“I can’t tell you what it did to hear that song”: Jamie Lee Curtis’ favourite Joni Mitchell song
Part of what makes Jamie Lee Curtis one of the most iconic actors and Screem Queens of an entire generation is her commitment to consistently evolving. However, beyond her evident capabilities as an actor, this also relates to her nuanced ability to factor personal experience into different stories and characters—something she also expresses with her connection to musical excellence.
When it comes to what makes Curtis so broadly influential in the film world, even the unsuspecting outsider who hasn’t paid that much attention over the last few decades can see that this is someone whose talent and capability know no bounds. After all, after gaining her breakthrough in 1978 with Halloween, Curtis went on to break new ground in a multitude of genres, playing characters with as much flair as innate complexity.
While she has her own selection of acting heroes, it wouldn’t be right to assume that Curtis has exclusively looked to her own space to shape her mindset, acting style, and career. In fact, Curtis observes and absorbs art from every corner, from literature to music, more often than not relating her first exposure to such seminal influences to her own life and the memories that changed or enhanced her life for the better.
In addition, Curtis is an avid creator herself. After all, she once explained to Empire that her spark revolves around ideas, no matter the industry, genre, or space they emerge from. She also writes children’s books and has “invented things”, revelling in her brain’s immense creativity in ways that never restrict her path. “I’m an ideas person, and I always have been,” she said.
This is also why, when discussing her favourite all-time tracks with KCRW for the Guest DJ Project in 2014, most of the actor’s favourites centred around specific moments in her life, ones that either made her realise something about herself she hadn’t noticed before or opened her eyes up in varying ways to the world around her. None more so than Joni Mitchell’s ‘California’, which she discovered during one of her most homesick times.
After moving to a new school in Connecticut, Curtis missed home like a sharp knife to the chest, and listening to ‘California’ was her only way of easing the struggle. “I was so homesick and I couldn’t come home, and Joni Mitchell’s ‘California’ I played on my stereo in my room over and over and over again,” she said, adding: “It was my connection to my home. And I can’t tell you what it did to hear that song when I was so far away from home.”
She was in desperate need of comfort, too. “I went for my senior year of high school to a prep school in Connecticut. I was a girl from Beverly Hills, I had frosted hair, bell bottoms jeans, little French t-shirts, no bra, corkys,” she recalled—in other words, she stood out from a mile off. All the other girls had been expecting the arrival of Tony Curtis’ daughter, and they didn’t make life easy for her.
“From that moment, I was miserable,” she said of the first time she was clocked on campus. Thankfully, Mitchell’s music doesn’t judge, whether you’re from California or not; like the rest of her songs, the meaning still resonates. Mitchell’s music puts its arms around you. They are songs that are there when you need them. In that moment, Curtis needed to hear ‘California’, no doubt down the line she will have needed ‘Both Sides Now’ and ‘A Case of You’, too, but because of how it hit when she needed it most, the former remains her favourite.
