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Joni Mitchell’s two favourite Bob Dylan songs

Sun 26 November 2023 22:00, UK

As the brother and sister of modern songwriting, the feud between Joni Mitchell and Bob Dylan has always had an air of sibling rivalry to it. Whether they are mutual fans or foes is hard to decipher. Mitchell’s battle with her peer has often twisted reverence with ridicule like a judgment contortionist, leaving many simply scratching their heads or searching for a backstory. The compliments commonly land with a backhand, and the discredits are often tinged with an ironic commendation.

Mitchell might have slandered him for having bad breath, Jackson Browne claimed she often felt she didn’t get the credit she deserved when stacked up against her male counterpart, and she even claimed that “musically, Dylan’s not very gifted; he’s borrowed his voice from old hillbillies. He’s got a lot of borrowed things. He’s not a great guitar player. He’s invented a character to deliver his songs … it’s a mask of sorts.”

The bastard also apparently fell asleep once at a listening party where she was playing Dylan and others her new album. And yet, even though she reckons he is far from the original vagabond and has a number of gripes with the gingham-clad star, she also has cited him as the major inspiration behind her songwriting and lauded two of his tracks among her favourites of all time. I suppose, in her book, he’s just a super-sleepy facile mystic hexed by halitosis, who just so happened to expose her to magic amid the humdrum folk scene.

In 1965, three years before Mitchell’s first solo album hit the shelves, Dylan released ‘Positively 4th Street’. The impact it had on Mitchell was profound. “There came a point when I heard a Dylan song called ‘Positively 4th Street’,” she once recalled, “And I thought ‘Oh my God, you can write about anything in songs’. It was like a revelation to me.”

In one fell swoop, her view of songwriting was changed. Speaking to Clive David, she later reflected: “My early work is kind of fantasy, which is why I sort of rejected it”. Many of Mitchell’s early songs were takes on traditional folk pieces which go back to time immemorial.

However, she quickly ditched the traditional for something a little closer to the heart, “I started scraping my own soul more and more and got more humanity in it. It scared the singer-songwriters around me; the men seemed to be nervous about it, almost like Dylan plugging in and going electric. Like, ‘Does this mean we have to do this now?’ But over time, I think it did make an influence. It encouraged people to write more from their own experience.”

So, it is no surprise that she has always held ‘Positively 4th Street’ dear. However, when she was asked to compile her favourite tracks into an Artist’s Choice CD back in 2005 as a celebration of musical inspirations, she thought the cutting tones weren’t quite apt, so went with her second favourite Dylan track instead. ”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,” Mitchell said of ‘Sweetheart Like You’, ”More in keeping with the spirit of this collection – for its Damon Runyon style of storytelling.”