The song Joni Mitchell said no one truly understands: “Nothing to do with my life”
It’s impossible to get to the root of any artist by listening to their tunes. While anyone can try to be their most authentic selves when they sit down to make a record, there will always be something that keeps the gory details of their lives at arm’s length from their fans. That hasn’t stopped some listeners from digging deeper into what their favourite acts are getting at, but Joni Mitchell has no problem bursting everyone’s bubble about what some of her signature tunes are all about.
Then again, all songs are meant to have loads of different interpretations. The beauty of sharing songs is that the audience listens to them and every member of the crowd walks away with a completely different idea of what they were talking about. But from day one, Mitchell always had a different tactic for writing songs compared to the kind of singer-songwriters strumming away on open chords.
When she first began exploring open tunings, there were many moments where her tunes would take different sonic turns. Not everything might have made sense for the average guitarist trying to figure out her tunes, but it made all the sense in the world in conjunction with the lyrics. A lot of her songs are full of questions about the outside world, so leaving some chords open-ended only serves to illustrate those questions.
But it can get artists in some hot water as well, and when talking about a song like ‘Free Man in Paris’, Mitchell felt the need to clear something up when it comes to her writing, saying, “People assume that everything I write is autobiographical. If I sing in the first person, they think it’s all about me. With a song like [that], they attribute almost every word of the song to my personal life. The characters I write about have nothing to do with my own life in the intimate sense. It’s more like dramatic recitation.”
At the same time, it’s not like fans didn’t have good reason to think that Mitchell was speaking in the first person. Half of Blue was about unpacking all of the excess baggage that came with her being separated by one of the loves of her life, so when someone can touch on a nerve that tight, it can be nearly impossible to go back to the old ways when she was writing story-driven material.
Because in ‘Free Man in Paris’, it feels more like Mitchell is reporting when you take her out of the equation. Every single piece of the song is about this man trying to find some peace for himself, and since it’s coming from a woman’s perspective, it’s a lot more freshing for her to call herself a ‘free man in Paris’ rather than singing about ditching her old flame to find something new on the other side of the world.
And further on in her career, some of Mitchell’s finest work has been about her subverting people’s expectations regarding her lyrics. A tune like ‘Amelia’ off of Hejira is a beautiful tune that could have easily gone down the same reporting route, but it’s hard to think of Mitchell’s colourful language about spotting jet planes leaving vapour trails and not see a bit of her in those lines.
It might seem like every songwriter’s job to open a window into their soul whenever they perform, but Mitchell always knew to keep it open only a crack. People can peer in and see what they want to, but she’s always in charge of how much the public is allowed to see of her personal life and when she can slip into another story song.
