Joni Mitchell’s favourite Bob Dylan song: “That had the most influence on me”
Joni Mitchell and Bob Dylan’s relationship is complicated. They are two of the most defining artists from their generation, who have been compared endlessly and even toured together. However, despite not being the best of friends, there is a level of respect for one another as songwriters who have both mastered the same craft.
The two folk icons honed their respective skills during the cultural uprising of the 1960s. They both said goodbye to their respective hometowns to chase their dreams on the dimly lit stages of New York’s Greenwich Village, which was a stepping stone to superstardom. By the time Mitchell made her voyage to the Big Apple in 1967, Dylan was already a huge star and had established a blueprint for other artists to follow, such as the Canadian.
When Dylan made his breakthrough, his originality was his most captivating asset, and every song he wrote was unlike anyone who came before. His stubbornness remains his most beguiling trait and, to some, his greatest hindrance. Nothing has ever been out of bounds for Dylan regarding songwriting, as long as it feels true to himself. He’s made a career from delivering the unexpected, going against the grain, and being an unpredictable enigma.
While Mitchell is her own artist, she admitted that this Dylan tendency is one element she adopted into her writing. After her ascendance to counter-culture icon, she got to know Dylan on a more personal level. However, it wasn’t until the mid-1970s, when the duo travelled around North America together on Dylan’s infamous Rolling Thunder Revue Tour, that she understood him as a human. It would be in this period that Mitchell got to see an unfiltered, up-close perspective of what Dylan was like, and it is where she started to separate her adoration for him as an artist from him as a person. “We are like night and day, [Dylan] and I,” Mitchell scathingly said to the LA Times in 2010. “Bob is not authentic at all. He’s a plagiarist, and his name and voice are fake. Everything about Bob is a deception.”
Despite the harsh words exchanged, Mitchell has spoken positively about his work on many occasions. In 2005, Mitchell took part in the series Artist’s Choice and handpicked 18 songs that occupy a special place in her heart, including Dylan’s enigmatic track ‘Sweetheart Like You’. Despite picking that track, it’s not her favourite in Dylan’s canon.
Mitchell revealed in the liner notes: “It was another Dylan song, ‘Positively 4th St‘ that had the most influence on me. I remember thinking as I heard it for the first time, ‘I guess we can write about anything now — any feeling.’ As I reviewed it for this collection, though, I found it a little too grumpy for my current state of mind, and so I chose this one, more in keeping with the spirit of this collection — for its Damon Runyon style of storytelling.”
‘Positively on 4th St’ arrived at a poignant moment in Mitchell’s life in 1965. It was released just a few months after she waved goodbye to her life in Canada and tried to establish herself in California’s music scene. Upon hearing ‘Positively on 4th St’, she understood it was time to adapt and be her authentic self as a writer. However, her fairytale was no overnight success story, unlike how Dylan’s life is portrayed in the biopic A Complete Unknown. Instead, she had to overcome setback after setback.
It would take a handful more painstaking years of playing shows to empty bars and giving her best songs away before she began to reap the rewards her talent deserved. Mitchell would likely have reached the same conclusion without Dylan, but nothing is certain in the unpredictable music industry. ‘Positively 4th St’ steered her into a creative train of thought that made her a musical great and helped Mitchell realise that she could express herself freely with her songwriting.
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