Joni Mitchell wears many Hats.
Joni Mitchell was more than simply ‘well received’ in the music community and in the ‘business.’ Just about every single person I know who made music their profession and who are quite talented in their own right all feel that Joni Mitchell is one of the single most talented songwriters of this, or any generation.
But Ms. Mitchell wears many hats….
Music is not her first love, nor is it her truest love. Being an artist is her love. A painter.
Over the years, she alluded to this in her lyrics, and statements that could be taken so many different ways (because she just loves messing with people…) I think they not only should have college courses on the brilliance that is Joni Mitchell…her philosophy, her musical abilities that still leave so many baffled…just her open tunings alone, one could write a doctoral dissertation.…but all that talent, inspiration, almost (in a way) being the voice of a generation…(think of Lauryl Canyon, without her…it just doesn’t compute) but her love is her art. And she is just as talented in that department as she is with everything else she does.
So, her two arts, painting and songwriting, happen in almost opposite ways for her. “In painting, you’re brain empties out and there’s not a word in it; it’s like a deep meditation, like a trance,” she says. “I could step on a tack and probably wouldn’t know it when I’m painting. In writing, it’s kind of the opposite. That’s why some people take stimulants.”
“You stir up chaotic thoughts, then you pluck from this overactive mind. It’s part of my process as a writer, being emotionally disturbed by something exterior someone said or something that is happening in society. It’s on your mind, and it won’t go away until you deal with it.”
Her fans may be shocked to hear how little she thinks of many of her most celebrated songs -- songs that established her almost in an instant as the first important female songwriter-performer in pop. Her style was greatly influenced by Dylan’s emphasis on poetry, but she also wrote melodies as ambitious as Dylan’s words. Drawing from classical composers and the great pre-World War II pop songwriters such as Gershwin, she came up with original and complex chord structures.
In “Both Sides Now,” a hit for Judy Collins in 1968, the words and the music came together gloriously as she paints alternating pictures of the romantic cycle….
She started writing the song after reading Saul Bellow’s “Henderson the Rain King” on a plane. In the book, Henderson was also on an airplane, on his way to Africa. He was looking down and observing the clouds. Mitchell looked out the window and the idea just came to her, much like a light bulb over a cartoon characters head.
Even after all this time, she doesn’t understand all the excitement over the song. “I thought ‘Both Sides Now’ was a failure, (A Failure!!!) so what do I know?” she says, smiling. “I was not a good judge of my early material; none of it sounded all that good to me. She was actually thinking to herself…’what exactly is all this fuss about….’ Can you imagine? But she has said…”That’s why I wanted to keep moving forward.”
As she often does during the hours together, Mitchell pauses, as if she’s ready for another topic, but either adds to it or amends her comment.
Her early musical appreciation was tied more to the beauty and structure of classical music. The first singer who got her really, really excited was Edith Piaf, whose voice “thrilled my soul.” (My own Father loved Edith Piaf, and as I was reading this article I remembered album covers with beautiful women, women such as Julie London in a long, gold shimmering gown. (Just a random memory I thought I’d share with all of you…)
She also speaks excitedly about hearing Rachmaninoff for the very first time. While in college, she studied commercial art, not music. But she sang folk music in clubs for fun and for pocket money. Everything changed when she got pregnant.
“Immediately my life was in shock,” she says. Having a baby when an unwed Mother was the “worst thing you could be” at that time. So she told her Mother she was quitting art college to become a musician.
She and the Father, a fellow student, soon parted ways and Joni Mitchell struggled to make a living singing in folk clubs in Canada. Hoping to provide a home for her baby, she says, she married American folksinger Chuck Mitchell, but the marriage was short-lived and she put the baby up for adoption. The move left her with a sadness and guilt that colored her songwriting.
It was the heart of the folk explosion and Mitchell kept running into other singers as she moved to New York and eventually Los Angeles. She found they were drawing from the same material, so she began writing. She had always been very gifted in the poetry department and had been able to make up melodies on the piano as a child.
She cites Leonard Cohen as an early influence. “I just thought he was worldly and made my work seem naive,” she recalls….”I was a Dylan detractor at first,” she says, bemused at the thought. “I was intolerant of copycats and I thought, ‘Woody Guthrie copycat. What’s the big fuss over that?’ Then I heard songs like ‘Positively Fourth Street,’ and thought, ‘Ah, now we can write about anything.’
Mitchell’s debut album attracted some critical attention in 1968, but it was “Ladies of the Canyon” two years later that confirmed her artistry and “Blue” in 1971 that certified her greatness. (Blue just happens to be my personal favorite album.)
