The songwriter Joni Mitchell desperately avoided sounding like: “I better cut that out”
By now, Joni Mitchell is such a singular talent that no one would ever dare liken her to anyone else. In fact, she’s become the pinnacle, the label that is stuck to so many other artists, typically female artists writing folk-leaning ballads.
From where I’m sitting, I see it in press releases all the time. I see her name come up over and over and over in interviews as Mitchell has become one of the ultimate references, maybe even more so than that. Alongside names like Bob Dylan and Leonard Cohen, Mitchell has become a kind of god that it’s almost simply assumed that anyone making that kind of music must surely worship.
For the most part, they genuinely seem to: St Vincent sings as a hymn to her ‘Melting of The Sun’, declaring, “Saint Joni, ain’t no phony”; “I used to cry about Joni Mitchell all the time after a few glasses of wine,” Taylor Swift once said, calling Blue one of her all-time biggest influences; “I want to be Joni Fucking Mitchell,” Lorde told The Guardian, seeing that as her ultimate career aspiration.
Mitchell’s name now appears as a shiny golden peak many strive towards. To the generations after her, she represents a career built on honesty and poetry; she represents the perfect meeting of vulnerability and strength; she represents a pioneering woman’s voice, furthering not only folk but the entire world of musical experimentation.
But back in the day, she was wary of the comparisons that were being attached to her. Before she’d fully made her name and carved her path, she was actively trying to steer clear of being pinned as an artist ‘for fans of’ certain people, and one person in particular.
“Paul Simon started piling up a lot of words, more than the bar could handle, and I stopped,” Mitchell once said. As far as critiques go, that’s a harsh one, as she admitted she disliked Simon’s music so much that it fully got her to change her own writing style.
“If that’s what it sounds like, I better cut that out,” she said in a 2000 interview before letting out a laugh so passionate the journalist, Joe Jackson, felt the need to note it down. Still chuckling away, mocking Simon decades on from when they were Greenwich Village peers, clearly even the years haven’t eased up her feelings towards him.
But really, while it seems like an exaggeration, there might genuinely be some truth to her fully changing her ways to avoid any likeness to Simon. If we think about the latter’s wordiest period, which is arguably the start of his solo career in 1972, when he’s tripping over his words on a track like ‘Me and Julio Down by the Schoolyard’, and still packing them in on ‘50 Ways to Leave Your Lover’ in 1975, it does coincide with a change in Mitchell.
As the 1970s rolled on, she leaned more and more into experimentation, cutting some of the words to integrate more interesting sonics like rock or jazz details. Learning to tell her stories in far fewer words, maybe it all genuinely did stem from a distaste for Simon’s lyric-heavy tunes.
