The song it took Joni Mitchell seven years to find lyrics for
There’s an excellent story in Malka Maron’s book, Both Sides Now, about the first time she saw Joni Mitchell and how she tried to persuade others to start listening to her.
In it, Maron describes stumbling into a cafe one night and hearing Joni Mitchell play for the first time. Like many who originally stumbled upon Mitchell’s style, she was blown away by the intricate way that she tuned her guitar and played using unique time signatures. She sat through the set and afterwards decided that it was only a matter of time before Mitchell was a household name. As such, she called a friend at a record label and asked him to come down one night and listen.
The record label executive Maron hated the set. He didn’t have any patience for Mitchell and decided before she had even finished her set that nobody would listen to her. “By the time Joni played ‘Night in the City’, he had no ears to hear her,” Maron writes in her book, “‘This singer has no stage presence, she’ll amount to nothing’, he declared in a whisper, then left in the middle of her set.”
Mitchell has progressed to prove Maron right and the misguided label executive wrong. Her music is some of the most unique and exciting available to listen to, as she leans heavily into folk music but then uses different kinds of tuning and time signatures in order to achieve her unique sound. The way that she approaches rhythm is so unique that Tool’s Maynard James Keenan once credited her with helping him explore various time signatures when exploring the boundaries of prog rock.
“Odd time signature stuff,” he said, “There’s some Joni Mitchell stuff that has crazy time signatures […] She’s singing on the up, she’s singing on the down, and that was kind of like the running.”
Her guitar work was incredibly impressive. I’ve often cited her as one of the greatest guitar players in the world, as while she might not solo like a lot of the greats, she plays in a way which is so unique to her and so hard to replicate that she manages to transcend all other artists around her and is comfortably in her own league. Try to play a Joni Mitchell song on guitar and you’ll quickly realise that the best you can manage is a slight imitation of the track as opposed to a proper replication.
Of course, while this is commendable, it can make it difficult to get lyrics down. There have been plenty of occasions where Mitchell has been able to get the instrumentation for a song together, but has done so in a way that it’s hard to write lyrics for. One of the best examples of this was her track ‘Two Grey Rooms’, which she released in 1991 on her record Night Ride Home.
The song was originally written in 1982, but it took Mitchell seven years to put together the lyrics for it. Until 1989, she appropriately called the song ‘Speechless’. It’s unknown whether the lack of words was a problem with the complex instrumentation or general lack of direction; chances are, both factors will have played some kind of role.
Eventually, Mitchell found lyrical inspiration in Max Fassbinder, a cinematographer who was left broken-hearted. Mitchell steps into his shoes and writes about a man who moves to a poor apartment purely so he can watch his ex walk to work. All that remains in the apartment are sparse decorations and two grey rooms.
