The one-hit wonder Joni Mitchell called a “flower of hope” in a musical “swamp”
By the 1990s, Joni Mitchell was sick of it all. From being folk’s new favourite voice in the ’60s, to evolving through rock, jazz and beyond, she’d already taken on a million different skins and lived so many lives in music.
The fatigue of that is hard for any of us to understand. With each new album, a demand is put on artists to constantly come up with something new and fresh, but within a confined space and time limit. Change too much and you alienate yourself from your fans, but if you don’t change enough, those same fans will get sick of you. You’re damned if you do and damned if you don’t.
That feeling is especially potent for female artists, where the pressure is levelled up even more. “The female artists I know have reinvented themselves 20 times more than the male artists; they have to or else you’re out of a job,” Taylor Swift once said about the way women are expected to not just change their sound but their style, their energy and their subject matters too. Joni Mitchell was always happy to be pushing forward into new eras, but just like everyone else, she felt the pressure from the higher ups.
Even as early as the ’60s, she was threatening to quit. “Remember the days when you used to sit / And make up your tunes for love,” she sang on ‘For The Roses’, mourning that now it was all being stuck “On giant screens / And at parties for the press / And for people who have slices of you / From the company”.
She’s never made a secret of her resentment towards the music industry, but by the ‘90s, it had evolved into resentment towards the entire music world and the art form itself. Luckily though, one song broke through that.
“At the time this song became popular, I no longer played my instruments and I had no desire to sing or to listen to music,” Mitchell recalled. It was intense as she added, “I listened to public radio and changed the station if they played music. But music is everywhere, in stores, even in traffic with the window down, and so I managed to hear this song.”
It might be expected that the song would be something high-brow or beautiful or pioneering. But no, it’s a pop song, and it’s ‘You Get What You Give’ by the New Radicals. The kind of song that feels like stock music, or a track you’d hear on purposefully the world’s most inoffensive playlist for older relatives to enjoy, at the time, it was Mitchell’s favourite song.
“It was the first thing I had heard in decades that seemed to be inspired by something greater than personal ambition,” she said. She heard something special in it, adding, “It was sassy and smart and had real emotions”.
Maybe it was simply that the hyper-optimism of the track and its motivational message hitting Mitchell at a time when she needed a boost of joy. Regardless, this random New Radicals song felt like a beacon that coaxed her back into the music world and allowed her to drop her guard slightly to keep the radio playing. “It rose from the swamp of ‘McMusic’ like a flower of hope,” she said, which is an insanely poetic descriptor for this 1998 chart hit now forgotten.
