How many Joni Mitchell songs are in standard tuning?
As undoubtedly one of the finest songwriters of the modern era, Joni Mitchell was a true innovator when it came to playing guitar and was always cited by her peers and followers as a true original in the world of folk music. While she hasn’t released any new material since her 2007 album, Shine, the catalogue she has left behind her, spanning from the late 1960s, is one filled with treasures that will long outlast her time on earth and will continue to be regarded with the utmost reverence.
So many of her songs were characterised by their bizarre chord changes and complex structures, and while a large amount of this can be attributed to her distinct jazz and folk influences that she incorporated into her music throughout her career, there was one other significant feature of her guitar-playing style that lent itself to her unusual and unorthodox composition style. While many have used non-standard guitar tunings in their work, none have been more committed to altering the tuning of their instrument than Mitchell seemingly was.
Even on some of her most famous songs, Mitchell was using atypical tunings to give a distinctive sound and character to each of her compositions. For example, ‘Big Yellow Taxi’, which remains perhaps her best-known song, was written in an open E tuning (ie, all strings are tuned to the key of E so that when no frets are being touched, an E chord will ring out when strummed). ‘Both Sides, Now’ is another example of a song written in the same tuning, and ‘This Flight Tonight’ is a wondrous example of an unusual tuning, with the low reverberation of a detuned drop A♭ in place of a standard low E.
In essence, these innovations prove that Mitchell was way ahead of her peers, and even though she’s far away from the genre stylistically, this detuned string is the Canadian songwriter proving that she was metal before the genre had even thought of tuning a guitar that low. However, did Mitchell ever choose to eschew her traditions of writing in non-standard tunings, or are there any examples of where she used the standard (E A D G B E) tuning of her instrument?
How many songs did Joni Mitchell write in standard tuning?
While she’s reported to have used over 50 different guitar tunings throughout her recording history, standard tuning accounts for a proportionally slim amount. It wouldn’t have been a cop-out for her to play with this tuning, but her steadfast dedication to altering the tuning of her instrument has always led to her altering it on virtually every song of hers, presumably causing many a guitar technician to have an aneurysm while working for her.
Only two songs in her recorded catalogue, the early rarity ‘Urge For Going’ and Clouds album track ‘Tin Angel’, use standard tuning, but in neither case does that mean the compositional aspects of the songs are straightforward compared to the bulk of her body of work. Both of them still see Mitchell use open and suspended chords, as well as 7ths and 9ths, all of which are standard fare for her labyrinthine folk-pop compositions.
But why exactly did Mitchell use different tunings so frequently? Allegedly, she claims that it was due to her inability to emulate the style of one of her guitar idols that led her to start using non-standard tunings. In an interview with Acoustic Guitar Magazine, she revealed that in her early days of learning to play, she’d laid her hands on what became her guitar player’s bible, and began to teach herself from the lessons within, although it wasn’t all immediately simple for her to grasp. “When I was learning to play guitar, I got Pete Seeger’s The Folksinger’s Guitar Guide”, she revealed. “I went straight to the Cotten picking.”
Referring to the style that was popularised by early 20th-century blues and folk musician Elizabeth Cotten, Mitchell began to explain how replicating this technique was a struggle for her as a novice. “Your thumb went from the sixth string, fifth string, sixth string, fifth string,” she explained. “I couldn’t do that, so I ended up playing mostly the sixth string, but banging it into the fifth string. So Elizabeth Cotten definitely is an influence; it’s me not being able to play like her. If I could have, I would have, but it’s a good thing I couldn’t, because it came out original.”
While her decision to change the tunings proved to be an excellent workaround for not being able to copy Cotten’s style, Mitchell’s unique approach to retuning her guitar led to her becoming an innovator in her own way. In fact, Mitchell is frequently credited with having invented the shorthand for different guitar tunings, where standard would be noted as E55545 in relation to the tuning of the lowest string and the fret one has to press to be in tune with the next string – for example, making the aforementioned tuning of ‘This Flight Tonight’ A♭(12)7543. As mad as it might all seem, Mitchell’s work in this area was simply unparalleled, and that’s why there have been so few other guitarists like her since.