To understand the honesty, rawness and depth of the emotion of “Blue,” Mitchell says, you have to understand her frame of mind..Part of the album’s introspection and vulnerability grew out of her own conflict of carrying “this guilty secret of having a child out of wedlock” and “not having been able to bond with her” and the sudden “elevation of public attention.” One song, “Little Green,” was written as a message to her lost daughter. That is just one heartbreaking song…(especially when you know the story…)
But she also wanted to be truthful because she felt there was a danger in letting the public pick your persona for you -- a trap that she felt both Jimi Hendrix and Janis Joplin fell into, contributing to their self-destructiveness.
“Jimi was a very genuine person, but doing all this theatrical stuff was humiliating to him,” she says. “I didn’t want a huge gulf between who I was offstage and who I was onstage. I didn’t want to be a phony. Basically, what I thought at the time was: ‘You are worshiping me. Let’s see if you can worship me if you know who I really am.’
I’m not going to start listing every song, on every album and the fans, both young and old, men and women, especially all of those very talented musicians who recognized her brilliance pretty early on…this is about her artwork, and one statement she made once long ago will stay with me always, and because I know the woman doesn’t lie or pull any punches, she is as deep as the song “River” she wrote about. This was her statement….
“I sing my sorrow, and I paint my joy."
(I had to read that once more…and as usual, it gave me chills.)
Just as her lyrics have about them a diary-like intimacy, her painting lays bare the dreams and desires of the woman who created them. Each is a subjective document with a private vocabulary of images and symbols that she has taken pains to evolve. "It's not just arbitrary imagery," she has said… "All of it is truly attractive to my spirit, all of it is authentic to my personal history."
Writing was also a calling, though she felt no compulsion to develop it. "Winged words flow from her pen," was what someone wrote in her high-school yearbook. So the talent was there and evident to others, even if she didn't give it much importance, at least at first.
Music was a moment of rapture. She recalls being enthralled at the age of 7 by a recording of Rachmaninoff playing Variations on a Theme of Paganini. She begged her parents for piano lessons. She was a natural, and could play by ear. But her teachers strapped her hands for straying from the rules. "So pain drove me out of music. I didn’t think it was worth getting beat up, you know? And they didn’t understand my desire to compose either. 'Why would you want to do that,' they said, 'when you could have really, really studied…become a real musician…you know…a ‘virtuoso..’ I struggled with that myself for a very short time, but I was never nearly as hard on myself as many musicians I know, even just many of my peers.
Defiantly independent, Mitchell learned early to follow her own path. She retreated frequently into nature, perhaps because it represented the call of the free. Pleasure she found in her own company and a couple of smokes on a sun-dappled Saskatchewan day.
"Oh, it would raise my spirits," she says, excitement rising in her amber-toned voice. "I'd get three cigarettes and I'd ride my bike on into the country and find a place that made me go, 'Ooh, pretty,' and I'd sit down and if it were autumn I'd look at the colours and the light through the leaves hanging over me. It gave me a sense of peace to watch the birds fly in and out."
Starting in the early nineties and continuing today, Mitchell has felt a need to return to classicism to reinvigorate her creativity: "I needed to go back and really revisit classicism again, and look for another route out of it, musically and painterly."
And so she continues to work hard at a time when other artists of her age might allow themselves to rest easy after such a fruitful career. But Mitchell doesn’t know the meaning of quit. Back in her sitting room, it is hours later and she is still standing. Her guests long ago fell into chairs exhausted by her relentless forward drive. And she keeps on going. And going….
Here is just a side note….
ON HER VAN GOGH-STYLE SELF-PORTRAIT "I painted it around, I guess, 1993 when I met Don Freed [her then boyfriend] -- who’s the subject of some of these paintings in the show she was speaking about in an interview during the time I was still a college student, struggling with the notion that I could no longer be a music major…can’t read music... I was going to lose my scholarship and suddenly thought of English and just how much I had always loved writing.….yes, writing/composing music. Children’s books…even on here, on Medium.…writing articles about all different sorts of things, and I suddenly wasn’t afraid anymore. I didn’t have to be a music major to become a professional musician! Joni Mitchell helped me realize this…talk about inspiring! Anyway…back to Don…. for the first time. And he said, 'How are you?' And I said, 'Undervalued.' [Laughs.] And I was. I was very frustrated at that time because the normal outlets for getting your product marketed in my business, those doors had been closed to me, and no one could give me a reason why.
"So my work was being rejected whereas mediocre work was being accepted and elevated on the basis of newness and youth and, you know, obvious mercantile speculation ran in that direction. So, rather than physically cut my ear off, I did it in effigy. [Huge belly laugh.] I'm not that stupid."
No. Joni Mitchell is the farthest thing from stupid, and she changed so much. She paved the way for so many female Singer-Songwriters, but when she looks back and thinks of what gives her chills (the way she does for me…) it is her art…what I wouldn’t give to be able to acquire one of her paintings one day. What a dream come true that would be for me….
‘I am a lonely painter…I live in a box of paints. I’m frightened by the devil…and I’m drawn to those ones who ain’t afraid….’ -
Joni Mitchell
