The singer David Crosby said brought Joni Mitchell back: “I just love her for doing that”
Scour the depths of musical critique, and you’ll struggle to find a bad word about Joni Mitchell, who remains the pinnacle of music, both as a songwriter and as a musician.
The two key components of her music were her poetry, which she delivered with some beautiful vocals, along with her unique style of guitar playing. She didn’t subscribe to standard tuning or song structure; instead, she went in her own direction, truly writing from the heart, and in doing so, managed to create something wonderfully unique, which resonated with music lovers around the earth, to the point where the world of music is full of people who can recall perfectly how moved they were the moment they first listened to Joni Mitchell.
One of those listeners was Malka Marom, who was lucky enough to stumble upon a Joni Mitchell gig before she was ever famous. On a late-night drive, Maron pulled over and went into a cafe where Mitchell was playing, and tried to get her signed based on the power of her live shows, but her way of playing was so individual that a lot of people weren’t ready to try and market it.
Luckily, people eventually took a chance on Mitchell, and fans are still listening to the stunning music she released as a result. One of her biggest fans was David Crosby, wherein Tte two of them dated, and Crosby worked with her on a lot of their music. “Bob Dylan’s as good a poet as Joni,” said Crosby when talking about his admiration for Mitchell’s music, “but nowhere near as good a musician”.
Even though their relationship didn’t last, he never stopped being a fan, which is why he was so devastated when Mitchell stopped playing following a brain aneurysm. In March 2015, she was found affected in her Los Angeles home, and the health scare was enough to put her off playing for some time, wherein she opted to focus on healing instead.
“I haven’t been writing recently. I haven’t been playing my guitar or the piano or anything,” said Mitchell when asked in 2020 about how she was getting on. Admirably, she admitted, “No, I’m just concentrating on getting my health back”.
Her unwillingness to make music or write anything is understandable, given her affected well-being following the incident. She’d already had a health scare in the past with polio, but said that recovering from her aneurysm was a lot more difficult, as she didn’t know how to walk or talk as a result. “Once again, I couldn’t walk. I had to learn how again. I couldn’t talk,” she said, “Polio didn’t grab me like that, but the aneurysm took away a lot more, really. Took away my speech and my ability to walk.”
It wasn’t until around 2022 that she started performing again, and ever-fan Brandi Carlile was a big part of this, helping to put together some shows, which she called the “Joni Jam”, and during these gigs, Mitchell would preside over a group of musicians who would play some of her classics. They performed at the Newport Jazz Festival and the Grammy Awards in 2022 and 2023, marking the beginning of her getting back into music.
Naturally, Crosby was always thankful to Carlile for helping Mitchell get back on her feet once again, noting, “I think she’s wonderful. I think she’s the best singer-songwriter of our times, and every bit of ground that she can recover is a joy to me. He further gushed, “Man, she deserves a lot of credit. That was a wonderful thing to do. She coaxed Joni into that, and she masterminded that whole thing, and I’m gonna find her and say thank you to her, because I just love her for doing that.”
