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Kilauren Gibb knew her five-year search for her birth mother was at an end when she looked, really looked, at the face in her computer.

Joni Mitchell.

As she clicked her way through Mitchell's home page on the Internet's World Wide Web last February, Gibb found 14 points of comparison - blue eyes, blonde hair, long legs, high cheekbones - that suggested there was more than a casual link between the two. "It just kept getting stronger," Gibb told The Star yesterday in a wide-ranging interview, the first she has granted since the discovery. "The more I read, the more I realized how alike we were. She was a singer, I was into music. She was an artist. I painted. We both enjoyed the same things."

And then, of course, a final clincher: Mitchell was looking for the daughter she'd given up for adoption 32 years ago. Gibb was looking for the mother who'd given her up 32 years ago. It would take another six weeks before the two spoke together, but in Gibb's mind, there was no doubt. "I knew then that I found my mother," she said, the joy still evident in her voice. `It was wonderful. It was a great relief to me in every way. It made me feel whole. It made me feel complete."

Just back from a 19-day "get acquainted" session at Mitchell's Los Angeles home, where she introduced the folk singer to her only grandson, 3-year-old Marlin, Gibb plans on keeping her feet firmly planted on the ground and continuing to make her home in Toronto.

Still, Gibb - who is living on student loans while studying desktop publishing at George Brown College - is candid about the potential of having a celebrity for a mother.

She has modeled, acted in commercials and as a movie extra, studied piano for eight years at the Royal Conservatory of Music, loves photography, and is a talented amateur painter. The links are obvious, and if Joni Mitchell can open doors, Kilauren Gibb is not averse to stepping through. "If that works for me, I'd be quite happy," she said. "But," she's quick to add, "I don't have any expectations. I didn't come into this thing with expectations. I just wanted to find my mom. "I wasn't expecting her to be a celebrity - in fact, I was probably hoping she wasn't, and would turn out to be someone living in a basement somewhere, keeping herself occupied with her knitting."

Gibb's search for a birth mother began, however tentatively, when she was a 14-year-old Toronto student, wondering about her baby pictures - or, more precisely, the lack of them. "I would look at our family's album, and realize that there were no pictures of me before the age of 8 months," she said. "My mother tried to explain it away - I was a second child, and you don't take as many pictures of them. Or the camera wasn't handy at the time. "But I always wondered."

That same year, in 1979, Gibb and her brother David were wandering along a Jamaican beach during a March break vacation when a talent scout from New York's Elite model agency spotted her long lithe lines and convinced her to try out. "I was a model for 10 years," she recalled. "It took me to Paris, New York, Australia. It was a good way for me to travel, and I enjoyed the money, while it lasted."

But back in Toronto, Mitchell found herself wondering again about her birth parents and, like many adopted children, at the same time afraid of alienating her adoptive parents. "I was 27 when I found out I was adopted," she recalled. David and Ida Gibb, two Toronto teachers who have now retired, "really loved me a lot," Gibb said. "They were nurturing, loving parents who wanted to protect me. They didn't tell me because they didn't want me to feel like an outsider. And, they were afraid they might lose me."

In the end, Gibb said, her quest for her birth mother took on overtones "of a soap opera. They knew I was looking, but, like in a soap opera, you don't talk about some things because they're too painful." But the Gibbs gave their daughter a starting point. "They told me to call the Children's Aid Society if I wanted to get some information on where I came from," Gibb recalled. "They told me where to begin." It would take five years before the package of "unidentifying information" found its way to her mailbox. "I couldn't believe the length of time it took," she said, a trace of bitterness creeping into her voice. "They made it so hard. I had to wait almost five years to get a piece of paper that didn't have a name."

But it was a beginning.

Her mother, she learned, was born in Saskatchewan, the only child of parents of Norwegian-Scottish descent. She had polio as a child, met Kilauren's father while both were in art school in Calgary. "The CAS information described her as being a successful Canadian folk singer." She was reading Mitchell's biography, but Gibb, who wasn't a fan, didn't make the connection.

