The song Joni Mitchell said was the most beautiful she ever heard: “Very sad, very romantic”
Joni Mitchell never defined herself by being committed to one genre. She was a child of any influence, and no artist should be required to pick one solitary genre and stick with it for the rest of their lives. Like anyone else, she contained different aspects of her personality, and while she decided to make folk-rock her medium during her prime, she was never afraid to make some adjustments to her music when the time called for it.
Before anyone even attempted to play a Joni Mitchell song, though, they knew they were working with someone at the top of their game. Her approach to guitar tunings may have been unconventional and never ceased to frustrate to anyone who was trying to figure out their instrument, but those droning strings on tunes like ‘Big Yellow Taxi’ gave it that yearning quality that populates all of her greatest songs.
It’s also important to realise that this is a woman who knows exactly what she is doing with her music. The age-old story has always been for artists to learn theory on the fly and maybe find a few tricks up their sleeve along the way, but Mitchell was always aware that a suspended chord could have a lot of mystery to it, and that open-ended sound is usually what made some of her tunes so hazy to get through.
It may have been alien for the time, but it made all sense in the world for someone who studied music. Mitchell had been listening to everything from jazz to blues to folk and anything else not named rock and roll, and despite being adopted by Crosby, Stills, and Nash as one of their favourite acts, even David Crosby realised that there was no way of trying to match what she could do when she had a guitar in her hands.
“So when I began to write my own songs, they had that sad, romantic quality.”
joni mitchell
But jazz is only a drop in the ocean in terms of her talent. She was always looking for new avenues to explore, and that meant delving into the world of classical music. After all, Beethoven and Bach used music to let out their innermost feelings, as she did, so why not find out what made them tick and see if she could incorporate that into her music?
While there were countless classical pieces to choose from, Mitchell always had a soft spot for what Rachmaninoff could do in his time, saying, “The first music that inspired me to make music was a piece by Rachmaninoff – ‘Variation’s On A Theme By Paganini’. It was one of the most beautiful melodies I ever heard. Very sad, very romantic. So when I began to write my own songs, they had that sad, romantic quality. Simply because Rachmaninoff was the first thing I loved.”
It was a far cry from the likes of Chuck Berry and Fats Domino from around the same time, but Mitchell was going to take inspiration from wherever she saw fit. Looking at how she incorporated orchestras in her later material, the classical version of ‘Both Sides Now’ sounds like she took notes on the kinds of themes that Rachmaninoff made and put them into her own music.
This kind of approach might not have necessarily been considered cool, but Mitchell never saw it in that way. Music has always been about learning from other generations about how to emote through sound, and if that meant having a symphony move someone rather than a standard guitar solo, that was more than enough to go on.
