The song that pulled Joni Mitchell out of exile
It might sound strange on the surface, but, to use the modern parlance, Joni Mitchell is having a moment.
Mitchell, one of the most influential and respected songwriters to have ever lived, is responsible for some of the most revered albums and songs ever made. To say she’s “having a moment” could sound like I’m selling her short. After all, one wouldn’t say that Bob Dylan is “having a moment” in the aftermath of A Complete Unknown; it’s just another chapter of his storied career, but it’s a little different for Joni.
You see, at the risk of pissing off a number of dyed-in-the-wool Dylanologists, Mitchell has never been as corporate as Dylan. She’s a capital-A artist who follows her muse wherever it goes. Touring and releasing albums constantly, the way that Bob Dylan has all the way up into his dotage, would be anathema to Mitchell. She never much cared for touring and would release albums precisely when she was ready to do so, never entering a studio for the sake of making a record.
She went so far as to (accurately) describe the music industry as a “cesspool” in a 2002 interview with Rolling Stone. By the 2000s, she was content to retreat to her house in British Columbia, work on her memoirs and advise on re-releases of her old work. That understandable hatred for the industry was what caused her to retire indefinitely from music in 2007, but not before releasing one more record as a proper send-off.
This was her record, Shine, released the same year. Quite bizarrely, it was released on the record label Hear Music, run by the coffee megachain Starbucks. Perhaps the music industry had burnt its bridges so badly that her only way back into it was the service industry, but there was a legitimate artistic reason for coming back as well. After all, she credited one song, in particular, as the real reason she went back into the studio.
What song made Joni Mitchell want to make music one final time?
In February 2008, Mitchell told Mojo about what had inspired the lynchpin song of her new record and how it began with a piece of music composed solely for the piano. Fittingly, that house in British Columbia was its genesis, with Joni saying that it is where she goes to “restore my soul”.
She added, “I hadn’t played an instrument in nine years, ten years, something like that, and I just felt this rush of gratitude for the property. I would stand on my front porch of this tiny, 800-square-foot house at night, and the Big Dipper was all you would see. I was happy.”
So happy that for the first time in nearly a decade, she was genuinely inspired to make music. “I ran to the piano and the first piece on the album just poured out. I even called it ‘Gratitude’ for a while. I started playing on the piano, and in a short period of time, I had four piano songs, but no words,” she claimed, and that was the one thing holding back the songs. After all, these were very special pieces of music, and the words had to be just as special.
The words that Mitchell eventually turned to were just as, if not more special, but not her own. A friend of hers turned her on to the classic Rudyard Kipling poem If, and there, Mitchell knew that she had found the lyrics. With a bit of tweaking and translation, she put together her version of ‘If’, one that does justice not only to her own incredible legacy, but that of the immortal poem, too. No mean feat, but one totally within the reach of an artist like Joni Mitchell.
