The only artist Joni Mitchell wanted to be remembered with: “I looked to her”
There wasn’t any kind of reference point for what Joni Mitchell was doing once she debuted in the late 1960s.
There had been plenty of singer-songwriters before her who tried to speak their mind, but whenever Mitchell strapped on her guitar, her music was a lot more like getting a peek into the life of an artist rather than singing along to a catchy tune. She wanted to give her audience much more than what they had been hearing, but she felt that there was a little bit of a disconnect when looking at the rest of the musicians with whom she was thrown.
But it’s not hard to see why she doesn’t necessarily fit into the singer-songwriter scene. She didn’t have the traditional harmonies that everyone else was working with, and even when she tried working on typical pop songs, tracks like ‘Both Sides Now’ were a lot more thoughtful than anything that was coming out of the pop machine at the time. Bob Dylan helped open up people’s minds, but Mitchell opened up their eyes that much more whenever she started using those open tunings.
Because when you look at a lot of her songs, not all of them are meant to be played on the radio. If anything, Mitchell was an artist first and a musician second, and some of her greatest tunes were like oil paintings that came to life on vinyl when she began working on classics like Court and Spark. And while many people couldn’t stand the music that she made when she became interested in jazz, she wasn’t about to apologise either.
She was making the music that she wanted, and even if it meant going far away from the mainstream, she was more than happy to do so. Besides, the singer-songwriter scene wasn’t treating her right anyway. She didn’t want to be known as a folk-rocker for the rest of her life, but even if she did have a few musical contemporaries like Dylan and Leonard Cohen, she felt that Laura Nyro was one of the only people who truly had something to say to her when she began writing tunes.
Mitchell’s taste was already starting to form by this time, but when listening to Nyro, she heard someone who was in total control of all of her emotions when she sang. She wanted to take her audience on a journey whenever she began working, and some of the best songs that she ever made put her one step above every other singer that Mitchell came across when she moved to California.
There was a lot more that Nyro had to offer, and after being thrown into a box with the other female singer-songwriters, Mitchell felt that Nyro was her only main influence, saying, “I’m sick of being lumped in with the women. Laura Nyro, you can lump me in with, because Laura exerted an influence on me. I looked to her and took some direction from her. On account of her I started playing piano again. Some of the things she did was very fresh. Hers was a hybrid of black pop singers – Motown singers – and Broadway musicals, and I like some things also from both those camps.”
And when you think about it, it’s not hard to see what she was talking about. The biggest names in singer-songwriting at that time may have been predominantly men, but even when looking at the greatest female artists at the time, Mitchell certainly wasn’t making the same kind of music that Carol King was at the time. She wanted to make something a bit more sophisticated, and it was as if Nyro was providing the perfect road map for her when she heard her music.
That music was practically a reminder to Mitchell that there was a way out of traditional songwriting, and even if it wasn’t the most popular music in the world, she was happy to have found her niche among her rock and roll brethren. She didn’t fit neatly into any specific box, but she only saw that as a good thing whenever she made her classics.
