The one singer Joni Mitchell knew understood her “the most”
Every Joni Mitchell song didn’t need to be one of the most gripping songs of all time to get people’s attention.
A lot of her greatest moments came from her trying to break new ground in her field, and that usually came from trying to make music that had a bit more melodic structure to it than what she was hearing out of every other band coming out at the time. There was nothing wrong with the flavours of the day by any means, but Mitchell knew that it was going to take a certain kind of artist to recognise her for what she was.
Because if you looked at Mitchell as simply a hero of the folk-rock world, you’re missing the entire point of what she was supposed to be. Yes, she primarily played acoustic guitar and had some of the most emotionally raw songs of anyone else in the singer-songwriter scene at the time, but there was so much more that she had to offer when she started to sprawl out into different genres.
Most people wouldn’t have seen a record like Hejira coming if all they had heard were cuts off of Blue, but Mitchell wasn’t afraid of that kind of music, either. She liked the idea of messing with more sophisticated styles of music, and you can really hear that in the way that she structured her melodies. She was writing songs the same way jazz musicians wrote their lines, and she wasn’t about to dumb it down for the masses.
If anything, she was willing to double down if she needed to. Some of her experiments were too much for some people, and they even ended up costing her her life as a hitmaker, but that didn’t matter that much to her. The whole point was to make something that actually had some meat to it when she finished a song, and she was willing to put in every single bit of work that she could when making her jazz records.
And that wasn’t anything that David Crosby took for granted for a second. He had already been romantically involved with Mitchell for a while, but even well after their breakup, he knew that she was operating on a much different level than anyone else. She had the musical potential that no one else had, and even in her early days, Mitchell thanked Crosby for being in her corner more than anyone else.
Anyone else would have been scared to take a chance on someone like her, but Mitchell felt that Crosby felt what she was doing on a much deeper level, saying, “I won’t have an arranger enforcing his own personality on my music, because I’ll be, for the most part, alone with David Crosby, who is the most into my music of any outsider I’ve ever met. He has very good judgment. He also gets very good sound out of me in the studio. He has taught me a lot of things about recording. Nobody would notice it.”
Crosby already had a good handle on what Mitchell needed, but there was also some cross-influence going on as well. Crosby probably would have never reached the point where he made more jazz-leaning songs, but the fact that he dropped the traditional rock for a more jazz-oriented approach was all thanks to working with Mitchell alongside his love of other jazz greats like Miles Davis.
Because as much as rock and roll may have fit Mitchell at the time, that can be a bit too limiting as a description of her work. She simply wanted to make great music, and even if it didn’t fit into the rock and roll blueprint, the only thing that she could do was hope that her tunes would find the right audience every single time she played them.
