“Where did they go?”: The only modern pop song Joni Mitchell ever liked
There comes a point in every songwriter’s life when they start to wonder where all the fun went in pop music. As much as they might have been interested in writing that next big smash, it can get a bit monotonous when everything is built off the same chord structure whenever someone tries to write some new material. But even by everyone’s measure for what a pop songwriter should be, Joni Mitchell was always a bit of a one-off.
There were certainly times when she could make a catchy melody that stuck in people’s heads, but that was far from what she had signed up for when she started writing. She was a living poet half the time she worked on her material, and while it may have taken some time to dissect everything she was saying, she had a gift for melody that could put people like Bob Dylan to shame whenever he played.
Unlike other rock stars around the same time, Mitchell’s taste was never tied to the blues and rock and roll. She had a healthy respect for that genre of music, but she always gravitated to everything under the sun, whether that be the sounds of jazz or the classical stylings that she heard as a kid, like Rachmaninoff.
It’s not necessarily the coolest taste when it comes to the pop charts, but looking at what she listened to in her spare time, it’s no surprise that she eventually graduated to working with people from the fusion scene. Everything about that genre was about bringing different styles together, so it wasn’t out of the question for one of the biggest singer-songwriters in pop music to suddenly have a jazz legend like Jaco Pastorius working with her.
But by the 1990s, that adventurousness had seemed to burn itself out. Everyone could breathe a sigh of relief once bands like Nirvana and Pearl Jam wiped out the phoniness of rock and roll, but since most of them weren’t interested in taking chances on their instruments, Mitchell was never going to be impressed. That is, until she heard what The New Radicals were doing in the late 1990s.
Despite the band being a one-hit wonder in many people’s minds, Mitchell felt that ‘You Get What You Give’ was one of the finest songs to hit the charts in years, saying, “The only thing I heard in many years that I thought had greatness in it was the New Radicals. I loved that song ‘You Get What You Give.’ It was a big hit, and I said, ‘Where did they go?’ It turns out the guy [Gregg Alexander] quit. I thought, ‘Good for him.’ I knew he was my kind of guy. I’ve been wanting to quit for all these many years. But I still stayed curious with it.”
And for everyone who only knows the song in the context of a song that plays in the credits of a feel-good family movie, this song is a pop-fuelled experience. Outside of having a knockout chorus, Alexander packs everything he can into five minutes, almost like he was taking every hook he could think of and turning in a song that would have made any standard yacht rocker proud.
Is it as adventurous as some of Mitchell’s records like Hejira or her friends in Weather Report? Absolutely not, but that’s never what it was intended to be. This was the kind of tune that could bring pure joy to anyone who heard it, and even if Alexander felt that he couldn’t continue with the band after one album, it’s better to achieve this kind of greatness once than never having it at all.
