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At the age of nine, Joni Mitchell gave her first public performance at a Canadian polio service. It was the holidays and Mitchell, one of the thousands of children hit by the country's polio epidemic in the early 1950s, could not be home to party with her family. So, lying in bed, she sang Christmas carols out loud.
"The boy in the bed next to me, you know, had a habit of complaining. And I found out that I was a ham, "Mitchell told Cameron Crowe in 1979." It was the first time I started singing for people. "
It was an encouraging but revealing beginning for one of the most prolific musicians of the twentieth century. With 19 studio albums published since its beginnings in 1968 Song to a seagullMitchell – who turns 75 this week – has never really stopped singing, the pain and difficult circumstances catalyzing some of his most beloved productions. The audience remained captivated as she pioneered the folkloric scene of her youth: mega-pop stars, avant-garde jazz, 80s rock incarnation for which she embraced sound and technology. of his time. his own words, distinctly Joni Mitchell.
Thus, Mitchell's work bears witness to the progress of American music since the late 1960s. But his is also a path that could never have been traced by the star-star machinery, often lamented Mitchell. Supremely possessed and embodying a wild and shameless artistic vision, Joni Mitchell's musical narratives, experimental song structures and social criticisms were just as innovative as his male counterparts of the time – Bob Dylan, James Taylor, Neil Young and Crosby Stills & Nash among them.
But Joni Mitchell is also unparalleled, with her open guitar chord – "I do not know her name," she has already answered a question: what agreement was she playing? "I give my guitar this way, to make me stupid" that is to say, do not fall into predetermined patterns – and that his undeniable voice of three octaves seems to emanate from his guts and from his third eye. Perhaps most important is Mitchell's captivating words, with his lyrical poetry creating vivid scenes – the river on which to skate, the big yellow taxi, a coyote lurking, a case of you soaking – in which the emotions lived and dormant ideas are freely revived. Whether through or challenging genres, Mitchell's catalog is linked to the essential mind – contemplative, cool, lively, sensual, funny, frustrated, honest – she delivered to everyone, obvious and indisputable.
Born Roberta Joan Anderson in a Canadian military family, Mitchell and his parents settled in rural Saskatchewan during his teenage years. Her interest in the visual arts – Mitchell painted most of her album covers – brought her to an art school in Calgary, where she stayed for a year before moving to Toronto . It was at this location, in 1964, that she became pregnant with her marriage at the age of 20. Since abortion became illegal in Canada and anathema to the unmarried mother towards polite society, Mitchell gave the baby, a daughter, for adoption. The experienced has nurtured for 30 years writing songs.
"I wrote songs from the time I lost my daughter to her return," Mitchell told NPR in 2004 at her child's meeting in 1997. "Since my family came back to me, I do not write anymore. It seems like I mothered the world until my own family became a mother or a friend. "
After divorcing her first husband, Chuck Mitchell, in 1967, Mitchell moved from Detroit to New York, where his songs like "Urge For Going," "The Circle Game" and "Michael From the Mountains" would become hits for folk heroes Tom Rush, Buffy St. Mary and Judy Collins. (His music would continue to be covered by everyone, from Bjork to James Blake via Prince, who has written to his friends a mail of fans to Mitchell.) She then returned to California, where Crosby, Stills & Nash (and sometimes Young) With Mamas & the Papas, Gram Parsons, Linda Ronstadt and others, forging the sound of SoCal, Mitchell would help catalyze his music, which entered and eventually dominated consciousness.
Her work is both delicate and robust, and her skeletal guitar and piano, often skeletal, lay the foundation for her rich, feathery voice, whose lightness often betrayed the seriousness of what she sang. Mitchell is the singer-songwriter par excellence, creating the model for many future artists – Feist, Fiona Apple, Neko Case and Elliot Smith – who would be inspired by his work.
In the end, there are millions of ways to look at Mitchell's catalog and all are correct. To be as precise as many of his words, listening to Joni Mitchell is an extremely personal experience. When she sings, she sings for you, about you. Just as Joan Didion revealed generations of mostly female readers, with deep emotions evoked by her instrumentation and lyric poetry that presented new ways of thinking and being nuanced, Joni Mitchell showed us how we feel, how we feel. at to feel, and who we are and what we could be. Entering into her requires nothing more than a willingness to let her affect you. Listen, and you will find that you do not often have a choice.
So, you want to get into: Ingenue Folk Poet Joni?
Mitchell was, by his own admission, not really a folk musician for so long. "I was just a folk singer for about two years," she said. Rolling stone in 1979 , "And it was several years before I made a record. At that time, it was not really any more folk music. It was a new American phenomenon. Later, they called the singer / songwriters. Or art songs, what I liked most. "
Regardless of the semantics, Mitchell performs at the Newport Folk Festival from 1967 to 1969. His production is squarely alongside current folk singers, such as Joan Baez and Judy Collins, who was successful with his 1967 revival, "Both". Sides Now ". Mitchell has released his own version of the song – which lasts as one of his key tracks – on 1969 Clouds. His second album, Clouds, won the Grammy for Best Folk Performance in 1969 and followed his debut with David Crosby in 1968.
