How Joni Mitchell hacked her way to a hit: “DJs have to like it”
As of the beginning of 2024, 1420 songs have topped the charts. Tens of thousands have entered the top ten. Lord knows how many have simply charted. That offers a huge pool of data, and science has since been able to discover the secret ingredients that can help secure a hit. But who needs science? Joni Mitchell didn’t when she read the palm of the charts and tried to craft her own chart cracker as an experiment.
She might be one of the most revered and celebrated songwriters of all time, but by 1972, the highest one of her records had risen in the charts was third in the UK for Blue and 15th in the US. There were more than a few factors that precluded her from getting higher, misogyny no doubt being one of them, but for her next album, For the Roses, she decided to address her lack of airplay in a very perfunctory manner.
She decided to analyse the common tropes among charting tracks and produce the archetype radio single. Unlike Blue, she wouldn’t pour her heart out or bear her soul; she’d stick to a clever formula. “I decided there were some ways to make a hit, increase the chances,” Mitchell recalled in Sounds. For a masterful musician like Mitchell, whose guitar playing David Crosby claimed was far superior to Bob Dylan’s, these little tweaks were easy to deploy.
“DJs have to like it, so you put a long part at the beginning and the end so the DJs can talk over it,” she explained. This is an age-old tip that stretches back to the birth of commercial radio. DJs, naturally, wanted to ensure that their own careers flourished too, so if your song was more than three minutes long, as Tony Visconti would put it, you had sealed it with a kiss of death. Most of Elvis Presley’s back catalogue is just a couple of minutes because of this.
Then there is the sentiment. Mitchell said you have to “take a tender situation and translate it into commonly appealing songs for the DJs”. In essence, you have to write something that they can impart some insight on within 20 seconds. Moreover, you have to make it easily relatable to the casual listening public.
Lastly, she said it also has to be “a bit corny”. And so, we arrive at her radio-friendly hit: ‘Oh Honey, You Turn Me On, I’m A Radio’. Ironically, despite all this formulaic thinking, it only rose to 25 in the US. However, perhaps in some ways, its parody of how to ‘hack’ the charts had more of an impact than if it had risen to the top. You see, in pointing at the platitudes that fill up the radio, she coyly ushered the world towards greater complexity and feeling—she effectively called out the DJs of the day.
Emboldened by this little experiment, she later wrote other tracks like ‘Free Man in Paris’ that hit out at the excessive demands labels place on their artists. With fierce fortitude and plenty to say, she always looked to set the world to rights in some of her songs that followed—always backed by the means to do so, thanks to her stunning skill as a musician.
Even now, she looks at her work and its place in the world with clear-eyed cognisance. “My early work is kind of fantasy, which is why I sort of rejected it,” she said. Many of Mitchell’s early songs were takes on traditional folk pieces which go back to time immemorial.
However, she quickly ditched the traditional for something a little closer to the heart, “I started scraping my own soul more and more and got more humanity in it. It scared the singer-songwriters around me; the men seemed to be nervous about it, almost like [Bob] Dylan plugging in and going electric. Like, ‘Does this mean we have to do this now?’ But over time, I think it did make an influence. It encouraged people to write more from their own experience.”
