JONI MITCHELL

Born: Roberta Joan Anderson, 7 November 1943

Genre: Folk, Rock, Jazz

Best-selling album since 1990: Turbulent Indigo (1994)

Hit songs since 1990: "Night Train Home," "The Magdalene Laundries," "Stormy Weather"

Joni Mitchell's artistic achievement places her in the vanguard of recent popular music, no mean attainment for a woman in a male-dominated industry. Her folk roots and focus on the power of the lyric bear comparison with a performer like Bob Dylan, yet Mitchell is more than just a female version of that giant of the rock scene. While she has operated in that similar singer/songwriter mode, her constant striving for new ways to shape and present her work marks her as a singular talent.

Canadian Beginnings

Growing up in rural Canada, Mitchell studied painting in Calgary and then moved to Toronto in 1964. She learned to play guitar and began to play the role of roaming troubadour in the folk tradition made fashionable by artists such as Woody Guthrie and then Bob Dylan. In 1965 she married a fellow singer, Chuck Mitchell, with whom she also performed. Her striking good looks helped attract attention to her collection of potently original work, featuring unusual guitar tunings and delivered in a voice that swooped memorably into the upper registers. She began to build a reputation in bars and coffee houses. She met the established folksinger Tom Rush, who recorded a Mitchell original, "The Circle Game," which also became the title track of his next album. Other leading folk performers were aware of Mitchell's talents, with Judy Collins recording a version of her song "Both Sides Now" in 1967.

Greenwich Village Coffee Houses

When her marriage ended that same year, she moved to New York, forging a name in the coffee houses of Greenwich Village but also travelling to England at the encouragement of the noted producer Joe Boyd. However, it was only after Mitchell's encounter with David Crosby, a former member of the renowned rock band the Byrds, that her star began to ascend. Crosby, a well-known practitioner of offbeat guitar-tunings himself, became her lover and then produced her debut LP, Song to a Seagull.

It was a promising yet not fully formed introduction to Mitchell's art; it was on her second collection, Clouds (which featured "Chelsea Morning" and "Both Sides Now," the latter an international hit in the hands of Collins), that she really began to carve out a career of major proportions. By the time Ladies of the Canyon was released in 1972, Mitchell was the major female singer in a musical revolution that blended folk and rock forms and witnessed the emergence of dozens of singer/songwriters. The album showcases such classic Mitchell compositions as "The Circle Game," the environmental anthem "Big Yellow Taxi," and a song that captured the spirit of the times, "Woodstock," a celebration of the 1969 rock festival.

With Blue (1971) Mitchell created perhaps the archetypal album of the era: a collection of fragile, introspective songs that celebrated love and commemorated loss in equal measure. Her relationship with Graham Nash—now a colleague of Crosby's in Crosby, Stills, and Nash—was one of the affairs she reflected on in this landmark LP, which seemed to distill the essence of the new California and its growing community of folk-inclined hippies.

Goddess of Confession

But Mitchell was quick to cast off the status of the goddess of confession, muse to other rock stars, and a mere chronicler of heartbreak. For the Roses (1972) hinted at a fuller, lusher, and more ambitious sound with strings, horns, and woodwind augmenting her voice, guitar, and piano. On Court and Spark (1974), the vision was pursued with even greater vigor. With the jazz saxophonist Tom Scott and his band LA Express in tow, Mitchell concocted an epic contemplation of stardom and its downside; "Free Man in Paris" and "Down to You" move away from the autobiographical, drawing on observations of a new gallery of characters centered in Los Angeles.

The following year The Hissing of Summer Lawns proved a stunning climax to this period—jazz and tribal rhythms sat comfortably with the remarkable folk melodies that Mitchell had always invented with such facility. "The Boho Dance," "The Jungle Line," and "Don't Interrupt the Sorrow" had critics gasping, yet her mature sophistication began to distance her from the paying public. Hejira (1976), showcasing the rising star of the jazz bass Jaco Pastorius, was almost as good, but it fared less well commercially. By the time of Don Juan's Reckless Daughter (1977), an ambitious, sprawling double release, and the brave but challenging Mingus (1979), a reinterpretation of work by the great jazz bass player Charlie Mingus, Mitchell had set course on a route that left her girlish romanticism far, far behind.

Since then, Mitchell has retrenched. Her albums in the past two decades have harked back to her styles of the early and mid-1970s, and even earlier still. The dramatic progression she so clearly sought in that decade—from folkie balladeer to sophisticated social commentator to cosmopolitan purveyor of sounds that embraced rock, jazz, and world influences—had stalled. Wild Things Run Fast (1982), Dog Eat Dog (1985), and Chalk Mark in a Rain Storm (1988) share the lyrical richness of their predecessors but seemed to mark time.

