The 1974 album Joni Mitchell grew to resent: “Nothing seemed to come up”
The entire size and scope of Joni Mitchell’s music was about more than typical rock and roll.
Anyone could have tried to make the same singer-songwriter tunes that she did, but no one can possibly match the kind of skills that she had when making some of her classics, especially when she started learning from the greatest names in jazz later down the line. But even if she was proud of her body of work, there were a few times when she felt like she was chained to some of her projects after a while.
There’s nothing wrong with fans loving your stuff, but when you’re trying to make the best record you can, it’s not usually easy to sell fans on something new. Mitchell already found that out the hard way when the label didn’t give her the support that she wanted on her album with Charles Mingus, but Mitchell was already outgrowing the kind of genre format that catered to having a massive hit single.
She didn’t really belong in the same category as the same simplistic songs that appeared on MTV in the 1980s, and she was more than happy to continue down her own path. Her albums still had some fantastic guest stars like Jaco Pastorius, but even if she had a pop icon like Billy Idol on one of her records, everything would usually come back to the days when she was writing tunes like ‘Help Me’ and ‘Big Yellow Taxi’.
But, really, could you blame anyone for wanting to listen to albums like Court and Spark or Blue? These were among the most confessional albums that she had ever made, and rarely has anyone made heartache feel good the same way that Nicole Kidman talks about it whenever you get to the movie theatre. But even if someone has a good idea of what Mitchell is by listening to those records, she never wanted to live that fantasy, either.
Her music contained multitudes, just like every other artist with depth, and she felt that Court and Spark started to become more of a nuisance whenever she talked about her new records, saying, “The problems that I had seemed to be many. I seemed to have been blacklisted for about 25 years. Everybody, no matter what I did, nothing seemed to come up to Court and Spark for people, including Hejira, which was kind of trashed at the time and later was listed as a classic. It just seemed that I was in the game and not of it.”
But instead of trying to play the game, Mitchell didn’t feel like she needed to search for those kinds of songs anymore. The fact that she managed to get those masterpieces at the time was certainly something to be proud of during her prime, but if she had continued down that road, would she really have been able to make all of the different twists and turns that she did when she graduated to the jazz world?
Sure, the open tunings set her apart from everyone else at the time, but getting a better understanding of other genres is the reason why the alternate version of ‘Both Sides Now’ works so well. It started off as a gentle acoustic tune, but after taking more chances and working with the best musicians that she could, she had finally grown into someone audiences could appreciate simply for the music.
Because while anyone can latch onto a trend for a few years, Mitchell’s catalogue is the definition of what pure music is supposed to be. It doesn’t have an agenda, and it’s not trying to do anything too flashy all the time, but that’s the reason why so many people can listen to her tunes and laugh, cry, and maybe even learn a little bit about themselves through every note she plays.
