words.
posted by machaus at 12:16 PM on March 5, 2006

I haven't listened to Don Juan's Reckless Daughter in years. I remember Paprika Plains being more like a spoken word performance than song.
posted by gimonca at 1:50 PM on March 5, 2006

I love Joni.

Someone above mentioned that "Coyote" bumped Joni into the "avoid" list, funny because that is in some ways a personal little national anthem for me... when I hear it, it says "Canada" to me in a really deep and personal sense, often tears me up, makes me proud and happy she is on my team.
posted by Meatbomb at 2:02 PM on March 5, 2006

I'll never forget figuring out that Little Green was about the daughter she gave up for adoption. I must have listened to it dozens and dozens of times without understanding the meaning. But one day I put the song on at work -- I was writing a legal brief for a mother trying to keep her daughter from being taken away by the state -- and all of a sudden the pieces fell into place...
posted by footnote at 2:25 PM on March 5, 2006

She's great.
posted by pracowity at 2:29 PM on March 5, 2006

Joni is an actual original genius, and pardon me if I put it this way, but on a level with Frank Zappa in that respect.

(*Puts on flack jacket. hears shouts of *INCOMING!"*)

I used to despise her style, but after getting caught on one song I bought her two CD retrospective Hits and Misses for somebody who was soon to divorce me. Guess what? The songs she chose as misses were incredible. I couldn't stop listening to the damn thing for years. And it led me to appreciate a whole world of singer-songwriters that I had previously despised when I found that so many of them saw Joni as their inspiration.

Sitting in a bar with two nasty assed cranky jaded big time punk-techno-avant-shit British music journalists once, I quoted a Joni Mitchell tune and they suddenly looked at me with big bright eyes. These guys worshipped Joni and always included her on their top ten lists, listened to her every day.

In my daily life I'm a musician, and I play some funky backwater old time east European shit mixed with stuff from Turkish ethnic minorities along the way. Tommorow I have a gig playing fiddle with two Moldavian bagpipers and a turkish drummer. That stuff is a long way from Joni Mitchell, but guess what?... She wouyld probably fit right in, and I'll probably prefer to listen to her tommorow afternoon before my gig instead of the oddball field recordings that I should be getting prepped with...
posted by zaelic at 2:39 PM on March 5, 2006

I'm about the same age as you, mykescipark, and I come from a perspective of having her music always around as a constant while growing up. I don't mean an ever-growing catalogue of music, mind you, but a handful of pop hits that have enjoyed endless radio play -- "Help Me", "Free Man in Paris", "Cary", "Raised on Robbery", and the dreadful "Big Yellow Taxi".

My opinion of her is also painted by the experience of a colleague. A few years ago, she returned to her hometown for an art exhibit. The radio station (where I worked) sent an intern to cover the news conference. And I'm not sure what she asked but Joni totally excoriated her in front of the other reporters.
posted by evilcolonel at 2:45 PM on March 5, 2006

I was a little too young for her early stuff so the 70s-era material is what I recall the best. I was too "rock" to follow her evolution into more jazz-oriented material, so that was the end of that.

I find what's happened to her voice (because of decades of heavy smoking) to be a tragedy.
posted by tommasz at 3:41 PM on March 5, 2006

Hippy music.

Don't much care for it (but not because it's hippy music).

Hey, you asked....
posted by jaded at 3:42 PM on March 5, 2006

It's not at all about music, but the reply by soiled cowboy has to be marked as a best.
posted by yclipse at 3:54 PM on March 5, 2006

Love Joni. I think Blue and Court and Spark are indispensible, and Hejia ranks up there with the best music of the latter half of the 20th century - lyrically, compositionally, and instrumentally (Hejira, Amelia, Refuge of the Roads tabs, from her own website - how cool is that?). (By the way, these tunes are GREAT fun to play - they sound great on their own, without accompaniment. And the alternate tunings are SO rich and beautiful.) Jaco and Larry Carlton are stunning.
posted by fingers_of_fire at 4:18 PM on March 5, 2006

My parents own Blue. The first time I heard it, I was in high school. I put on the side with "California" and thought that her voice was the most obnoxious, affected thing ever.

Years later I listened to it again and, as a mid-twentysomething, I couldn't believe how much it resonated with everything in my life. The narrator of these songs was brash and capricious but also vulnerable; independent and needy at the same time. Rarely do you see a portrait of a flawed, complex woman in popular culture.
posted by transona5 at 4:30 PM on March 5, 2006

I think Joni Mitchell gave me a back bone while I was in high school. Listening to her music gave me confidence to be independent and live my own life. I think she is why I never got married like ever other girl in our little town. And I took off on adventures and had lovers instead of husbands.

So, in short - huge influence.

My girlfriends and I listened to "Hissing of Summer Lawns" and "Hejira" over and over again. I guess mostly when guys weren't around. We never played her records at parties or allowed boys the chance to mock her. It was something just the girls shared. Is there a woman singer like that today? Then, in college, we were sad to admit we didn't like her new jazz album. Then we stopped buying her records. We were on our own then. But thanks for this post, it brought a lot of pleasant memories back.

