Joni Mitchell’s five points of influence
“By the end of the 20th century, it seemed to me that the muse had gone out of music,” Joni Mitchell once again. “Truth and beauty were passé. Shock was the reigning value, and schlock was rating raves in Rolling Stone.”
Despite being a musical artist herself, the art form had lost its spark for Mitchell. It happened several times during her career, leading her into seasons of silence where she thought she might ever pack it in all together. “I no longer played my instruments and I had no desire to sing or to listen to music,” she said of one period in the 1990s. “I listened to public radio and changed the station if they played music.”
But it had never really been about music for Mitchell. In the broadest, it had been about art. She’s never just been a singer or a folk star. Instead, Mitchell is a writer, a painter, a vital leader and an important reminder that if something has heart and truth in it, it’ll come through. That’s why she’s remained such an enduring and beloved figure.
For this reason, it’s almost strange to imagine her having influences. Mitchell seems to be bigger than the sum of any parts, any movements or scenes. Her sound is singular and uniquely hers, but that doesn’t make her an island. Instead, rather than being particularly inspired by any musical moment or gaggle of songwriters, she draws influences from all corners of art and culture, with these five standing as key pillars.
Joni Mitchell’s five points of influence:
Miles Davis and jazz
While Mitchell is a folk legend, she’s always been greatly informed by jazz. On some of her 1970s albums, like Don Juan’s Reckless Daughter and Mingus, she gathered up jazz idols to play in her band, and she even collaborated with Charles Mingus himself. In her earlier works, you can hear the seeds being sown in songs like ‘Twisted’ or ‘My Old Man’. Even her reworking of her own music, like the moving return to ‘Both Sides Now’ in 2000, feels reminiscent of jazz standards being done time and time again.
One of her key influences in this work is Miles Davis. While Mitchell might be best known for her songwriting, his appeal was in his wordlessness as she said, “He captures and transmits – without words – all we need to know about the situation- in the universal language of tone.”
Nietzsche
Mitchell is well aware that citing Nietzsche as an inspiration is somewhat cliché, but she doesn’t care. “He gets a bad rap; he’s very misunderstood,” she told New York Magazine. Best known for his controversial philosophy, “God is dead,” it’s only with context that his clear influence on Mitchell makes sense.
Nietzsche seemed interested in people, our relationship with society and with each other in the modern world. “Who will wipe this blood off us? What water is there for us to clean ourselves?” he asked, calling out for answers on how the world will comfort itself without the guidance of religion’s rules. “What festivals of atonement, what sacred games shall we have to invent? Is not the greatness of this deed too great for us? Must we ourselves not become gods simply to appear worthy of it?”
Even just that small comment, “What sacred games shall we have to invent?”, finds a footing in ‘The Circle Game’. However, in the broader sense, Mitchell holds Nietzsche up as the inspiration to end all inspiration. She said, “He’s a maker of individuals, and he was a teacher of teachers.”
Leonard Cohen
If there is one peer Mitchell looks to for inspiration, it’s Leonard Cohen. The pair shared a deep mutual respect and admiration, and for a brief period, a romantic love that gave way to some of their finest songs like ‘Winter Lady’ or ‘Rainy Night House’.
“Leonard – the boudoir poet – the hungry ghost – the perennial penitent,” she declared the artist. She once said, “I’m only a groupie for Picasso and Leonard,” holding him up as another world-changing artist like the painter. As two leading forces in the world of confessional writing, Mitchell saw herself in Cohen as well as a driving force to get better and go deeper. “Leonard was a mirror to my work, and with no verbal instructions, he showed me how to plumb the depths of my experience,” she said.
Debussy
If there is any musical moment that inspired Mitchell the most, it’s classical music. Of all of the records of her youth, she remembers these most as she said, “Mama had four nocturnes – Chopin, Beethoven, Tchaikovsky and Debussy’s ‘Clair de Lune’. To this day, I love the trumpet and sad, moonlit melodies.”
Growing up, she loved “anything with romantic melodies”. As she moved into her own career and began crafting her own sound out of the scraps she loved from folk, jazz and beyond, that romance lives on in her discography.
Van Gogh
On the cover of her 1994 album Turbulent Indigo, Mitchell painted a self-portrait in the style of Van Gogh’s 1889 Self-Portrait With A Bandaged Ear. The Dutch painter had always inspired here, looking more towards him and his peers than any modernists, as she said, “I wanted to paint in a folk-artist-y way.”
But when it comes to Van Gogh, their connection is deeper. Mitchell sees a kind of kin in the artist and their mutual strife to create. At the time, she felt utterly undervalued by the industry she was in and totally stuck trying to navigate the machine rather than being simply an artist. “My work was being rejected whereas mediocre work was being accepted and elevated on the basis of newness and youth and, you know, obvious mercantile speculation ran in that direction,” she said of the artwork, “So, rather than physically cut my ear off, I did it in effigy.”