Others did. "My friends kept telling me that I looked like Joni," she laughed. "They kept on telling me that I should do something about it. And, eventually, when Joni let it be known that she was looking for a daughter she'd given up for adoption, I though, `Yeah, I should check it out.' "

Gibb's fateful Internet session, last Feb. 1, led her to call Sam Feldman, Mitchell's agent in Vancouver. "I asked to speak to someone who represents Joni Mitchell, who is emotionally attached to her," she recalled. "I wanted someone connected, because I was going to drop the bomb."

But, perhaps not surprisingly, Gibb - who unknowingly was one of dozens of girls calling to identify themselves as Mitchell's long-lost daughter ran into an initial wall of mistrust. "There were a lot of girls calling them," she chuckled. "They didn't trust me, and I was nervous. "But I slowly gave them some information. I finally faxed my birth information to them, and got a phone call several days after that."

In a way, Gibb said, she'd hoped the connections would be made sooner. "February 19 is my birthday and I wanted to have it all done so I could meet her in time for that day. But it wasn't going to happen." Gibb came home one day to find a message from Mitchell, in New Mexico, on her telephone answering machine. "She said `Hi, it's Joni. Please call me. I'm here. I'm overwhelmed.' "

But not quite.

Mitchell asked Gibb to fax her some photographs of herself as an infant. "She wanted to see some baby pictures of me. She had some herself of me as a very small baby - pictures that were taken before I was adopted. "They matched." Mitchell called again. "She wanted to get it off her chest, how sorry she was that she gave me up. How broke she was at the time - she couldn't even get the money together to be in the musician's union. She couldn't tell her parents about the whole thing, having a baby - she was brought up in a Victorian household."

Gibb told her not to worry. "She asked me how my childhood was, and I was honestly able to tell her that it was fabulous," she said. "It was a great childhood, probably the best. I think now, that I could have been raised in California, and been a Bel Air brat. I'm really happy that I got my family to raise me, in down-to-earth style. "I'll always be grateful for that."

On March 13, Gibb flew to California with Marlin. A limousine whisked her to Mitchell's home, where Gibb and Marlin promptly walked through the evening darkness up to the wrong door. "I heard a voice coming from above, looked up, and there she was, like Juliet on her balcony."

The trio promptly repaired to Mitchell's kitchen, where 32 years of separation vanished within the space of an hour. "It was very comfortable. Very natural. I immediately got the feeling that I was home, that we belonged together," Gibb recalled. "And Marlin - he loved meeting his grandmother, even though I don't think she was the typical grandmother stereotype for him. "He called her Joni, and Grammy - which is kind of funny - and Big Momma, since I'm the momma and she's the Big Momma. "We were all quite cozy together."

Yesterday Mitchell made another connection herself, calling the Gibbs in their Don Mills home to introduce herself and say "thanks" for raising her daughter. "Joni wanted to talk to my mom. She said she wanted to thank them, and tell them how happy she was that they did such a great job raising me."

There is one remaining connection to be made. "I've never met my dad," Gibb said, referring to Toronto photographer Brad McMath. "Or is it MacMath? Being a Scot, it probably is." That could, she hopes, happen this summer, "when Joni comes to Toronto to see where we live, and meet my parents. "Then we could all meet, everyone together, and deal with the missing bits."

But for now, Gibb is concentrating on what she's found. "I don't think I would have been prepared at any other age to deal with this," she confessed. "I wouldn't have been mature enough. I had to learn my life lessons, and she did too."

And, lessons learned, the meeting was truly magical. "It's kind of crazy," Gibb said. "We met, and it clicked. It was like we never separated."

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Joni Mitchell Library - How Joni Mitchell's daughter found mom and became whole: Toronto Sun, April 8, 1997

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Kilauren Gibb knew her five-year search for her birth mother was at an end when she looked, really looked, at the face in her computer. Joni Mitchell. As she clicked her way through Mitchell's home page on the Internet's World Wide Web last February, Gibb found 14 points of comparison - blue eyes, blonde hair, long legs, high cheekbones - that suggested there was more than a casual link between the two.

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Welcome to From Insults to Respect. From time to time I have been discussing two distinct ways of looking at the nature of depression-the medical model and what we may wish to refer to as the creative temperament view.

