The folks icons Joni Mitchell accused of being “copycat”
“It’s in my stars to invent; I was born on Madame Curie’s birthday. I have this need for originals, for innovation,” Joni Mitchell once proclaimed. Mitchell’s desire for a pioneering edge is one thing when it comes to her own music, but when she found it lacking in the music of others, her critique could be harsh. For two huge names, though, she delivered perhaps her worst insult of all, calling them “copycats” or shrugging them off as merely part of a wave.
In her own right, Mitchell more than lived up to the pioneering attitude she held close. Even though she broke through amid the booming folk heyday of the 1960s, along with so many other angelic-voiced and vulnerably lyrical acts, the singer always stood out. While others might have just continued on as they were going, writing more beautiful confessional works and furthering their signature guitar style, Mitchell kept evolving.
Less than a decade after her debut, the artist was almost unrecognisable from where she started. 1974’s Court and Spark or 1975’s The Hissing Of Summer Lawns began to push folk to one side in favour of jazz, or a form of rock that merged together all the various influences Mitchell held closest, including a mix of classical masters, philosophers and poets.
Mitchell seems to embody the idea that if you stop swimming, you’ll sink. If you’re not evolving, you’re stagnating. As she raced ahead with her ever-changing innovations, her glances towards her peers often looked more like superior daggers being thrown at those who fell behind.
“I briefly liked Leonard Cohen,” she said with such casual and coy judgement. Really, Mitchell more than liked Cohen. She’d once said, “I’m only a groupie for Picasso and Leonard” as the two folk stars swapped odes written for one another during a fleeting romantic relationship. “Leonard was an early influence,” she said. “I remember thinking when I heard his songs for the first time that I was not worldly. My work seemed very young and naive in comparison. At the time I met him, I was around 24, around the time of my first record”. However, Mitchell quickly seemed to outgrow her old flame as she added, “But thematically, I wanted to be broader than he was. In many ways, Leonard was a boudoir poet.”
When speaking to New York Magazine, she said that the more well-read she became, the more disillusioned with Cohen she grew, seeing him as just a copy of some old poets. “Though once I read Camus and Lorca I started to realize that he had taken a lot of lines from those books, which was disappointing to me,” she said, with imitation being akin to weakness to her.
The same tarnishing brush paints Bob Dylan, who she slams as “a Woody Guthrie copycat”. As someone who takes pride in being the first and racing head into the future, Dylan seemed too interested in the past for her. Even in 2010, Mitchell held tight to her disparaging of the musician. “We are like night and day, [Dylan] and I,” she said. “Bob is not authentic at all. He’s a plagiarist, and his name and voice are fake. Everything about Bob is a deception.”
However, her song ‘Talk To Me’ seems to suggest that their relationship is more complex than a simple dislike. “Talk to me, talk to me / Mr. Mystery,” she sings, recalling the time she spent on his Rolling Thunder Revue tour, desperate for his attention or affirmation while he was the untouchable king of folk.
For Mitchell, authenticity and innovation are king. So when it comes to Cohen and Dylan, both of whom take inspiration or sometimes even words from others, she sees them as being left in her dust.
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