“A little bit of friction”: The album Joni Mitchell said was painful to make
Nothing that Joni Mitchell ever made came easy when she walked into the studio.
There’s a lot of energy that goes into making sure every single note is exactly right, and even if some of the pieces are a little out of tune compared to today’s standards, it’s always better that someone like Mitchell make the purest statement she can instead of throwing whatever songs she could think of onto a slab of vinyl. Her music needed to mean something more, but that didn’t mean that there weren’t a few records that she didn’t walk out of without a few scars to show for it.
After all, no one in their right mind would have been able to write a record like Blue without going through a fair share of hardship. The album itself sounds absolutely pristine, but there’s a lot of work that goes into making songs sound effortless, especially when they are all about unravelling pieces of her relationship. There was a lot more on her mind than typical love songs, but there was a lot more harmony in her head outside of rock and roll as well.
Nothing that she ever made was supposed to be the average folk-rock song, and even when anyone attempted to play her guitar, there were bound to be people scratching their heads trying to figure out how the hell she used those alternate tunings throughout every one of her songs. And if that wasn’t enough, bringing in the best jazz players of all time to work with her wasn’t going to be easy for people who only knew the basic chords behind their favourite Beatles songs.
Mitchell’s heroes were people like Miles Davis and Charles Mingus, and getting the chance to work alongside people like that needed a much more refined vocabulary. She wanted to be able to focus squarely on the music and let the rest of the production team do the rest, but when her husband and bassist Larry Klein left during the recording of Turbulent Indigo, she remembered the rest of the sessions being a lot more strenuous than the rest of the projects she had been working on.
Admittedly, their parting was water under the bridge by the time that Mitchell walked into the studio, but since she didn’t know much about the specifics, getting to the finish line was a lot harder this time around than before, saying, “That process was difficult because in pulling apart, although there was no violent parting, there was kind of a cold war. Like, I don’t know the proper names of pieces of equipment, things like that. I have to give them nicknames, or call them ‘that gizmo’, or point. And before, Larry never had problems deciphering what I meant by these things. But now, this perverse withholding of understanding went down, and we had a little bit of friction on this project.”
But before anyone says anything, this isn’t like Mitchell’s Rumours or anything. She had already established herself as an artist, and while there are definitely pieces of the album that are more heartfelt than others, a lot of the songs are about capturing the best performances that she could, even when she and Klein weren’t communicating properly behind the scenes. It was a bit of a hurdle, but it was nothing that Mitchell couldn’t handle.
She had already been through working on the Mingus album when Mingus himself was sick, so even if she was at a disadvantage, she understood her need to fill out the sound she was working with as much as she could. People were going to remember the performances at the end of the day, and the record is proof of Mitchell being able to rise to the occasion and making something beautiful even in the face of adversity.
No one would want to see their ex every single day after they split apart, but even if the record spent a long time coming together, it’s still far from a terrible record as a result. If anything, it’s proof that even when times seemed to be their most grim, there are more than a few times when the stars can align in just the right way to make everything work out alright when the red light comes on.
