Carole King on her favourite Joni Mitchell songs
When Joni Mitchell released Blue in 1971, it was the warning shot that indicated that the singer-songwriter movement was about to kick off in earnest. Although she had created three previous albums in the same number of years, Mitchell brought things in a new direction with Blue.
By focusing on piano and guitar as the main instruments, Mitchell stripped back all of the elements of her folk style and channelled them into more personal material. Across the music industry, every singer was put on notice.
One of them was Carole King, the legendary songwriter who was the other key figure in the singer-songwriter explosion of the early 1970s. Just four months before Mitchell released Blue, King dropped her own definitive album, Tapestry. King and Mitchell were sharing a studio at the time, and Mitchell even contributed backing vocals to ‘Will You Love Me Tomorrow’. For King, Blue was a massive step forward.
“When the album was released in 1971, I was blown away by Joni’s open guitar tunings, unpredictable chord changes, and amazing vocal chops that allowed her to move effortlessly from warm, rich low notes to bell-like high notes and back again,” King told The Guardian in 2021. “I loved the simplicity of her rhythmic accompaniment on piano, guitar, or dulcimer.”
When King took a closer look at the music, she found more than she could ever have imagined. Mitchell’s life stories were strewn throughout the record, so much so that she famously considered herself to be like a cellophane wrapper on a pack of cigarettes. “I had absolutely no secrets from the world, and I couldn’t pretend in my life to be strong.” King recognised those struggles immediately.
“Then I got into the lyrics. It was hard to hear her painfully honest emotions,” King observed. “As a young mother, I found ‘Blue’ and ‘Little Green’ especially moving, but then she’d break into something wickedly funny, as in ‘California’. The album is such a perfectly sequenced collection of inspired and well-crafted songs that it’s difficult to choose one as a favourite. I’ll just say to my sister in songwriting: ‘Congratulations, Joni, and thank you.’”
Check out ‘Little Green’ down below.
