‘The Magdalene Laundries’: The Joni Mitchell song that had her fearing for her life
“She was exciting and turbulent and fun and we all loved her – yet I don’t think she was ever happy,” said David Crosby when talking about Joni Mitchell, “She’d been through polio, the marriage to Chuck Mitchell and giving up a child – and music was her way of processing this. It could be difficult to be around her because she’d have you laughing or crying real tears in the same half an hour, like her music. It’s genuinely who she is.”
Mitchell is among the best songwriters and musicians to hum a tune on God’s green earth. In that same interview, after talking about her as a person, Crosby turns towards her ability as a musician, saying, “Bob Dylan’s as good a poet as Joni, but nowhere near as good a musician.”
It’s hard to find someone who can navigate a song like Mitchell can. You tend to find people can lean either into lyrics or music, they might be capable in both areas, but it’s rare to find someone who excels in them. Mitchell is the exception, as the melancholy nature of her music, paired with the emotive way that she played guitar meant her songs took on a life of their own and really spoke to the listener on a deep level.
In a different interview, Crosby spoke explicitly about how she could play the guitar in a way that complemented her lyrics. He said she was “like a band in the way you approach a chord and string the melody along,” continuing, “She was so new and fresh with how she approached it. It’s these odd tunings that have tripped up thousands of artists trying to figure out how to get ‘Big Yellow Taxi’ to sound like her ‘Big Yellow Taxi’.”
While her songwriting was brilliant, it often fell in the realm of quite sad music, which is easily explained when considering her state of mind discussed earlier. However, in a bid to challenge her, Mitchell’s property caretaker said she should try and write a happy song. What she actually did was end up penning a track that almost got her into a bar fight.
“He said, ‘You’re a cheerful person, Joni. But you write all these melancholy songs. I think it’s because you write them at night. Why don’t you try writing a song in the daylight?’” she recalled, “So, I sat out on a rock, and I tuned my guitar to the sounds of the birds around, which were mostly squawky birds, you know. But there is a tonality to it. And I waited for an idea for the lyric to come.”
The idea was about the Magdalene Laundries, just outside of Dublin. This is where they found the bodies of women buried in what were almost unmarked graves, with the only things written on them being “Magdalene of the tears” and “Magdalene of the sorrows”. These graves were for women who were deemed to attract “unwanted” attention from men between 1800 – 1970. They were forced to live in the church until they died and were buried in anonymous graves.
While this wouldn’t be most people’s go-to for a “happy song”, the track’s tone was quite uplifting. While it had her dynamic style, it was slightly more uplifting. Mitchell was also beautifully descriptive in how she wrote about the song’s theme. While she was happy with the track, one night, an Irish woman in a bar cornered her and threatened her over the song.
Mitchell said the woman asked if she was Catholic, to which the songwriter said no. “Well, then what business is it of yours to be writing about our business?” The woman allegedly asked. “It was bad enough with Sinead ripping up the picture of the Pope, but at least she’s one of ours.”
Nothing came of the altercation, but it certainly shook Mitchell up. “Oh, man,” she said, “She just had me on the grill there for a while about it […] But it’s a raw subject.”