The medical model views people who experience depression as having an illness that requires, as the first line of treatment, taking pills that are called "antidepressants." The enormously wealthy pharmaceutical industry puts its full promotional apparatus behind this approach.

The creative temperament view lacks the backing of any huge corporate interest, but news of it trickles in from a variety of sources. For example, those interested in the history of psychology may learn how the brilliant psychologist and philosopher William James viewed his "bass notes of experience" (see "William James's Personal Bout with a 'Mental Illness'" ). He wrote that many so called "healthy-minded" individuals believe that those who worry are "morbid-minded" and "diseased," but it may very well be true that "the world's meaning most comes home to us when we lay them most to heart." He, himself, learned to appreciate these visits of melancholy as something of extraordinary value, and stated that,

" there is no doubt that healthy-mindedness is inadequate as a philosophical doctrine, because the evil facts which it refuses positively to account for are a genuine portion of reality; and may after all be the best key to life's significance, and possibly the only openers of our eyes to the deepest levels of truth."

From there, James reviewed the biography of some of the most creative people in history, and noted that they often experienced depression.

A more recent example of someone discussing depression in a manner consistent with the creative temperament view appeared in a New York Times articletitled " The Case for Melancholy. " There we learn from American writer Laren Stover about her own personal experiences. After telling us of her weariness of all those folks on the internet promising to show us how to be delightfully happy in just a few short steps, she writes:

"Whatever happened to experiencing the grace of melancholy, which requires reflection: a sort of mental steeping, like tea? What if all this cheerful advice only makes you feel inadequate? What if you were born morose?"
Laren continues to weave her creative images of melancholy with such words as:

"Sadness has a bad reputation. But I soon came to feel that melancholy - the word itself is late Latin from the Greek melancholia - is a word with a romantic Old World ring, with a transient beauty like the ring around the moon."

Most recently, I discovered a particularly revealing example of someone who experienced her depression in a manner similar to Prof Willam James and Ms. Stover.

Reckless Daughter, is a new biography of seven-time Grammy Award winner Joni Mitchell. Prior to reading it, I had already gotten a sense of Joni's view of melancholy from her soulful rendition of her song "Hejira." There she sings,

I'm sitting in some cafe
A defector from the petty wars
That shell shock love away
There's comfort in melancholy
When there's no need to explain
It's just as natural as the weather
In the moody sky today

Now, having read the book, I found a clearer sense of this sensitive soul's perspective.

In 1971, Joni released her album Blue, which, according to her biographer David Yaffe, deals with "the feeling underneath the tears, before the tears, the surge and power of heartbreak." Although the success of the album might make you think she was thrilled, and perhaps there was some of that, but it was a time of a great depression. There must be more to life, she figured. How does she handle this?

"I bought every psychology book I could lay my hands on. Jung, Freud, theology, self help, psychiatry." She ended up throwing them all against the wall. And then she was introduced to Nietzsche, and learned from him that to live is to suffer, to survive is to find meaning in the suffering.

She decided to spend some extensive alone time in nature along the beautiful coast of British Columbia. It was there that she discovered that "Depression can be the sand that makes the pearl.... Most of my best work came out of it. If you get rid of the demons and the disturbing things, then the angels fly off, too. There is the possibility, in the mire, of an epiphany."

Concerns that she was dealing with were, "How am I going to get back in the saddle? And what about the audience? Would you still love me if you knew what I was really like?" And then, in the midst of all of these swirling heartfelt feelings, the words and music for her next album, For the Roses, began to flow through her soul.

An interesting characteristic of Joni is that she so values her melancholy that she doesn't like it when someone tries to cheer her up. "If somebody's dark and brooding, you're better off brooding beside them," she explains. "Don't go acting cheerful. You're just a reminder of what they're not. They'll hate you for it. The last thing you want is a cheerful person when you're down like that."

Of course, there is a great deal more to the life of Joni Mitchell. Nevertheless, I shall pause here, for I think I achieved my purpose of giving readers an added sense of the creative temperament view of depression. In one of her interviews that appears in Yaffe's biography, Joni explicitly rejected the idea that she was mentally ill.

