Joni Mitchell named her favourite Bob Dylan period
Joni Mitchell is one of the most influential folk songwriters of all time. Pairing raw, diary entry-like poeticisms with soft strums and tender keys, she was an instrumental figure in the genre, and somewhere in between the vulnerability of Blue and the jazziness of Mingus, she enchanted millions. Making young women feel seen with her music and even influencing some of them to pick up a guitar themselves, her impact is largely unparalleled.
Bob Dylan is one of the few figures who could match Mitchell’s legacy as one of the most influential folk songwriters of all time. By the time she made her debut with Song to a Seagull, Dylan had already put out eight records of his own, ranging from collections of covers to future folk classics, some of which would come to inspire Mitchell in her own work.
Though Mitchell was repelled by the unoriginality of Dylan’s homages to fellow folk legend Woody Guthrie in the beginning of his career, there were elements of his early work that she adored, elements that would even inspire her in her own songwriting. Recalling Dylan’s influence in a BBC Archive interview, Mitchell shared her particular love for Dylan’s output in the mid-1960s.
It was albums like 1965’s Highway 61 Revisited and 1966’s iconic Blonde on Blonde that would convert Mitchell to Dylan. Taken in by his personal yet poetic lyrics, Mitchell was inspired to start penning some of her own. “It occurred to a lot of us, then, that you could sing the scribblings that you had in notebooks,” she explained, “The private, poetic, scribblings.”
From ‘Visions of Johanna’ to ‘Like a Rolling Stone’, the two records featured some of Dylan’s best work, lyrically and musically. He had begun to show off his mastery of imagery and literary lyricism, and Mitchell was inspired.
Before these albums were released, she had spent her college years covering old classics, but she was suddenly emboldened to turn her own wonderings into song. Just a few years after her favourite Dylan period, she unleashed her debut record, Song to a Seagull, onto the world. Immediately demonstrating her vocal prowess and her poetic voice, the record marked the beginning of a legacy.
As she grew as a songwriter, the influence of Dylan, that freedom to sing her “private, poetic, scribblings,” was unwavering. It became her trademark. It’s in the stunning lyrics to ‘A Case of You’, it’s in the vocal sways of ‘Help Me’, it’s even in the jazzier stylings of ‘Coyote’. Her sonic storytelling is so good because of just how unflinchingly vulnerable it is, always sounding as if she ripped out a page from her diary and began to sing.
It is this element of her songwriting that has endeared her music, and Dylan’s, to so many. Even when they tackled huge topics like love and freedom, politics and climate, they maintained that personal quality. Somehow, this seems to have earned them universal appeal.
As Dylan and Mitchell bear their souls in song, turning off-handed scribbles into some of the greatest songs of all time, it’s difficult not to be taken in by their raw ramblings. It’s easy to see how Dylan won Mitchell over with this element of his songwriting and how Mitchell has had the same effect on so many others since then.
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