The songwriter who shaped Elvis Costello: “I followed everything she did after that”
“When you’re in love with Joni Mitchell, you’ve really got to write about it now and again.” – Robert Plant
There are some musicians who cut deep, and their lessons in love and loss paint your life with different hues you never thought imaginable by the simple expression of words. There are some musicians, like Joni Mitchell, who guide the way even in the wallow of heartache. For Elvis Costello, no one ever came close to Mitchell.
Growing up, Costello was exposed to the two pillars of modern music – Frank Sinatra and The Beatles. Sinatra, who Linda Ronstadt once credited with birthing modern pop music along with Billie Holiday, and The Beatles, who, as we all know, changed the game forever in the 1960s by bringing something fresh and innovative to the pulsating world of rock ‘n’ roll. But as Costello’s parents exposed him to the first artists who connected him with music, he soon began to search for something else entirely.
A fierce lover of complete and utter honesty when it comes to sociopolitical contexts and how they coalesce with matters of the heart, it was only a matter of time before Costello fell head over heels in love with Mitchell, not only as someone who all but reinvented the parameters of the singer-songwriter boom but lead the way with art during an immense period of transformation when most musicians were merely scrambling to keep up.
Blue, for most musicians, was the ultimate reflection of a society in turmoil versus a heart struggling to make sense of its own tragedy, both in relation to complicated relationships and the breakdown of the community around them. As Mitchell once said, “At that period of my life, I had no personal defences. I felt like a cellophane wrapper on a pack of cigarettes. I felt like I had absolutely no secrets from the world and I couldn’t pretend in my life to be strong. Or to be happy. But the advantage of it in the music was that there were no defences there either.”
However, it was the record that came a few years later, Court and Spark, that really gave Costello something meaningful to hold onto. While he’d fallen for the songwriter much earlier after his father gave him his first Mitchell record, Court and Spark introduced Costello to a more nuanced and intricate style of songwriting that looked to put words to more complex emotions and experiences; an upgrade from the earlier lamentation throughout Blue.
“My father gave me my first Joni Mitchell record, and I followed everything she did after that,” he told Pitchfork. “Court and Spark is very different because it’s the first time she really gathered jazz musicians. And the songs and scenarios are very different to the traveling songs of Blue or the self-exile songs of For the Roses; Court and Spark is describing a much more sophisticated lifestyle.”
He continued, “It’s a problem that people with success sometimes have: Their first record speaks of a life that everybody shares, then they’re clearly talking about specific people and locations. But even though she was really singing about quite a rarefied society here—I would guess kind of a Hollywood life in songs like ‘Same Situation’—she could make it accessible. No one is remotely operating on her level.”
It’s high praise coming from someone like Costello, but it’s also entirely warranted considering just how much Mitchell shaped not only the way he approached his own storytelling technique but also how he factored real-life thoughts and ideas into art. For instance, it takes a lot to be as defenceless as Mitchell and still transform it into world-class art, but with her guiding the way, he ventured into the same space, laying his mind and soul bare where it counted the most.
