The most beautiful song Joni Mitchell ever sang on: “You couldn’t beat it”
Being able to sing a song meant a lot more than hitting all of the right notes for Joni Mitchell.
The best singers are almost sonic actors to a certain degree, and even if they don’t relate to every single thing that they are talking about every time they sing, it’s about trying to get into the mind of the character in the song and tell their story properly when the rest of the band comes in. And while Mitchell has written beautiful character portraits about herself across her discography, she couldn’t fathom any song that sounded more gorgeous than the music she heard as a child.
Because even if she was considered a rock and roll icon, Mitchell was influenced by almost everything except rock and roll whenever she sang. She had a great deal of respect for the biggest names in the genre, like Bob Dylan, and even going back to people like Chuck Berry, but when she first had the idea of singing, she was taking her cues from the sounds that she heard coming out of a Rachmaninoff piece rather than anything that was on one of Little Richard’s albums half the time.
And that’s before she began listening to jazz as well. There was so much more layered harmonies to explore in records by Miles Davis and Charles Mingus, and while she liked the idea of making music that touched people regardless of the melody, she knew that getting the right sound for one of her tunes went a long way, like the wistful production that she put into a track like ‘Amelia’.
But as she slowly grew out of rock and roll, her performances in the jazz world were the stuff of legend as well. No one would have thought that she could have worked with Mingus on some of the last music he would ever produce, but aside from lending a hand to her jazz heroes, Mitchell was also more than willing to pay tribute to the greatest voices in pop when she sang ‘Stormy Weather’ in honour of Frank Sinatra.
‘Ol Blue Eyes’ didn’t normally want anything to do with rock and roll when he first started hearing it, but Mitchell could tell the kind of songs he was after when hearing his tunes. This was someone who wanted to bring a bit more beauty and sophistication to the pop charts, and when she had an orchestra behind her to do justice to one of pop’s greatest showmen, Mitchell felt that nothing else could be better.
She had tried her hand at making her own classic-sounding records, but nothing could compare to how ‘Stormy Weather’ made her feel, saying, “This time I just had to stand up and sing. And I loved the arrangement – I sang ‘Stormy Weather’ with 60 pieces. The most beautiful arrangement we could find of it. Frank Sinatra had recorded it several times, but this one – I forget the arranger’s name, but we just copped it- you couldn’t beat it, it was so gorgeous. And to feel all those strings come rising up around you.”
And given how well she translated her tunes like ‘Both Sides Now’ in her later years, giving her one of these jazz-leaning songs to sing was absolutely perfect. She didn’t want to be known as the female version of what other folk singers were doing, and a tune like this was about sending a message to everyone who wanted her to keep making the same kind of music that they liked to hear on every single album.
Because while David Crosby was happy to call Mitchell one of the greatest artists of her time, she felt that her best records were only a small sampling of what she could do. She had a lot more to offer the world, and even if the pop charts weren’t willing to listen, all of her hardcore fans realised that this song meant that she had only just begun to impress them.
