The one songwriter who made Joni Mitchell change her style: “I better cut that out”
Joni Mitchell didn’t spend her career trying to copy everything her heroes did.
She knew that there were musicians who could take music into far greater places than she ever could, but when looking through her record collection, she wasn’t exactly going to be making the kind of classical masterpieces that set her mind on fire when she was a kid. What she was doing had to come from her soul a little bit more, but she felt that some of her habits ended up becoming a little too ingrained in pop culture.
Then again, it’s hard not to think of people who would try to copy the perfection that Mitchell hit upon on her records. Blue and Court and Spark are some of the most pristine records ever made, and even if people weren’t after all of the brilliant prose that she wrote on every tune, there were just as many trying to decipher the strange chords that she was using or wondering how she was able to make her songs sound so pristine when she walked into the studio.
Mitchell would be the first person to say that she was focusing on the song more than anything, but she did feel that some of her contemporaries were a bit too liberal about stealing from their influences. She was already disappointed after finding out that Leonard Cohen and Bob Dylan had taken lines from poetry every now and again, but Paul Simon was a bit of an interesting case once he launched his solo career.
Because on paper, Simon making a name for himself was pretty much inevitable. Simon and Garfunkel were a lot of fun while they lasted, but considering the amount of time they were disagreeing behind the scenes, Simon seemed finally ready to turn his voice up when he released his first solo album. Once he started to get more comfortable in his own skin, Mitchell started to notice that her influence was a little bit too strong when looking at a few of his songs.
As opposed to Stevie Wonder using her harmonic ideas on his records, Mitchell felt that Simon stealing her sense of phrasing was a lot more noticeable, saying, “It wasn’t like [Stevie] copped the lick or anything like that, but basically he went in a more adventurous chordal direction than he would have had I not existed. That’s the kind of influence that I like. It is not copying. [But when] Paul Simon started piling up a lot of words, more than the bar could handle, I stopped! If that’s what it sounds like, I better cut that out.”
It wasn’t just about the amount of words being crammed into every stanza, though. A lot of Mitchell’s rambling melodies did at least sound like a conversation every single time that she sang, and while Simon did have a similar thing going on when working on albums like Graceland, hearing her turn towards jazz gave her a chance to find beauty in the spaces between the words, letting every single line sink in perfectly before moving on to the next section of the song.
But what’s impressive about Simon is how parallel his career was with Mitchell’s after a while. Without overtly copying her, both of them started off in the folk tradition of trying to make music that revolutionised people, but around the same time, something turned a corner and both of them began moving into the studio scene, eventually working with the best session players and having a flair for improvisation that seemed to lean a lot more towards jazz than anything to do with rock and roll.
So while Mitchell felt that she needed to change her songwriting after a while because of Simon, her more verbose songs were never a bad thing. She could still weave together the right melody to make anything sound great, and while some people surely missed the more extended pieces of poetry in her catalogue, it was a lot better to work on songs that seemed to have more soul to them.
