“Everything rained down on me”: The one word Joni Mitchell claimed ruined her career
No artist should have parameters around how they want to write a song. There are certain bags of tricks that every writer can rely on to get them through when a tune isn’t coming together, but if someone wants to think outside the box and deliver something that they haven’t heard anyone do before, that’s normally when the best ideas start coming out. Although Joni Mitchell had more than her fair share of iconic moments throughout her career, she felt that there were moments when the critics helped bury her before she could properly get started.
At the same time, Mitchell’s music almost defied any sort of standard criticism. Whereas most people might talk about how a song isn’t competently played or doesn’t have the kind of pathos that they’re looking for out of an artist, there was never a moment in time when Mitchell wasn’t 100% committed to one of her ideas. From Ladies of the Canyon to Blue, every single one of her albums stands as a work of art in its own way, even if some don’t hold up as well over the years.
That’s because Mitchell was never interested in repeating the same formula every time she made a record. She has always been closely connected to her music in the same way that Bob Dylan was, so when listening to her music, you’re not only getting new songs but also a reflection of the person she is in the moment. And if we’re being honest, her albums are far more sophisticated than anything that Dylan would ever write.
Dylan was a master of wordplay, but Mitchell always understood how to translate her words into the right song. Whereas many folk singers would stick to traditional cowboy chords to tell their stories, Mitchell’s experiments with altered tunings and working out different suspended chords brought more depth to her song-crafting, practically tone-painting all of the questions that she had about life.
“Women can’t use the patriarchal device like Dylan and say ‘you.’ He uses it all the time, but I used ‘you’ on The Hissing Of Summer Lawns, and everything rained down on me.”
Joni Mitchell
But for every passive rock fan, it always comes back to the way that she deals with romance. While many people only focused on Blue because of the breakdown of her relationship with Graham Nash, there was a world-weary soul at the heart of that album, but Mitchell felt that the biggest albatross around her neck came a few years later when she was working on The Hissing of Summer Lawns.
Despite not being one of her most true-to-life records, Mitchell felt that she got thrown in a box the minute she started to speak in the second person, saying, “Women can’t use the patriarchal device like Dylan and say ‘you.’ He uses it all the time, but I used ‘you’ on The Hissing Of Summer Lawns, and everything rained down on me. That’s why I use ‘I’, and I get this reputation for being a confessional poet. If I go ‘you,’ everybody shuts down because I’m lecturing: ‘How dare you tell me that?’”
When looking at the way that Mitchell is using that direct approach, though, she’s actually far more subdued than her contemporaries were. Dylan definitely had an axe to grind when working on ‘Masters of War’, but Mitchell was always looking to ask questions rather than make sweeping statements about the state of the world.
And much like her character-driven songs like ‘Amelia’, all of Mitchell’s tunes have been about her trying to find new ways of living instead of telling people how they should live their lives. All she could do was be true to herself, and if some critics had a problem with the way that she phrased her lyrics, that was their problem.
