“My first god”: The first artist Joni Mitchell ever fell in love with
There has always been an ongoing conversation in the music world centred around the musical geniuses. Not many of them exist in the wild, but every now and again, people like Jimi Hendrix or Eddie Van Halen will come out of nowhere to show the guitar world that mere mortals can do much more than simple power chords in rock and roll. Those greats usually have that can of musicality flowing through their body, but Joni Mitchell knew that the only way to have that musical sixth sense comes with listening to different people.
When Mitchell first started making the rounds as a singer-songwriter, she was already one of the greatest in her field. Other artists like Crosby, Stills, and Nash could put together some brilliant melodies when they wanted to, but listening to the ethereal sounds of her guitars on tracks like ‘Both Sides Now’ or the dulcimer on ‘California’ made the songs feel like they were floating on the wind rather than coming out of a speaker.
And for the rest of her career, Mitchell remained the complete package for what songwriters were supposed to be. There were always those few that had the great lyrical power but not the musical chops and vice versa, but listening to tracks off of Hejira, Mitchell was one of the true poets of rock and roll that also knew the ins and outs of what made some of the best melodies dance across people’s hearts.
That’s because she never felt confined to rock and roll like most people. Everyone tends to stay in one lane when it comes to their favourite styles of music, but before Mitchell even started listening to traditional rock and roll, she was already steeped in the world of jazz. She knew that it didn’t get better than listening to someone like Miles Davis in his prime, and given that she eventually got people like Larry Carlton and Jaco Pastorius on her records, she was never shy about letting her influences in.
But looking at the past few years, it’s almost fitting that Mitchell decided to leave the record industry. She was never equipped to play the pop game that so many others did when MTV kicked in, and if her music wasn’t going to be appreciated by the mainstream market, it was time for her to take things one step further and reinterpret her songs with orchestral accompaniment.
“I never emulated anybody. My first instrument was the piano, because my first god was Rachmaninoff.”
Joni Mitchell
While the orchestral version of ‘Both Sides Now’ could have been a cheap way of bringing some refinement to the track, Mitchell was simply following in the footsteps of her childhood heroes, saying, “I never emulated anybody. My first instrument was the piano, because my first god was Rachmaninoff. By the time I was a teenager and learning guitar, I had no ambitions as a musician — I just wanted to accompany people singing bawdy songs.”
Since she was not considered the next major force in rock and roll, she made decisions that most people would have refused on principle. She never had time to play the same kind of music because a suit wanted her to, and when she was done with a certain style, it didn’t take her long to abandon it altogether and start looking for new ways to interpret her music.
Because, like Rachmaninoff, Mitchell knew that the only thing that she needed to make a song work was the right melody rather than a roaring guitar. That may have caused excitement for a few minutes for casual listeners, but by learning from the biggest names in classical music, Mitchell created the kind of songs that could hit people on different levels depending on what stage in life they were in.
