The tragic reason why Joni Mitchell’s guitar playing is so unique
As any guitar player will tell you, trying to play a Joni Mitchell song accurately is a nightmare, not least because her filigreed flittering between light and hard deserves a more delicate approach than most can offer. However, while you might look at the chords and be able to grasp them, getting them to sound the same way Mitchell does is an unforgiving task. The reason for this is her truly unique approach to tuning.
As her friend and former lover, the late David Crosby said when analysing the greatest guitar players of all time: “She was a folkie who had learned to play what they call an indicated arrangement,” he told Rolling Stone. “Where you are like a band in the way you approach a chord and string the melody along. She was so new and fresh with how she approached it.”
He added. “It’s the reason I fell in love with her music. She was a fantastic rhythm player and growing so fast. She had mastered the idea that she could tune the guitar any way she wanted, to get other inversions of the chords. I was doing that too, but she went further.” It’s these odd tunings that have tripped up thousands of artists trying to figure out how to get ‘Big Yellow Taxi’ to sound like her ‘Big Yellow Taxi’ with its trifling mix of open tuning with higher steps thrown in for ear-twisting measure.
This style is reflective of the welter of emotions she hopes to translate into complimentary instrumentation. As she explained to Acoustic Guitar: “Pure majors are like major colours; they evoke pure well-being,” she said. “Anybody’s life at this time has pure majors in it, given, but there’s an element of tragedy. No matter what your disposition is, we are air breathers, and the rain forests coming down at the rate they are… there’s just so much insanity afoot. We live in a dissonant world. Hawaiian [music], in the pure major—in paradise, that makes sense. But it doesn’t make sense to make music in such a dissonant world that does not contain some dissonances.”
Well, Mitchell grew up in the leafy land of Canada but soon journeyed to the rather more riotous rubble of Los Angeles and toured the cities of America, so this mix of peaceful, delicate playing, and rugged dissonant moments exist side by side in her one-woman-band technique. As Crosby suggests, this came naturally to her. The reason for this is relatively tragic.
As she was learning the guitar from Pete Seeger’s songbook, her left hand was weakened by a bout of polio. So, she had to innovate her way around this by playing with tunings. While hospitalised and in recovery for weeks, she practised endlessly and gazed out longingly at the world outside, both factors steadily creeping into her artistic disposition. When a “restlessness” later settled in during her days as a professional musician, she knew that the guitar had more scales and scope than most usually stick to thanks to this quirk of fate.
“When I play the guitar,” she explained, “I hear it as an orchestra: the top three strings being horn section, the bottom three being cello, viola, and bass—the bass being indicated but not rooted.” This gives her playing not only great depth but also a nonstandard approach to harmony that allows for a lilting range of beauty in her music, reminiscent of the same ying and yang of nature and civility that is a central tenet of her songwriting.