Was she wrong? Would she have been better off fully accepting the notion that she was suffering from a mental illness? Is her experience with depression really no different from diabetes, as many claim?

Certainly, there were times during which she experienced suffering. But just as suffering occurs as part of the process of giving birth, it can also be part of the process of giving life some deeper, truer meanings to this crazy, incredible experience we call life.

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Some people will enjoy reading this blog by beginning with the first post and then moving forward to the next more recent one; then to the next one; and so on. This permits readers to catch up on some ideas that were presented earlier and to move through all of the ideas in a systematic fashion to develop their emotional intelligence. To begin at the very first post you can click HERE.
Depression Joni Mitchell Major depression disorder Medical Model

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Joni Mitchell's Experience with Depression

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Welcome to From Insults to Respect. From time to time I have been discussing two distinct ways of looking at the nature of depression-the medical model and what we may wish to refer to as the creative temperament view.

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"I wouldn't have pursued music but for trouble," Joni Mitchell once said. Mitchell was referring to real problems - her childhood time spent bedridden with polio and the life-shaping loss she experienced after giving her daughter up for adoption in 1965. Those events solidified the drive that pushed Mitchell forward from small-potatoes rural Canada toward the American meccas where she would prove to be the magnet shifting the needle of pop. But trouble, in all its manifestations, is also Mitchell's muse.

Call it her craving for innovation, or her refusal to rest in comforting clichés; call it the essence that makes her a secret sharer for millions of listeners' and most musicians' daunting standard-bearer. Trouble is Mitchell's jazz, the blasted-open space that can feel like a void but is also the real ground of possibility. It rings through her famous open guitar tunings and surfaces in the way her foot worries a piano pedal. It's in the impossible careening of her young soprano and the cracked resonance of the lower tones that came later. To become preoccupied with Joni Mitchell's music, whether as a fellow musician or as a serious fan, is to welcome trouble as a friend, as the challenge that animates life. Her songs ask us to live within trouble, to see the mirrors embedded in its cracks: the trouble we make, the trouble that waylays us, that makes a nest that we then fill with more trouble because we are made of it, too.

In recent years, trouble has been part of Mitchell's story in a less poetic way. In 2015 she suffered a brain aneurysm, and although she has made several recent public appearances as she recovers, according to some reports she is still learning to walk again, and she has not spoken in public. Her diminished presence has raised anxiety in fans who can't imagine a world without Mitchell's voice. Recordings preserve that voice, of course, but only live performance makes it immediate. Like her prime compatriots Bob Dylan and Leonard Cohen and her favorite protégé, Prince, no one can adequately echo her; even great singers, taking on her songbook, admit they can only hope to achieve proximity. Tributes to Mitchell abound, perhaps because the potential permanent absence of her living voice feels so terrifying; these are acts of transubstantiation, attempts to take in what, in life, belongs to her alone.

This week, in honor of her 75th birthday, a two-night gala benefit for LA's flagship performing arts destination, the Music Center, was crafted by loving hands to make a space for Mitchell to inhabit, likely in silence, and hear her voice come alive through her friends and acolytes. It was conceived by Music Center Director Jorn Weisbrodt, who staged a similar event in Toronto in 2013; musical producer Danny Kapilian, who served the same role at that event, has served that role at several Mitchell tributes since 1999. Bandleaders Brian Blade and John Cowherd are also veteran Joni interpreters; Blade also produced her last three recordings. The evening's staging included spectacular images of Mitchell by Norman Seeff, the photographer behind several of her most-loved album covers, and audio excerpts from the famous interviews conducted by her friend, the Canadian singer and broadcaster Malka Marom, between 1973 and 2012 (which included the quotation that opens this piece). The audience the night I attended was littered with celebrities who have been part of Mitchell's inner circle for years, including David Geffen and Cameron Crowe.

