Why Joni Mitchell’s office intercepted letters from Prince
Any aspiring songwriter owes it to themselves to listen to the gospel according to Joni Mitchell. Throughout the early days of folk rock and singer-songwriters to the present day, Mitchell’s way with words has always been one of a kind, sculpting her songs like a fine piece of art until they are striking images of beauty on vinyl like Blue and Hejira. Outside of her many fans worldwide, she had one devotee worthy of music royalty.
As the music world turned its head to something different in the late 1970s, a young man named Prince Rogers Nelson was taking in as much music as he could from his native Minnesota, counting Joni Mitchell as one of his favourite artists. Throughout The Purple One’s rise to the top, he always maintained an intense love for Mitchell’s work, occasionally covering songs like ‘A Case of You’ when working on his material for Purple Rain.
However, Mitchell’s influence didn’t just run out when he started to hit it big. When asked about some of his favourite albums of all time, Prince would always point to The Hissing of Summer Lawns as one of his favourite, complete album experiences, remarking on how each song was able to complement the other perfectly. It’s also easy to spot Prince’s vocal mannerisms as a nod to Mitchell, always coming from a place of heartache or conviction when singing about affairs of the heart.
Though Mitchell admired Prince from afar, she did remember that a few of his fan letters sent to her didn’t exactly go through. As Mitchell explains, “Prince used to write me fan mail with all of the U’s and hearts that way that he writes. And the office took it as mail from the lunatic fringe and just tossed it!”
Despite getting the cold shoulder from Mitchell’s people, she always had a fondness for Prince’s music. Like her way of bending the norms of the genre in the late ’60s, Prince was about breaking down the barriers of his own genre. Throughout his glory period in the ’80s, Prince would go through any genre that he thought would suit the song at hand, whether that was laying down a funky guitar groove a la Funkadelic or making something that the likes of Bob Seger could have sung.
Once Mitchell started to listen to Prince’s music, she developed an intense fondness for what he was able to do with his songs, telling The LA Times, “From time to time, I would comment and say, ‘Oh, I love that chord,’ or ‘I love that progression — where did you get that from?’ And he would say, ‘From you,’ but I wouldn’t recognise it.”
As Prince expanded his musical vocabulary in the late ’80s, he also began incorporating the same musical sensibilities that his idol had in her Renaissance period. Between layers of funk music infused into his sound, Prince’s work with legends of the jazz world is ripped straight from Mitchell’s playbook, having previously worked on albums like Hejira with jazz players like Jaco Pastorius and Pat Metheny.
Though Mitchell always gets thrown into the world of singer-songwriters, her influence on an artist like Prince further proves her genre-bending qualities. Some songs might fit comfortably in one style of music, but with the right song, the best artists can use any sonic palette they want to.
