The Bob Dylan song Joni Mitchell said changed songwriting forever: “We can write about anything now”
Any songwriter is going to need to be doing something very right to differentiate themselves from the rest of the pack. Anyone can spend their days strumming the same three or four chords and hope to write a halfway decent melody for the whole thing, but when people like Joni Mitchell first began writing, it was all about subverting people’s expectations every single time she stepped up to the microphone. It might not have been the most commercial music anyone had ever heard, but she admitted that she had a few contemporaries who dared her to dream bigger.
When looking at the kind of rock and roll that Mitchell was used to, though, a lot of it came back to the same love songs that everyone had heard a thousand times. There were still traditional party songs from the likes of Elvis Presley and Chuck Berry, but outside of turning up the intensity for the fast songs and getting vulnerable for the ballads, there was no other place to go that found its place on the charts.
Sure, there was jazz, but that would take a while before it would have its proper place in the rock sphere. The days of fusion were miles away, and even prog rock was first getting born when Mitchell was making her first tunes, but like all great songwriters of her generation, everything changed when Bob Dylan came to the forefront with songs like ‘The Times They Are A-Changin’.
The Beatles were shellshocked by what Dylan was doing, and The Byrds practically owe their career to Dylan’s words, but when Mitchell first heard the folkie, she wasn’t particularly impressed. There had been people like Woody Guthrie before that who went against the grain, but there was no reason to think that a kid doing the same thing with a squawky voice would get anywhere. That is, until ‘Positively 4th Street’.
Dylan had always been a storyteller and often seemed to preach to the public, but when she saw him get vulnerable, Mitchell realised what kind of power someone could have with that kind of song in their heart, saying, “It wasn’t until ‘Positively 4th Street’ that a light bulb went off in my head and I said, ‘Oh!’ Up until then Dylan seemed to me like a Woody Guthrie clone, and I was a detractor I guess you’d have to say. Then his stuff started to really come from his own blood, you know? And when he wrote that song, I thought, ‘Oh, my God, we can write about anything now.’”
Mitchell always had a poetic slant to all her greatest works, but after hearing Dylan lay the groundwork, something like Blue felt much more accessible on the charts. No one had listened to a woman show off her emotional scars like that, but if Dylan could find a way to show his heart to the world, why couldn’t she?
And that was only the start of Dylan starting to lay into himself a little bit more. ‘Positively 4th Street’ was a decent start as far as he was concerned, but Blood on the Tracks is still among the most emotionally frail albums in his discography, spending half the time addressing the fallout of his marriage, and the other half beating the hell out of himself for letting go of his other half.
Suffering for your art like this is by no means mandatory when it comes to making great music, but as everyone from Dylan to Mitchell to Fleetwood Mac would find out, it certainly helps when making a masterpiece. After all, some of the best songs are the ones that come from the heart, and it’s a lot easier to be that honest when you’re spending time putting that heart back together again.
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