She had a great influence on us. But maybe because we live near the Canadian border and we could identify with her because she's Canadian. Maybe it's a Canadian-woman thing.
posted by 9000.68 at 5:39 PM on March 5, 2006

I hate her. She was the soundtrack of one of the most horrible years of my life. Every time I hear her it takes me back to a really bad place, where my sister was being cruelly manipulated and taking it out on the rest of us and playing the same goddam records over and over again, and I didn't really understand what was going on, but I did form burning dislike for Joni Mitchell's voice. A couple years later one of the men who hurt her and got away with it, a teacher at our school, was my English teacher. He told me that he and my sister would have entire conversations of just Joni Mitchell lyrics. I said I thought Joni Mitchell was bullshit. I never did my work for his class and he gave me an A.
posted by Sara Anne at 5:43 PM on March 5, 2006

Thanks gimonca for that Elvis Costello quote. That just about sums it up for me. My 18-year old daughter loves some songs from "Blue", so that tells you how well Joni's music ages.
posted by vac2003 at 7:28 PM on March 5, 2006

I like some of her stuff -- I own "Hissing Of Summer Lawns" and "Don Juan's Reckless Daughter", but I realise that I've never had the slightest desire to seek out more.

I was exposed to those two albums on a summer holiday in my teens, maybe that's part of the appeal, but I can listen to stuff from "Don Juan" over and over again and never get tired of it. In fact I'm going to listen to "Paprika Plains" right now!

The only fact about her that I can bring to mind is that she was apparently voted Ugliest Girl In School at one point in her teenage years. I hope her classmates followed her career with great interest...
posted by AmbroseChapel at 8:07 PM on March 5, 2006

The songs she chose as misses

Actually I think it's more the songs she chose FOR Misses, songs she felt were among her best but neglected by popular opinion. (Or just neglected -- that's where you'll find 'Urge for Going'.)

And as fingers_of_fire pointed out, what makes Hejiera so steller was the incredible fretless bass playing of Jaco Pastorius. He also contributed to Don Juan's Reckless Daughter and (I think) Shadows and Light.
posted by Rash at 8:16 PM on March 5, 2006

I think in order to get Mingus you have to understand and be familiar with the fusion scene from which she drew the players and the inspiration for the album. From Court and Spark on she was trying to create something new, built on the folk music of her youth and the jazz that her LA musician friends were playing. The jazz influence grew until it finally culminated on Mingus. I personally think it may be her best album (although Hejira is incredible also), but I also think it is her least accessible album. I cannot listen to her 80s albums because of the way they are produced.

I also love her voice during the 70s. The folk years she sounds like a girl; during the 70s she sounded like a woman.

Another huge thing about Joni is how incredibly influential she has been. First of all, every non-jazz female singer that plays piano owes a huge debt to Joni, and acts as diverse as Tool and Counting Crows cite her as an influence.
posted by tcobretti at 8:51 PM on March 5, 2006

I like her, but I think she is really inconsistant. For every gem, there is usually another song that's too pretentious, and/or treacle-y for words. Still, I'm glad she's around.
posted by lilboo at 9:04 PM on March 5, 2006

This is a nice question to come completely out of the Blue (so to speak; I never could stand that record) and onto the Green. (It would be even more interesting if mykescipark was Joni Mitchell.)

I've always liked that her first name is Roberta, and she was born in Alberta. That she was an art student at the Southern Alberta Institute of Technology. And that she's famous for writing the song about "by the time we got to Woodstock," yet she didn't go to Woodstock (I did, actually) because her agent thought it would be better if she appeared on The Dick Cavett Show.

At the beginning, her songs were more important to people than her recordings, being covered (and done better, I think) by Judy Collins, Tom Rush, Fairport Convention, etc. I thought her first album was o.k., nothing special but not bad, but I really disliked the followups as they started coming out.

It seems to me (trying to remember back almost 40 years ago) that she got as much publicity then for her famous musical boyfriends (James Taylor, Crosby, Nash, even Young?) as for her music. Which of course continued as she lived with her drummer John Guerin and then married her producer/bass player Larry Klein. There is a famous (perhaps apocryphal) quote where she was asked about her many relationships and said something like, "If it doesn't work, at least you can get a song out of it."

Having not liked her albums two through five, I was somewhat stunned to find that #6, Court and Spark, was (and still is) one of my favorite albums. I can listen to it over and over and over, and have — one afternoon in the summer of 1976 I wrote a 37-page short story over the course of six or seven hours and listened to it almost the entire time.

Curiously, the only other album of hers that I like to listen to over and over is probably her least regarded: Dog Eat Dog. Hardly anyone ever mentions it, but I think it's great.

You have to give her credit (although how hard a decision would it have been?) for putting Jaco Pastorius and Pat Metheny on her records. But I never much liked (Charles) Mingus, either as an album or as a jazz giant. Like Joni, I think he was notorious more for his turbulent personal life — see Beneath the Underdog — than for what his music deserved. (So I guess they belonged together.)

p.s. allmusic.com says "When the dust settles, Joni Mitchell may stand as the most important and influential female recording artist of the late 20th century."

p.p.s. her website is extremely well-organized. It includes this fascinating look (from the Saskatoon StarPhoenix) at her life in 1966, when she was (briefly) the happy young bride of Chuck Mitchell.
posted by LeLiLo at 10:27 PM on March 5, 2006

"Raised on Robbery", along with her cover of Annie Ross/Wardell Grey's "Twisted", remain favorites that I never tire of.
posted by trip and a half at 11:01 PM on March 5, 2006