The Joni Mitchell lyric people will still be quoting in 100 years: “A lot of hate in my heart”
Joni Mitchell invites her listeners to yearn for a better love, but the bar she set was just too high for most of us.
Her playful desires are captured in her exuberant rhyming sequences throughout ‘All I Want’, the opening track of her heartfelt 1971 album Blue. The excitable pace of her tune evokes the tempestuous tumble of early romance, and as she’s “travelling, travelling, travelling”, the journey her love takes quickly unfolds before her.
“I want to knit you a sweater, I want to write you a love letter, I want to make you feel better” is Mitchell’s encapsulation of the thrilling and mundane that novel dating can bring, in all the cosy ways a folk musician is known to show devotion. Her excitement is as palpable as if it were drawn on a canvas, lending truth to her own description of herself as “a painter who writes songs”.
The sincerity in her craft called the world to become fascinated with her music, but it’s so honest that it has often led to confusion: “It’s funny how people keep looking between the lines of songs to see what is hidden there,” she told the Los Angeles Times in 1996, “I’m not an evasive writer. You don’t have to dig under the words for the meaning. The meaning is all there. It’s very plain-speak.” She did, in fact, knit a vest for her lover, which guitarist James Taylor wore with pride.
Taylor provided the acoustic accompaniment on the song that was written about him, which brings a lot of the magic into it. The alignment between vocals and guitar carries this harmonious imagination of falling head over heels, although the six-time Grammy Award winner denied the song had been written for him in Uncut in 2018: “I thought it was a beautiful song… I wished it was about me!”
The song explores the other side of the coin, the despair lurking on the serious side of that lively sung titillation, ready to jump at a moment’s insecurity. “Oh, the jealousy, the greed is the unravelling,” she sings in a portrayal of what love truly carries, in yearning for the days of love letters and knitted sweaters. The paradigm between imagined and real love is what the song really tries to capture, the difference between ‘All I Want’ and what remains of that.
In a 1979 Rolling Stone cover interview, Mitchell indulged the self-doubt that inhibited her songwriting at the time: “In the state that I was at in my inquiry about life and direction and relationships, I perceived a lot of hate in my heart… I perceived my inability to love at that point. And it horrified me some”.
The song juggles her crafted emotional outpouring with a side of guilt for what could be, while playing the role of both harmed poet and wishful prophet; she packs in breathless elation, turning to anticipation for its eventual deterioration.
For all of its agitated fire and despite its trembling octave jumps, the song doesn’t verge into delirium and stays in a comfortable, bright space between jazz and pop, such that anyone getting ahead of themselves when meeting someone new will find solace in this tune.
