The Joni Mitchell song she said was written by God: “I plagiarised it”
It’s impossible to figure out where Joni Mitchell came up with many of her classic tracks.
A lot of musicians may have easily tried to learn her folk tunes on acoustic guitar, but her love of open tunings and unconventional harmonies have been throwing people for a loop for generations now. A lot of that music may come quite naturally to Mitchell, but she knew that there were many times when divine intervention takes over when she’s making some of her classic material.
But beyond being a brilliant musician, the poetry in Mitchell’s lyrics is what separates her from everyone else in her field. The music is already a trip to go through, but Mitchell always had a habit of setting up perfect pictures in your mind whenever she opened her mouth, whether it was giving everyone hope for the future on ‘The Circle Game’ or picking up the pieces of her soul on the album Blue.
If you look at her track record, though, not many musicians have been able to hold their own next to legends like John Coltrane and hold their own. For all of the other bands that were taking their cues from blues, Mitchell wanted to have a bit more sophistication in her melodies, which probably explains why her songs have been perfect for jazz players to play against for years on end.
Even though the charts didn’t have much time for her after albums like Dog Eat Dog, she never stopped exploring new sonic avenues, either. Despite not enjoying her time working on Roger Waters’s adaptation of The Wall in 1990, it did give her a firm musical foundation going into the next decade on albums like Turbulent Indigo. There might not have been a ‘Both Sides Now’ on the record, but the song ‘The Sire of Sorrow’ is one of the most powerful lyrics that she had ever written up to that point.
Mitchell was no stranger to more intense subject matter, but hearing her speak from the perspective of the prophet Job is heartbreaking. She might not pull as much from the biblical text here, but given all that has been written about Job’s never-ending struggle trying to please God and facing hardship after hardship, Mitchell understands that kind of perspective perfectly as she talks about how much longer he needs to suffer before being granted a spot in Heaven.
While a lot of people are more interested in the confessional version of Mitchell, she was never going to entertain the idea that she was writing about her life on the tune, saying, “I put a lot of truth in my songs, and still they’re always poking at me to ferret out hidden meanings. But there aren’t any. This one guy laid into me for about 15 minutes, trying to get me to confess that ‘The Sire of Sorrow (Job’s Sad Song)’ was autobiographical. I said, ‘I do believe God wrote it. I plagiarised it from three different translations and put it together.’”
And judging by the lyric sheet, it’s not like there are any allusions to her life by any stretch. Blue may have been one of the more confessional records any singer-songwriter ever produced, but there’s no way for any artist to keep themselves in that kind of headspace and continue to talk about themselves for the rest of their career.
Granted, there could be some parallels for those willing to look for them, but if you try to pin them to Mitchell’s life, you would have to also apply them to every other believer in the world. Everyone has faced hardship in their lives and have wondered why it is happening to them, so while it might be easy to point the finger and claim that Mitchell was tearing her heart open, what she’s talking about is the kind of struggle that we will never understand until we’ve reached the other side.
