Joni Mitchell’s best song, according to Ben Folds
Ben Folds’s musical crux is rooted in ingenuity, with sonic experimentations and visions of bold, new concepts coursing his veins. As frontman of the Ben Folds Five, he knows a thing or two about what makes a genre-spanning success – bridging the gap between rock, pop, and classical, he has that rare creative ear, both in bands and as a solo artist, and an intuition for what will sound good before anyone else knows it does.
To that end, for Folds, there’s one formative singer whose songbook instantly captured his mind and heart. It could only be Joni Mitchell, the queen of folk beloved on the highest pedestal not only by Folds but millions of famous fans around the world enraptured by her captivating spirit.
Of course, also at Mitchell’s supersonic disposal is her Earth-defining album Blue, released in 1971 and solidifying her place in the stars ever since. Naturally, it was a song from within Blue’s seminal depths that made Folds’s musical imagination take flight.
Its final track, ‘The Last Time I Saw Richard’, is “such a great song because it’s like you’re getting a letter and a story in one,” Folds recently enthused. “And I think when you’re younger, songs are your friends. You’re taking a lot more out than the writer probably ever intended, especially with something this conversational. Joni just dispensed with anything formal. How ever many lyrics she wants to shove in, she was going to figure out a way to do it.”
That is certainly true, as Mitchell’s lyrical tempo is as much disjointedly magical as it is an enchanting race through love and yearning. For the budding wordsmith Folds, this whirling incantation was simply, blindingly mesmerising. He continued: “It opened a door for me as a kid. Everything at that time had that iambic pentameter, Dr Seuss kind of vibe. Stravinsky, years before, referred to that as ‘the tyranny of the bar line’. I always loved music that goes against that.”
But specifically, it was Mitchell’s conversational tone throughout the ballad that struck him as a revelation: “When someone’s speaking to you, in real life, you don’t know how long they’re going to take a breath for. That’ll tell you if they’ve been thinking about what they’re about to say, for example. It’s real unpredictable, the way that people speak. And so Joni Mitchell folds that into a song, and it gives her such great license.
It was Blue that he listened to “on repeat, every day” for Folds that was the gateway into Mitchell’s intoxicating sonic mysticism, inviting him towards a life of musical magic too irresistible to contain. On a singular scale, that’s momentous, so just imagine how many times that has been replicated whenever Mitchell has first spun into the psyche of fans the world over.
She really should come with a label – warning: this may become addictive. But unlike most habitual highs, Mitchell is of a much less dangerous taste. In fact, the truth is that she only gets better the deeper you go into her swirling world.