The second half of the 1970s Ladies of the canyon contains "Big Yellow Taxi" and "Woodstock", songs that would define the counterculture of the late '60s, even after David Geffen, then Mitchell's leader, convinced him to jump Woodstock to appear in a episode of Woodstock Dick Cavett's show alongside Jefferson Airplane and Crosby, Stills & Nash .
On these first records, the voice of a Mitchell voice floats over lean arrangements for guitar and piano, sounding like the sun through eucalyptus leaves one morning from Laurel Canyon. This music with often soft tones is betrayed by some invasive solitude and by the seriousness of the subject dealt with – the bittersweet realization that you have evolved beyond your love ("I've had a king"), the power of fear ("I think I understand"), the fall of the man ("Woodstock") and the degradation of nature ("Big Yellow Taxi".) This last piece was covered by all, from Bob Dylan to Counting Crows, via Janet Jackson, who sampled it when he left, "with the Q-Tip guest taking the line" Joni Mitchell does not lie. "
While other artists of this era were similar to pastoral sonorities, Nick Drake presenting a style similar to London, the work of Mitchell is a soundtrack of mercurial America of that time. The intoxicating and peaceful promises of the counter-culture still seemed real, even if the dark side of this scene, drug addiction, paranoia, ego, police reprisals, was too revealing. Mitchell's music effectively captured the era from both angles, serving as both hymns and warnings to a generation to come.
PLAYLIST: "I had a king" / "Michael of the mountains" / "Sing for a seagull" / "I think I understand" / "Both sides now" / "Woodstock" / "Big Yellow Taxi" / "The Circle Game "
So, you want to get into: Fiercely Vulnerable Pop Joni Mitchell?
Mitchell's best-known and most commercially successful music is also his most confessional denominational, Mitchell putting himself at the service of his art in the service of his art. Blue, for roses, and Court & Spark. Her words in this fertile period of the early 1970s were highly analytical, closely observant and deeply feminine, revealing an anxious yet cool, sensual but distant artist, shy but demanding, confident but evolving. Her operatic production was a 360-degree perspective of femininity, a more direct and complete representation than almost anything given by artists of earlier eras. The opening line of Blue– "I am on an isolated road and I travel, travel, trip, trip. Looking for something, what can it be? / Oh I hate you. I hate you, I love you. I love you when I forget myself. – want to sit down for a long conversation with a trusted friend. Joni Mitchell has gained the confidence of listeners by making themselves vulnerable to them.
"We all suffer for our loneliness, but at the moment of Blue, "Mitchell said Rolling stone, "Our pop stars have never admitted these things."
Widely considered one of the greatest albums of all time – and chosen by NPR as the best album of all time by a woman – Blue speaks of love in all its incarnations. She explores bitter-sweet relationships in "My Old Man", "A Case of You" (a torch ballad often told about her love affair with Leonard Cohen), "The Last Time I'm Here" I've seen Richard, "his love of the Golden State about the pretty and funny" California "and the long-repressed love sorrow on" Little Green ".
Mitchell wrote to the latter that she had abandoned adoption at the age of 20 and that she was living in Canada, a story she had started with "The Circle". Game. " Separating from his child was a major turning point in Mitchell's personal life. her professional life, with all her hidden sorrows, finally released and presented to the world in the form of sonic poetry: "Born with the moon in Cancer / Choose her a name, she will answer too / Call her green and winters will not be able to lose it. "
"The Blue the album, there is hardly any dishonest note in the voice, "said Mitchell to Crowe in 1979." At this time of my life, I had no personal defense.I felt like a cellophane wrapper on a pack of cigarettes, I felt that I had absolutely no secrets of the world and that I could not claim to be strong in my life or be happy, but the advantage of music is that it there was no defense either. "
This helplessness persisted during the years 1972 For roses, on which she wrote, in her eternal genius, a song from the point of view of a radio in response to the request of her record company to make a radio hit. I'm a radio, it's Mitchell's first hit in America as an artist.
1974 saw the biggest commercial success of Mitchell's career with Court and spark. On the album, she describes herself in the shadows and the light of her success – a woman deeply rooted in the music industry and nervously watching the party from the corner of the room. She talks about "Twisted" mental health and desire about "Car On a Hill", the lush arrangements of the album marking a change of direction and alluding to the experimental jazz style she was about to embrace . When we consider Joni Mitchell, we most often think of his work from this fertile time.
