James Taylor’s favourite Joni Mitchell song: “It’s delightful, personal and genuine”
Some performers can whistle in and out of our lives like a quick breeze, barely moving the curtains as they go. Some, however, can land like a meteor hitting the earth, changing absolutely everything around the. No matter who she worked with, Joni Mitchell was so supremely talented that she left an impression on just about everyone who entered her orbit.
Sometimes that would be pioneering jazz giants like Charles Mingus or titanic peers like Bob Dylan, other times it would be former flames like Graham Nash and David Crosby. Even Mitchell’s ex-boyfriends had to admit how singular the Canadian singer-songwriter was, and James Taylor is no exception.
The kismet shared between two singers meeting is often laden with extra gravitas, thanks to the very essence of starry-eyed fans, wishing that something special happened when two creative forces glance one another. However, for these two, it was a little different. Taylor entered Mitchell’s life at a particularly turbulent time.
Mitchell’s romance with Nash had just come to an end and would be memorialised in songs like ‘Our House’ and ‘River’. Meanwhile, Taylor was dealing with a debilitating heroin addiction that coincided with his introduction to Mitchell. Between trying to get his solo career off the ground and starring in the 1971 film Two-Lane Blacktop, Taylor’s had his head in a few different places.
Mitchell would channel the difficulties and triumphs of her relationship with Taylor into songs like ‘All I Want’ and ‘Blue’, both of which appeared on her legendary 1971 album Blue. When asked by The Guardian to pick his favourite song from the album, Taylor steered away from any of the material that was written about him. Instead, Taylor chose Mitchell’s ode to the pair’s adopted home state of California.
“Joni had succeeded in music. She had a house and an automobile and wanted to have fun and see the world,” Taylor wrote. “After a year or two travelling in Europe with her portable dulcimer, she came back with lots of songs and ideas. We moved in the same circles and ended up together. I’m not saying I was sober, but my then addiction to heroin was relatively quiet.”
“It was a calm, peaceful, amazing, creative time. She quit smoking and her voice was excellent,” Taylor claimed. “She was at the height of her powers. It felt natural and easy for me to play on the album. There were very few people in the sessions. Blue’s brilliance lies in its minimalism. It thrives on her voice, melody and personality. It’s pure Joni.”
“‘California’, which she wrote in Paris, is a coming home song. After travelling, your home has a different context within the world and ‘California’ captures that. It’s delightful, personal and genuine,” Taylor adds. Those three adjectives provide a crystalline reason for why people have flocked to Mitchell for decades and decades of incredible songwriting. She has an innate ability to provide genuine delight from the caverns of her soul.
“When I was taking her to meet my family in North Carolina, between flights she suddenly said she had to return to ‘California’ and left me at the airport – at the altar, so to speak. Maybe she sensed the wreckage of my next 15 years and didn’t want to be tied down. She is totally real and self-invented and it’s one of the best things in my life that I’ve known her.”
Listen to Joni Mitchell’s ‘California’ below.
