How the best cover song Joni Mitchell heard became an insult: “She took offence”
Joni Mitchell isn’t the kind of artist that people need to reinterpret all that often.
Her songs are incredibly malleable when you look at them on the surface, but if you look at how Counting Crows did their own version of ‘Big Yellow Taxi’, there’s a reason why people usually need a little bit more experience to try and match the nuance that Mitchell made with her songs. Her words are practically poetry in motion whenever she sings, but it takes the right voice for someone to start building on what she has started.
Then again, a lot of Mitchell’s tunes are already perfect just the way they are. She didn’t get into the business to make mediocre records, and even if she had a lot of moments where the recordings didn’t come together, who’s going to look at you with a straight face and say that a song like ‘California’ is flawed? It’s impossible, but there are definitely people like Mabel Mercer who managed to take Mitchell’s words in a new direction.
Because if you think about it, some of the greatest singers for a song aren’t always the writer. Sure, Mitchell had a beautiful voice, but when talking about some of her best songs, the narrator doesn’t necessarily have to be her sullen voice. There was a lot more for people to work with, and Mercer’s version of ‘Both Sides Now’ was the kind of tune that took everything great about the original and amplified it.
At the same time, there is a magic to the way that Mitchell sings the original version. The chime of her open-tuned guitar is absolutely magical, and considering the song is all about someone trying to look at the world from all angles, she does deliver the sentiment incredibly well. But if you need someone to sing that song, there needs to be a certain wisdom that comes with making the track sound beautiful.
And since Mercer had been a cabaret artist for years before singing Mitchell’s song, the folk-rock genius remembered being absolutely knocked out by what she heard coming out of her mouth, saying, “I said, y’know, I’ve heard various recordings of that song, but you bring something to it, y’know, that other people haven’t been able to do. You know, it’s not a song for an ingenue. You have to bring some age to it. Well, she took offence. I insulted her. I called her an old lady, as far as she was concerned.”
Granted, there are probably many artists who wouldn’t want to be called old just after delivering a performance, but it’s easy to understand what Mitchell was getting at. She had written a song that was wise beyond her years, and if she wanted to bring the tune to life, she would either have to give it to someone else or wait until she was ready to tackle the whole thing on her own once she had grown into it.
And when you listen to the re-recording she made of the song years down the line, it tells the story a lot better. Especially when she started performing the song with an orchestra behind her, Mitchell seemed to have finally lived every single line in the song perfectly, and while the line about not really knowing much about life at all does seem a little bit sad, it’s almost reassuring to know that the world can still hold such mysteries even someone reaches their twilight years later down the line.
So while it’s easy to understand why Mercer was unhappy, it wasn’t so much about Mitchell trying to offend her. She wanted the chance to hear the song in its most natural state, and after years of being told that she was wise beyond her years, seeing the song get put on top of a world-weary voice is the perfect way to listen to the song.