PLAYLIST: "Little Green" / "California" / "An affair of you" / "You excite me, I'm a radio" / "Blond in the bleachers" / "Popular celebrations" / "Car on a Hill "/" Child Trouble "
So, you want to get into: No Fucks, Joni, the goddess of avant-garde jazz?
Designed and compounded during a pair of road trips after the largely lonely tours through the United States, 1976 hegira marks Mitchell's most experimental album to date and announces a radical change in more accessible pop melodies from Court and spark and his follow-up of 1975, The whistling of summer lawns.
While songs like "Coyote", "Amelia" and "Furry Sings the Blues", for which storytelling was as important as the unstructured instrument, were receiving many critical acclaim, hegira failed to achieve significant commercial diffusion and predicted the profound experimentalism of 1977 The reckless girl of Don Juan and 1979 Mingus. Of course, Mitchell collaborated with the jazz icon, Charles Mingus, who researched it for the project. They spent the last year of his life working on the project, Mitchell writing the lyrics and painting the Mingus portrait for the cover of the album.
"She ended up making music that does not really have a category", David Yaffe, author of Reckless Girl: A Portrait of Joni Mitchell, told PBS NewsHour in 2017. "It was not jazz, but it was not quite pop either. It was something else, it was the music of Joni Mitchell.
Although much of his compositions from that era were less accessible to his inner world, Mitchell was still revealing himself through his evolving interests. "The tenth world", of The reckless girl of Don Juanit's almost seven minutes of African drumming, while "Paprika Plains", lasting 16 minutes, is a long stroll through cinematic orchestral music. She does not seem to care if her mood suits you, but only if she is doing well. Critics described the album as reckless, sleepy and disengaged, but his insistent experimentation, stuck to Mitchell's voice – showing his first signs of the hoarse transformation caused by his habit of smoking a cigarette four times a day – was making music in essential time and revealing as its previous result.
And the jazz community was always with her. In 2007, Herbie Hancock paid tribute to Mitchell's influence in the genre by publishing River: Joni's letters. The album featured artists such as Norah Jones, Tina Turner, Leonard Cohen and Wayne Shorter covering Mitchell's music. He won the Grammy for best album of the year in 2008.
PLAYLIST: "Coyote" / "Amelia" / "Furry Sings the Blues" / "Hejira" / "God must be a boogie man" / "A chair in the sky" / "The dry cleaner of Des Moines" / "Goodbye Pork Hat Pie "
So, you want to get into: Queen's Synthes 80's Joni?
The technological advances of the 1980s brought many new ways of making music. At that time, Joni Mitchell adopted many elements that she had not yet incorporated, including the electric guitar and the synthesizer. While Neil Young tinkers electronic music on his album Kraftwerk-lite 1982 Trans, Mitchell was packed to the 80s, with his work on Wild Things Run Fast, Dog Eat Dog, and Mark chalk in a rainstorm sounding fuller, stronger and often less delicate than anything she had done before.
These albums included a large part of his contract with Geffen Records, the mega-label of the 1980s founded by his former manager David Geffen. Much like Jefferson Airplane's awkward transformation into Jefferson Starship's ridiculous stupidity, the sound of the 1980s was strangely suited to Mitchell. But she did not let the style of the day dominate her essential Joni Mitchell, her lyrics and song structures remaining fundamentally linked to her long-standing style in their non-traditional structures and their explorations of consumerism, televangelists, glory and Reagan era great.
"Wild Things Run Fast" could have been at home in the booming punk genre of the time, while "Chinese Café / Unchained Melody" meanders before switching to a smooth jazz rehearsal of The Righteous's tube Brothers. "The three great stimulants", meanwhile, flew on percussion at the Phil Collins. There's even "Good Friends", a deliciously soaked duo of 80's cheese with Michael McDonald.
The Joni Mitchell of that era – a woman who was in her forties and apparently more comfortable with herself than ever – was not an artist who clung to relevance, but who was exploring what the trends of that time could serve it. Few fans will count them among their favorite Joni Mitchell albums, but be the favorite of anyone who has never been his ambition. As always, Mitchell's main motivation was to create art, an impulse that links this era to the full spectrum of his career. This fierce and unashamed commitment to self-searching is his singular gift, both as an artist and to his audience. Then, as always, Joni Mitchell just wanted to sing.
Joni is an old woman now. His last album was released in 2007 and his rare public appearances fueled rumors of failing health. Yet she remains accessible, her work has not lost control of her time. You can take her with you on a road trip, ask her advice when the world is dark or just enjoy her company during quiet nights at home. Mitchell, in all her incarnations, remains a chief cartographer of American music and female experience. No matter who you are, the card she's made is for you.
PLAYLIST: "Wild things run fast" / "You're so square (baby, I do not care)" / "Good friends" / "The three big stimulants" / "The dog eats the dog" / "Lakota" / "The tea Prophecy of the leaves (put your arms)"
Katie Bain stirs the star machinery behind the popular song. She is on Twitter.
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