The one musician Joni Mitchell could never play like: “I tried to teach myself”
There’s a certain language that comes with learning almost every single Joni Mitchell song.
There are many of her tunes that don’t follow the same pop song structure, and even when she does have a silly love song compared to her early work, there are more than a few times where she goes outside the conventions of what traditional chords were supposed to sound like. It’s not always the easiest to grasp, but when you start to understand what she’s doing in her songs, the more you start to see the beauty underneath it all.
Because when you think about it, none of Mitchell’s guitar tunings would have been considered normal by the usual folk standards. Everyone had their moments where they would go outside the norm, but even when the greatest names in blues were tuning their guitars to open E or open D to get the sounds that they wanted, Mitchell was broadening the scope of the instrument whenever she twisted her tunings around.
Most people wouldn’t know the first thing about how to write a song with that kind of tuning, but what Mitchell did was about far more than songwriting. A lot of her songs sound like the sonic equivalent of finely crafted paintings, and when the open strings from those abnormal tunings ring out, it tends to feel like the spaces that are in between different colours whenever she told her stories.
After all, no one goes through life without a few grey areas, and those might as well have been the grey areas in the characters in her songs, each of them trying to figure out different questions that they had about their lives that remain unanswered. But by the same token, there were a lot of guitarists who were making harmonies well beyond what Mitchell thought she was capable of.
That’s why some of the best musicians on most of her records were all from the jazz world, and while she knew her fair share of jazz, it was easier to get someone like Jaco Pastorius from Weather Report to play on one of her songs rather than try to dictate what the song needed to a session player. But even back when she was first learning guitar, the kind of lines that Pete Seeger was trying to show the world was completely alien to the way Mitchell thought about playing guitar.
She could make fine melodies, but even if she tried her best, she felt that Seeger’s method wasn’t really her speed, saying, “I got Pete Seeger ‘How to Play Folk Style Guitar,’ and I tried to teach myself from that ‘cotton-picking.’ I couldn’t get my thumb to go like that. It always had a mind of its own, and I developed [my own] kind of a version. I’ve met Pete and I thanked him for trying to teach me.”
But when someone is as much of an artist as Mitchell is, no formal training was going to do her any good. A lot of what she did was almost second nature, and while she remains one of the few singer-songwriters from that time that could actually tell her audience what every chord she played was from a harmonic standpoint, it was a lot easier for her to start working on songs that didn’t have to rely on the same kind of fingerpicking methods.
Music was already supposed to be about throwing away the rules, but Seeger served as the one person that taught Mitchell which specific ones to break. There was a simple method to getting the best sounds out of a guitar, but she was the one filling in the cracks where music theory hadn’t been going in rock and roll.