A cynical person might say that all this staged intimacy made Joni 75 feel like a living wake. But her baby boomer generation is one that has long viewed legacy-making as part of an active later life. Bob Dylan didn't earn his Nobel Prize by accident; retrospective albums, films and books had been making the argument for his greatness for years. Mitchell has been attending tributes to herself since at least 1999, showing the world what the often-abused term "doyenne" really means. Listening to others enter into dialogue with her voice, she has not simply amplified her own; she has guided the preservation of its most salient qualities in others. A photograph of her sitting in one of the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion's plush seats, immersed in careful listening, evokes the process of an inimitable artist's voice living on, dispersed within the consciousness of others.

At the conclusion of the second night of Joni 75, the moment many fans have been waiting for finally came. Mitchell was helped to the stage by two old friends and she stood, supported, as the evening's cast sang her 1970 bop "Big Yellow Taxi" and then blew out the candles of a birthday cake. She wore regal red and an outlaw's black hat. "She looks great!" people in the audience whispered giddily. She also occasionally looked confused or anxious, seeming to look inward to re-center herself. She is 75 years old and still recovering. The pressure in the room was palpable that Mitchell be her old self, or at least an old self that doesn't worry people.

But trouble has always been inherent in what she does; not just grace, as she said in one song long ago, but havoc, always possible. Onstage, the hand-picked group of peers and protégés who had performed for her beamed confidence in her direction. It was such a human moment: joy shot through with uncertainty. Most of us have experienced something similar. Have you held your grandmother's hand as she gamely goes for a step? Or cried unexpectedly when your lover crosses the finish line after running a marathon? Or smiled hard at a toddler startled to tears by something meant to engage her? Or held the gaze of a friend bearing the kind of bad news that people tend to instantly deflect with jokes and optimistic declarations?

Mitchell is human, and though she herself has not always resisted self-deification, her music has consistently made her vulnerability clear. And it is not the pretty kind. In another excerpt from an interview played at the concert, Mitchell complained of "being stereotyped as a magic princess ... you know, the sort of 'twinkle, twinkle, little star' kind of attitude." Vulnerability, in Mitchell's songs, is often dissembling, an irritant. What was most poignant about the stance Mitchell took onstage was that it wasn't simply triumphant; it was complicated.

More than just a photo op, Mitchell's appearance at Joni 75 - a moment that was troubled, in the best way - reflected the entire endeavor. As a fly on the wall at rehearsals for Joni 75, I watched the stars who participated overcome their own shivers as they took on songs that demanded they deploy their best resources. Here were old friends and collaborators, including Graham Nash, Chaka Khan, Kris Kristofferson and James Taylor, and more recent protégés, from Seal to Diana Krall. These were people who had recorded with Mitchell, hung out at her house or even lived with her. They've won awards for covering her songs and sung them every night on their own tours. There were also a few less closely associated acts who nonetheless had been carefully chosen. One of the highlights of the program was the collaboration between East LA's greatest band, Los Lobos, and leading younger Latinx music lights La Marisoul, Cesar Castro and Xochi Flores, on Mitchell's percussive masterpiece "Dreamland." The original recording featured a percussion circle that included percussion greats Airto Moreira, from Brazil, and Manolo Badrena, from Puerto Rico. Khan, who sang on the original "Dreamland," added Latinized jazz vocal lines. By taking that song to the California-Mexico border, this ensemble renewed it for a new century - and connected it to a different kind of trouble, one that music seeks to overcome, at least symbolically, with joy.

I watched other cast members deconstruct classics and stitch them back together with thread they'd taken from Mitchell's own closet. Taylor, for example, found a way to do "Woodstock" that honored both the propulsion of the hit Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young version and the delicacy of Mitchell's own recording. Krall, for whom Mitchell's music was a bridge from straight jazz to the more eclectic music that made her famous, played the close reader on "Amelia" and "For the Roses," her interactions with bassist Christopher Thomas suggesting thorny conversations she's had with herself about these songs for years. Artists like Krall have thought hard about how Mitchell's work is not exactly like their own, and how they could take on the challenge she poses without getting lost in imitation. Mitchell's music is a problem they have to solve, not only because of those tricky tunings and her verses crammed with cascading syllables. Most songs, even great ones, eventually land in one place: They may flirt with irresolution, but in the end a major chord or a cleanly turned cliché resolves it all. Not Mitchell's songs. As she wrote in "A Strange Boy," which Seal performed with steely conviction, Mitchell's music weaves a course of grace and havoc, as does life itself. Staying with it demands clarity.

