The 1970s artist Joni Mitchell always loved: “Genius”
Joni Mitchell seemed to be completely done with rock and roll before the 1970s had even finished.
There was nothing wrong with people trying to make the best songs that they could, but after spending her time being one of the greatest folk artists of her time, Mitchell knew that there was a world out there that she was only scratching the surface of every single time she made one of her records. She wanted the opportunity to make something a bit more far-reaching, and there were plenty of other musicians who could wow her that didn’t fit into the rock and roll context.
She could still admire people like David Crosby whenever he wrote more experimental music, but the lion’s share of her heroes seemed to be from the golden age of American music. She loved the idea of making music that someone like Miles Davis could be proud of, and half of her career was all about trying to create more expansive landscapes with her music that no one had ever considered before.
No one would have imagined that one of the leading figures in pop would suddenly make an entire record dedicated to Charles Mingus or spend time working with fusion players, but that’s what Mitchell needed to do. She had outgrown the pop sphere in many respects, but there were always going to be those few musicians who left her with her jaw on the floor every single time they made a new record.
She may have had a decent respect for what a band like Led Zeppelin were doing, but she could still see the framework that they were working in. Jimmy Page was still trying to live out his fantasy as a blues guitar legend despite his Eastern influences, but when it came to more jazzy players, there was no one on this planet who could have possibly touched what Stevie Wonder did during his classic run.
The biggest names in music usually have those moments where everything seems to be going right, but what Wonder did was on another level. Bands like The Rolling Stones maintained a fairly consistent hot streak, but every one of Wonder’s greatest records was about more than just soul. He was out there to prove that he belonged next to some of the biggest names in music history, and by the time he made records like Music of My Mind, he was already halfway there.
And for all of the boring bands that had come up in the meantime, Mitchell felt that Wonder was one of the only musicians who genuinely impressed her in the 1970s, saying in 1974, “Along the way, there’ve been a lot of people who have influenced me. Anything which moves me influences me. I’m influenced at this point by Stevie Wonder because I think that he’s like a musical genius, I really do, and I love the quality of his singing.”
What’s even crazier is that when Mitchell said that, Wonder didn’t even show everyone the full extent of what he could do. A song like ‘Superwoman’ was only the beginning, and when you look at every album that paved the way for a record like Songs in the Key of Life, Wonder practically put every single bit of his soul into making each song perfect. ‘Isn’t She Lovely’ and ‘Sir Duke’ don’t sound like they have a single bum note across their runtimes, and that kind of ingenuity was what Mitchell eventually strove for when making records like Hejira.
No one was going to be perfect, and even Mitchell and Wonder have had moments where their records haven’t hit with the general public like they thought they would, but that’s part of the beauty of their career as well. They weren’t afraid to try new things and see where it goes, and if they held themselves up to those same high standards on every record, they were going to make something fantastic.
