Did Joni Mitchell gift a classic song title to Bob Dylan?
On any list of the best songwriters of all time, you’re almost guaranteed to find two names: Joni Mitchell and Bob Dylan. Mitchell earned her place among the greats through her wavering folk tales of wandering and freedom, always balancing unflinching vulnerability with literary prowess. Meanwhile, Dylan secured it through his talent for equally poetic protest music, creating songs that would endure for decades to come.
Though they shared an untouchable talent for lyricism, the pair didn’t necessarily share a mutual admiration for one another. While the world piled praise on Dylan, labelling him as one of the greatest lyricists of all time, it seemed that Mitchell couldn’t quite make her mind up on him. In interviews, she flitted between admiration and dismissal. Her comments ranged from citing him as an inspiration to criticism regarding his bad breath and originality, or lack thereof.
Still, her ever-changing opinion of Dylan didn’t stop Mitchell from implying that a conversation between them inspired one of his classic songs. While speaking with Rolling Stone in the late 1970s, Mitchell recalled how the pair attended a party of Paul McCartney’s on the Queen Mary. “Everybody left the table and Bobby and I were sitting there,” she remembered.
They sat quietly for a short while until Dylan asked her about her other main artistic endeavour, painting. “If you were gonna paint this room, what would you paint?” Mitchell remembered him asking. She told him that she would paint the disco ball, the “women in the washroom” and the band. This later inspired her when she wrote ‘Paprika Plains’, a 16 minute track which opens with an image of the women in the washroom.
Dylan had a much simpler view of what he would paint from the room. “I’d paint this coffee cup,” he responded to Mitchell when she threw the question back at him. “Later, he wrote ‘One More Cup of Coffee,’” she concluded, almost implying that their conversation had had a similarly inspirational impact on Dylan.
Just one year before Mitchell released ‘Paprika Plains’, Dylan had put out ‘One More Cup of Coffee’ as a single following the release of Desire. “One more cup of coffee for the road,” Dylan sang in harmony with Emmylou Harris in the chorus, “One more cup of coffee before I go.” While the central image of the song may have been in alignment with Dylan’s conversation with Mitchell, it wasn’t actually that cup of coffee that actually inspired him to pen the song.
Rather, Dylan was inspired by a trip to France, where he stumbled upon a Romani celebration. When he took his leave, he asked for a cup of coffee for the road. This request soon turned into lyrical inspiration, leading to ‘One More Cup of Coffee’. This inspiration certainly makes a little more sense than Mitchell’s within the context of the song.
‘One More Cup of Coffee’ is, largely, a love story. Dylan spends the song pining over the sweet breath and smooth hair of his lover, though he acknowledges that her devotion is directed towards “the stars above” rather than him. The refrain of “One more cup of coffee” seems like a metaphor for one last night together before he goes.
By Dylan’s own account, the song certainly took its main inspiration from his request for coffee upon his departure from the Romani celebration. But perhaps, somewhere subconsciously, his conversation with Mitchell bled into the central image.
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