Perhaps one reason Mitchell's music is so often the subject of tributes is that open-ended quality. It makes room for others to take risks; in fact, it demands that they do.The work of only a few popular musicians is expansive enough to be adapted in this way, and the Joni 75 concerts showed why so many organizers of these kinds of events turn to her songs. For one thing, they allow for a great band to stretch out without having to be showy. Under Blade and Cowherd, this one continued to establish a template for honoring her. The ensemble featured many players known for gently saying no to any confinement within genre or style: the trumpeter Ambrose Akinmusire, the guitarists Marvin J. Sewell and Greg Leisz and the percussionist Jeff Haynes. In arrangements that expanded or intensified her originals in finely drawn increments, these players made some of pop's most confounding song structures easeful without going soft. They let in just the right amount of noise to remind us of Mitchell's commitment to trouble, the dark energy ever expanding within.

Some choices the cast of Joni 75 made reminded listeners, as Mitchell often does, that trouble can also be fun. Khan, one of the prime interpreters of Mitchell's music, found that playfulness tinged with a sense of risk in every phrase she sang. This was especially true of her reading of "Two Grey Rooms," a later Mitchell song that, in some ways, comes as close to the blues as she ever would. A desolate tale of unrealized desire, Mitchell's version is weirdly pretty; maybe she was thinking of a similar song, the Temptations classic "Just My Imagination," when she added choral harmonies that sweeten the sorrow. Khan, who recorded "Two Grey Rooms" in 2005, goes rougher. At the Music Center she hit her notes hard, finding the groove within Mitchell's dreamy isolation; finding, possibly, a way out. The fun Khan found in Mitchell's sad song reminds us that there's a reason people court trouble.

Mitchell, of course, also understands this playfulness. If I must indulge in the tradition of critics quoting her songs as a way of describing them - because none of us are as incisive as she can be - let it be here: Laughing and crying, she knows, it's the same release. As Mitchell's music becomes repertoire, it continues to challenge listeners to make room in their hearts for more than one feeling at once. In 2018, there can never be enough reminders that human experience is only enriched by self-reflection; by listening, quiet and solitude. Returning to Mitchell's songs now offers that precious gift: It reminds us that art comes not just from unexpected encounters - between people, cultures, the past and the present and the world of dreams - but from nurturing, from practice and the willingness to simply take time to make the work better. Joni Mitchell took that time. She faced down the trouble that simply living inevitably raises: the heart breaking, mending and scarring as time goes by; the soul shedding layers in the slow and sometimes untrustworthy process of enlightenment. Now we can see her as someone who, like all of us, lives with imperfection. It's something she always acknowledged in her songs, despite or maybe because of her overwhelming aura of mastery. Trouble was a teacher for her, though not a gift. Would that we all could find the power in knowing that.

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Joni Mitchell At 75: Trouble Is Still Her Muse

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"I wouldn't have pursued music but for trouble," Joni Mitchell once said. Mitchell was referring to real problems - her childhood time spent bedridden with polio and the life-shaping loss she experienced after giving her daughter up for adoption in 1965.

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Joni Mitchell - Both Sides Now (Live, 1970)

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Joni Mitchell's 1971 album Blue is often mentioned whenever some publication or website trots out an all-time best albums list of some sort. Mitchell might have hit upon the reason why it's so popular when she spoke to Cameron Crowe for a Rolling Stone interview in 1979.

"The Blue album, there's hardly a dishonest note in the vocals," she said. "At that period in my life, I had no personal defenses. 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 defenses there either."

The centerpiece of that album is "A Case Of You," a gorgeously yearning ballad that benefits from the intimacy and lack of filter that Mitchell referenced in the interview. That tone is enhanced by the spare instrumentation: James Taylor on acoustic guitar, Russ Kunkel on drums, and Joni on Appalachian dulcimer. The gentle accompaniment allows her voice to be the guiding force, alternating between soft cooing and soaring falsetto as the emotion demands.