In this period Mitchell did expand her range of collaborators, engaging the synthesizer master Thomas Dolby to produce Dog Eat Dog and enlisting contributions from Peter Gabriel, Billy Idol, Willie Nelson, and Tom Petty on Chalk Mark in a Rain Storm; it seemed that if her interest in jazz had been sidelined, she was still eager to bring flavors as diverse as country and punk to her work. The decade also saw a significant personal and musical development. Mitchell married for the second time, shortly after the release of Wild Things Run Fast, and her new husband, the bassist Larry Klein, became a key figure in the production of her recorded work.

Acoustic Stylings Revisited

Night Ride Home (1991) saw the decade begin with Mitchell revisiting some of the acoustic stylings that had marked her success at the end of the 1960s. Hailed as a return to roots and a return to form, the recording focuses on her vocal strengths and her acoustic guitar playing. One of the reasons for this stripped-down version was that she had built a studio in her Bel Air home; although there were contributions from Wayne Shorter, the focus of the work rested on Mitchell's shoulders. The title track expresses a certain optimism, countered by the more melancholic moods of "Two Grey Rooms."

A three-year silence, bridged only by a cameo appearance on the second album by emerging British singer Seal, was broken in 1994 with the arrival of Turbulent Indigo, an album that would see Seal return the favor on the track "How Do You Stop"; the song earned Mitchell a Grammy for Best Pop Album. Her separation from Klein, shortly before the release of Turbulent Indigo, did not result in his exclusion from the collection, which he co-produced. The album was, however, made in the same home studio, a circumstance that resulted in emotional tensions that were, perhaps, reflected in the vivid title. Some of the material ventures into socially fraught issues: "The Magdalene Laundries" covers the incarceration of Irish women by the Catholic Church, and "Not to Blame" is a powerful anti-rape piece.

Since then, aside from the 1998 album Taming the Tiger, Mitchell has been treading water professionally, with a number of recordings drawing on her past material. In 1996, in a unique move, she simultaneously issued a pair of albums that summarized her career output: Hits, which gathers her more familiar work, and Misses, a collection of her best lesser-known songs. Taming the Tiger saw her operating again with Klein and Shorter, expressing longing on "Man from Mars" and bemoaning abandon on "Crazy Cries of Love."

Lavish Rearrangements

In 2000 Mitchell issued Both Sides Now, an album of standards, including "You're My Thrill," "Stormy Weather," and "Answer Me, My Love," alongside new takes on her own title tune and her composition "A Case of You." She followed it with Travelogue (2002), a double set, which employs a full orchestra to recreate some of her finest moments in a series of lavish rearrangements. With the London Symphony Orchestra, conducted by Vince Mendoza, she creates new versions of "Woodstock," "The Last Time I Saw Richard," "God Must Be a Boogie Man," and nineteen other pieces of her work. It also became her valedictory set; she revealed, in magazine interviews, her intentions to retire from recording and quit the business—"a corrupt cesspool," in her words—late that year.

In considering Joni Mitchell's legacy, one must not overlook her painting—several of her album covers, including Clouds, Mingus, Wild Things Run Fast, and Travelogue, feature her visual art; her images were also used in the 2001 movie Vanilla Sky. But that is a mere footnote to her magnificent musical achievement, which was a huge influence on her own generation of popular music makers and those who followed. Amy Grant and Janet Jackson have sourced her songs for hits of their own, and performer/composers such as Prince, Alanis Morissette, Tori Amos, and Shawn Colvin have paid tribute to Mitchell as an inspiration, a songwriter, and a personal role model. Few artists can claim to have captured the tenor of an era in song—or in any other art form, for that matter—as memorably or as movingly as Joni Mitchell did during her apogee in the late 1960s and early 1970s.

SELECTIVE DISCOGRAPHY:

Song to a Seagull (Reprise, 1968); Clouds (Reprise, 1969); Ladies of the Canyon (Reprise, 1970); Blue (Reprise, 1971); For the Roses (Asylum, 1972); Court and Spark (Asylum, 1974); The Hissing of Summer Lawns (Asylum, 1975); Hejira (Asylum, 1976); Mingus (Asylum, 1979); Wild Things Run Fast (Geffen, 1982); Night Ride Home (Geffen, 1991); Turbulent Indigo (Reprise, 1994); Hits (Reprise, 1996); Misses (Reprise, 1996); Travelogue (Warner Bros., 2002).

BIBLIOGRAPHY:

B. Hinton, Joni Mitchell: Both Sides Now (London, 1996); S. Luftig, The Joni Mitchell Companion: Four Decades of Commentary (New York, 2000); K. O'Brien, Shadows and Light (London, 2001).

WEBSITE:

www.jonimitchell.com.

simon warner