The 1968 song that had everything Joni Mitchell ever wanted: “The real shit”
The whole point behind every Joni Mitchell song was to offer the pop industry something different.
No one would have thought to use the strange tuning or come out with the unusual melodies that she came up with, but a lot of what she did ended up going on to influence the way that most people started to think about where they could with the typical pop song. It didn’t have to be strictly about the same structure anymore, and a lot of that came from Mitchell knowing which rules that her heroes were breaking along the way.
Because as much as pop music has a set structure to it, it was like the Wild West when Mitchell first began playing. There was no sense in her trying to make the same singer-songwriter tunes that everyone else was coming up with, and since her background was in things like classical music and jazz, it was easier for her to make songs that had a bit more depth to them than the average James Taylor ballad.
And it’s not like she was afraid to wear those influences on her sleeve. By the time she began work on tunes like ‘Amelia’, she was fully embracing the sounds of jazz, and a lot of the session musicians that she was working with practically spoke the same language that she did whenever they needed the right vibe for a song. Jaco Pastorius was already a God-gifted musician, but even after his passing, Mitchell was dreaming bigger when working with people like Charles Mingus.
In her mind, jazz and her brand of pop were all connected, so it wasn’t out of the question for her to make songs that had a bit more of an edge to them. That’s what Miles Davis always excelled at when he made his greatest records, and looking through all of the tunes that she heard growing up, Mitchell felt that no one could ever mess with the kind of brilliance that Davis had on every one of his albums.
He was the consummate musician in her eyes, and seeing him embrace all different textures was a trip for any jazz fan. Everyone might be more familiar with his modal period or watching him embrace rock and roll sounds on Bitches Brew, but for Mitchell, everything that she ever needed to hear from Davis could be found in the song ‘Nefferttiti’.
The song didn’t have to be the catchiest in his catalogue, but everything she loved about Mitchell was there before the melody even comes in, saying, “I have to admit that ‘Nefertiti’, and some of Miles Davis’ romantic music is something I’ve always revered and looked to as ‘the real shit’. To me it had incredible contours, depth, whimsy— it had everything. Miles had the full musical talent: a gift of composition, shading, emotion, everything was there.”
And when looking through a lot of her greatest tunes, she was trying to make the same kind of extravagant music that Davis was doing from a more commercial perspective. No one was going to claim that an album like Mingus was as commercial as whatever the disco craze was doing in the late 1970s, but a lot of what Mitchell was great at was making little brilliant passages that never needed to call attention to themselves.
She knew that some of the greatest musicians in the crowd would someday find out what she was doing, and it didn’t take the rest of us long to see the kind of brilliance that she was working with. Her music was coming from a much different place, and if she could pull off a style that sounded anywhere close to a song like this, perhaps she was right when she said she belonged in the same category as Davis.