"A Case Of You" is one of the most beloved love songs of its era, which is somewhat ironic because it starts out with an admission that the relationship in question has run its course, as Mitchell sings in the very first line: "Just before our love got lost." Her lover's promises of stability are ones that he just can't keep, and she calls him on it: "You said / "I am constant as a northern star"/ And I said, "Constantly in the darkness."

Yet even as his wayward nature pushes her away, other traits pull her right back in. "I'm frightened by the devil," she sings. "And I'm drawn to those who ain't afraid." Mitchell describes the power he has over her in religious terms, comparing him to communion wine and, in the process, making this love seem much deeper than an ordinary fling.

This is Mitchell at her most accessible, even as the song takes some unexpected turns, such as when she breaks out into a brief rendition of the Canadian national anthem. Yet there is genuine emotion on display throughout, such as when she sings of how her ex has become so ingrained inside of her that he practically acts as her muse: "'Love is touching souls/ Surely you touched mine/ 'Cause part of you pours out of me/ In these lines from time to time."

In the refrain, she acknowledges the push and pull of his relationship once more: "You taste so bitter and sweet." Her concluding thought is one of those lines that songwriters will envy evermore, a line that evokes passion and love in a strikingly original way: "I could drink a case of you/ And still be on my feet." It's hard to say it any better than that.

With such dazzling skill and striking originality as her calling cards, it's no surprise that Joni Mitchell's legion of admirers is vast, especially among fellow songwriters. Sara Bareilles is one of those big fans, as she recently told American Songwriter.

"I discovered Joni Mitchell in college while I was on a year abroad and incredibly depressed," Bareilles said. "I'd gone to a little music studio looking for piano lessons, and an American man working there had me play some songs for him. He said my music reminded him of Joni Mitchell and the song "California" off of Blue. I was so homesick, weeping, listening to that song, but that's how I discovered her and I've just never been the same since.

"She's an angel. She's a goddess. She's incredible. Joni's just one of those really special voices in music, not just as a writer, but in a multitude of ways. She was the first lyricist I listened to, and she made me listen to music entirely differently. I could listen to a storyteller in a new way. Joni says things with an unexpected turn of phrase that makes otherwise mundane things very special, and she's got a real flair for how to capture the details of a person or a place. She's one of my favorite writers of all time, and has influenced me beyond words."

That respect from her performing peers is one of the reasons that Mitchell's songs have been so often covered. Her website lists 211 different artists who have covered "A Case Of You," ranging from the sublime (Prince) to the ridiculous (Frank Stallone.) Graham Nash, whose breakup with Mitchell is often cited as the inspiration for many of the songs on Blue, took a crack at it. Diana Krall's solo piano take is a showstopper, and the song continues to inspire, as evidenced by James Blake, a rising star in Great Britain, doing a faithful version in 2011.

Still, not one of these covers beats the original. It all goes back to the honesty and fearlessness of Joni Mitchell's performance of "A Case Of You," which, when combined with the beauty of the song itself, is intoxicating in every way.

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Behind the Song: Joni Mitchell, "A Case of You" " American Songwriter

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Joni Mitchell's 1971 album Blue is often mentioned whenever some publication or website trots out an all-time best albums list of some sort. Mitchell might have hit upon the reason why it's so popular when she spoke to Cameron Crowe for a Rolling Stone interview in 1979.

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The most poignant tunes by one of the greatest songwriters of the past half-century

Joni Mitchell began her career singing folk songs and writing lyrics that would be performed by musicians like Judy Collins and Fairport Convention. When she began to make albums of her own, her verses became more pointed and her music expanded, growing to incorporate the jazz she had long adored. Even toward the end of her career, Mitchell continued searching for new directions: In 2007, her "One Week Last Summer" won a Grammy for - of all things - Best Instrumental Performance. Here are 10 essential tracks from her half-century of recording.

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The most poignant tunes by one of the greatest songwriters of the past half-century Joni Mitchell began her career singing folk songs and writing lyrics that would be performed by musicians like Judy Collins and Fairport Convention.

