‘Misses’: Joni Mitchell’s anti-greatest hits album
There comes a point in every artist’s career when a greatest hits album seems like the natural next step. It’s an easy way to collate your biggest successes into one place and cash in on them one more time, provide fans with a record full of their favourite tunes and make more money off them in the process. Countless bands have given into the greatest hits ploy, from Fleetwood Mac to The Who, but few have followed in the footsteps of Joni Mitchell and created an anti-greatest hits record.
By the mid-1990s, Mitchell was in a prime position to release a greatest hits album. She had spent 30 years carving out a place for herself in the music industry, securing her place as one of the most talented songwriters of all time with records like Blue and pushing her genre experimentalism with Court, Spark, and Mingus. She had dozens of songs to her name, many of them worthy of a place on a greatest hits record, but Mitchell was never one to follow the status quo.
In line with her hatred for the ever-increasing commerciality of the music industry, Mitchell opted to release a collection of her worst hits. They weren’t bad songs—in fact, the compilation contained some of her greatest sonic experimentation and poetic phrasing—but they were songs that had passed audiences by upon first release. The result was the aptly titled Misses, which she put out in the autumn of 1996.
The record featured songs from throughout Mitchell’s career, from the lengthy, sultry ‘Harry’s House/Centerpiece’ to the title track from For the Roses. It was a collection that showed off the breadth of her sound, with many pieces stemming from later in her career when she began to work with more jazz-inclined musicians. They may have been commercial misses, but they certainly weren’t musically.
The record showed off Mitchell’s talent with a pen, too, particularly on track three, ‘A Case of You’. The love song originally featured on her magnum opus, Blue, and is widely considered to be one of Mitchell’s best. Detailing devotion through the idea that she could “drink a case” of her lover and still be on her feet, it’s one of the purest displays of her poetic talents and one of her greatest lyrical hits.
Although Mitchell often spoke out against the commercialised music industry, which spawns the greatest hits records and released Misses as an act of rebellion against it, she unfortunately still existed within that system. As a result, to get Misses through, she also had to agree to put out a record of her greatest hits, titled Hits.
Hits was released on the same day as Misses and featured some of Mitchell’s more well-known tunes, including ‘Big Yellow Taxi’ from Ladies of the Canyon and ‘California’ from Blue. It was just as well-curated, with tracks taken from across her career, but it wasn’t quite as special as Misses, which also encapsulated her feelings surrounding the industry.
While many artists have embraced the greatest hits record to make money without providing audiences with anything new, Mitchell used the opportunity to shine a light on some of the songs that had gone under-appreciated in her catalogue and poke fun at the industry.
