The one person who almost made Joni Mitchell quit music: “Killed my love”
Joni Mitchell was practically put on this planet to take pop music further than anyone else.
No one would have thought that the folk revolution would have had much to say after the Summer of Love, but Mitchell wanted to move far beyond anything that some of her contemporaries were doing. She had the idea of branching out into new territories that most pop singers would have been too scared to explore, but all of that sense of wonder was almost snuffed out years before her music got started.
But the fact that Mitchell was even able to become one of the biggest names in music is a miracle. She had already gone through various sicknesses as a child and even managed to survive having polio, but when looking through a lot of her upbringing, she knew that nothing could dull her love for music every time she put on her favourite records. But not everything that she listened to needed to be rock and roll all the time.
She was in love with all kinds of music, and it wasn’t all that unusual for her to be waxing poetic about everyone from Chuck Berry to Miles Davis. The key motivation for her was whether or not a song sounded good, but when listening to a song by Rachmaninoff, she knew that she was going to become a musician. She was head over heels for the music, but the idea of getting into piano first wasn’t her best move.
Then again, it’s never a bad thing for some of the biggest stars in the world to have some musical training. Rock and rollers didn’t necessarily need to know the beginnings of theory or anything like that, but even when Mitchell was curious about how music worked, she remembered getting the worst treatment from her first piano teacher when she sat down for lessons for the first time.
Whoever this person was clearly went to the same abusive teaching school that Terence Fletcher from Whiplash went to, and while Mitchell braved through it, she was practically discouraged from doing virtually anything on piano for a long time, saying, “Some people can survive it, but I couldn’t. She killed my love for the piano. It was like the church and school, so I quit. And as a result my mother viewed me as a quitter and the expenditure on the piano as a waste of money, so years later when I wanted to play guitar, she refused to buy me one.”
Even when Mitchell managed to find her footing as a songwriter, though, there were still obstacles in her way. No one seemed to have the same faith in her music when she walked into the studio and while some of her songs were masterpieces before she had even recorded them, the idea of having a producer looking over her shoulder and telling her to change the chords or a line here and there wasn’t her idea of a good time every single time the red light came on on the studio floor.
Because when you listen to Mitchell’s music, she almost seems to have her language when it comes to just about everything she does. She knows exactly what she’s doing, but when she tunes her guitar into strange open tunings or plays with unconventional fusion musicians, they are all meant to be different musical colours that make up the masterpiece that she ends up with whenever she finishes a record.
So while there are always going to be people in the industry looking to grind you down, the important thing is to have people like Mitchell as an example of what it means to play music on your own terms. She was willing to do everything to stand by her craft, and even if she had an abusive way of learning at the beginning, she always came back to her songs as something that she loved more than anything else on Earth.
