Would music be different if Joni Michell had actually quit?
In 1972, Joni Mitchell was in a strange state.
With For the Roses, Mitchell delivered something of a contradiction. On the one hand, ‘You Turn Me On, I’m a Radio’, written as a tongue-in-cheek response to her record label’s demands for a hit, became exactly that. Her success was reaching new heights. At the same time, much of the album felt like a resignation letter, as though she were already preparing to step away from the expectations that came with fame.
“Remember the days when you used to sit and make up your tunes for love,” Mitchell muses on the album’s title track. She was reminiscing about her days spent as a broke cafe singer before the industry got her, singing with awareness, “I guess I seem ungrateful / With my teeth sunk in the hand / That brings me things / I really can’t give up just yet.”
But at the same time, the song captures her palpable sense of misery towards the whole affair and the “people who have slices of you from the company.” She’s singing about poets corrupted by the consumerist industry, about the way the music business finds a talent that then boxes it in until it’s boring. Overwhelmingly, she’s singing about wanting out.
“That was my first farewell to show business,” she said in 1996, adding of this moment in her life, “I had decided to quit show business and get away from all the pressures I felt. To me, this was an unfair, crooked business, and it has nothing to do with real talent.”
But obviously, she didn’t. “I was up in Canada about a year, and I guess it strengthened my nervous system a little, so I finally came back,” she added as the time away restored her. She’d deliver this album, naming it after this breaking point, and then go on to make 14 more records. Just as her own lyrics foretold, this was coming. She really couldn’t give up just yet. But what if she did? What if Mitchell had just quit then and disappeared?
Mitchell rightfully exists in the realm of the musical gods. She’s rightfully held up as one of the most influential artists in history, so would her calling it quits in 1972 have had a broader butterfly effect?
For the answer, you only really have to look at what would come next. Her follow-up album, Court and Spark, was the beginning of her broadening. There are elements of jazz at play, as well as a louder rock sound, as she evolved beyond folk. This would eventually lead to projects like Mingus or Hejira, where her range was incredible.
This period was similar to Bob Dylan going electric in the sense that Mitchell shook off both the sound and the scene that had first embraced her. But she took a different route. Rather than simply turning up the volume and getting rockier, she began pulling in styles from all over the musical map. Looking back, it’s hard not to see the knock-on effect of that approach in today’s genre-defying artists. Plenty of contemporary folk-adjacent acts incorporate horns, double basses and cellos, embrace jazz improvisation, and feel free to throw all kinds of influences into the mix, all while maintaining a clear identity at their core.
But then again, by the time For The Roses came around, so many of Mitchell’s most beloved songs were already out. In terms of lyrical inspiration, people tend to reference her earlier albums, especially Blue. So there’s perhaps an argument to be had that maybe if Mitchell had called it quits in 1972, with the music she’d already put out alone, she’d still be a legend that artists would still reference forevermore.
