“I think people were surprised”: The obligatory album that saw Joni Mitchell proving herself to her heroes
Joni Mitchell has never been one to appease for no good reason. For the most part, this made her into the fierce figurehead she is today, with a reputation based on making the music she wanted, even when her peers or the industry made her feel obligated to venture elsewhere. However, some more complicated forays into unspoken requests and contractual coercions may not have been all bad.
Similar to a handful of musicians who emerged around the same time, Mitchell has endured a complicated relationship with the music industry. On more than one occasion, she has entertained the idea of quitting entirely, with grievances about labels and other industry-related pressures making her want to turn her head the other way, despite the indisputable brilliance of her artistic vision.
However, this has always seemed more like a mindset Mitchell has nurtured and protected than any real rejection of music or the power of the art form to inspire and change the world. Most of the time, her pushback stems from an innate belief in her music and the beauty of doing things her way, rather than any inherent desire to throw out the rulebook just for the sake of it. And, in Mitchell’s defence, most of music’s legendary figures have been the exact same way.
Sometimes, however, certain pathways are more beneficial than anticipated, even if they seemed more a product of the label’s intentions than anything else. For Mitchell, this story pivoted with Both Sides Now, a record that boosted her career beyond her established arenas and challenged what it meant to dismiss something that eventually wielded more positives than negatives.
Around this time, the music industry had diminished Mitchell’s spark, pushing her into a corner where she couldn’t even feel inspired to write. The inspiration had dissipated entirely, and her lack of recognition for her work beyond her growing disillusionment gave her an overwhelming sense of deflation. However, she recorded new versions of songs that would later be added to Both Sides Now to fulfil her contract with her label.
While she still would later announce her retreat from the music industry, Both Sides Now not only re-established her place as a master among heroes, it also became the Grammy Award-winning record that distilled a newfound respectability for her art, solidifying the fragments of her earlier brilliance as a centralised force of excellence. “I think people were surprised that I’d absorbed standards,” Mitchell later told New York Magazine.
Adding: “People just assumed that I didn’t understand that. I don’t think I proved myself to guys like Herbie Hancock until I did standards.”
Although Mitchell’s disdain intensified during this time and continued long after the album’s release, the pressure to re-record old classics and create something that evoked a different kind of artistic maturity demonstrated all corners of her artistic prowess.
At the core of this was also a concept anybody could get behind: the journey of a romantic relationship, the kind that starts under the pretence of something perfect or idealistic, only to venture through different phases of compromise to end up at both sides, now, where there’s the overwhelming feeling that love was never present to begin with. It elicits the standards, but also holds an unmistakable sturdiness that positions Mitchell as someone whose art glides above the rest with effortless ease.