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It hardly seems possible that the golden-haired waif who represented the innocence and purity residing at the core of all '60s sensibilities turns 75 on November 7th. Joni Mitchell was - and still is - the quintessential folk goddess whose songs provided a soothing serenity during otherwise tumultuous times. They guided the way towards a higher plain where hope and happenstance found common ground and allowed listeners to hang on to their dreamy-eyed desires even when conflict and struggle threatened to intrude.

Not that everything always went well for Ms. Mitchell herself. Dashed romance and her initial insecurity made her a fragile figure in a realm dominated by men. Her recent struggles with the illness have caused fans to worry about her health and wellbeing. Likewise, at this point in her life, it seems doubtful that she'll ever record or perform again.

Fortunately, we can take comfort in the records she released during the prime of her career, and know that their soothing sounds will always offer us an easy embrace.

3. Ladies of the Canyon, 1970
By the time Ladies of the Canyon appeared in April,1970, Mitchell was clearly on a roll. One of its keynote songs, "Woodstock," had already become a hit for Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young," while other entries such as "Willy" (written for her lover, Graham Nash), "For Free," and "Big Yellow Taxi" rank among the most memorable and enduring songs of her catalog, melodies flush with optimism, idealism and a reflection of an idyllic time that would soon come to its conclusion. And seriously, if "Circle Game" does bring a tear to your eye or a lump to your throat, your stoic stance may have turned you to stone.

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Joni Mitchell at 75- The Iconic Songstress' Ten Greatest Albums - Glide Magazine

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It hardly seems possible that the golden-haired waif who represented the innocence and purity residing at the core of all '60s sensibilities turns 75 on November 7th. Joni Mitchell was - and still is - the quintessential folk goddess whose songs provided a soothing serenity during otherwise tumultuous times.

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Update: This article was published before the announcement of British author Kazuo Ishiguro being awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature. (None of his novels are set to music.)
***

These are the clouds of Michelangelo
Muscular with gods and sungold
Shine on your witness in the refuge of the roads.
Refuge of the Roads, Joni Mitchell
A year ago the Nobel Prize for Literature was awarded to Bob Dylan, thus sparking a bonfire of the vanities among critics, writers and commentators over what should be classified as literature.

The Swedish Academy, which decides the winner, said Dylan had won "for having created new poetic expressions within the great American song tradition".

And, with that, the parameters of the Nobel Prize were blown apart. No longer were words tied simply and purely to the page, stage or recitation hall. Now, after the Dylan decision, you could listen and go with the rhythm of the drums and the call of the singer. You could even go electric.

Now you can listen to a Nobel laureate sing to you. Of course, you can also read the lyrics, go deep into the words without the melody but, in essence, lyrics exist primarily to be sung.

Dylan in his Nobel speech wrote: "Our songs are alive in the land of the living. But songs are unlike literature. They're meant to be sung, not read. The words in Shakespeare's plays were meant to be acted on the stage. Just as lyrics in songs are meant to be sung, not read on a page. And I hope some of you get the chance to listen to these lyrics the way they were intended to be heard: in concert or on record or however people are listening to songs these days. I return once again to Homer, who says, 'Sing in me, oh Muse, and through me tell the story'."

But still is a word not a word for all that? Today (October 5), the academy will announce this year's winner. The barricades may have come down last year, but the odds of a successive singer-songwriter winning are as likely as 10 people in a room agreeing that they understand a single word of Finnegans Wake. The times may have changed, but they haven't changed that much.

But here's the rub. Another singer-songwriter should win it, and not because it would balance gender equality, but because this woman richly deserves it. As equally so as Dylan did. Her name is Joni Mitchell.

Dylan is, rightly, the unchallenged iconoclast of the song's shaping in rock to be more than froth and bubble, the one who takes no prisoners in delivering a deep knowledge of the past into the present. Mitchell, over a career almost as long as Dylan's, has forged a different path in words and music. A path that was not there before her.

While Dylan was looking down the highway, indeed building a new highway, Mitchell was looking at the clouds and seeing in their form the imperfections of man and woman. She had the eye for giving shape to the shadows of lives. At first, this was labelled confessional writing. And she was the queen of her dominion, but over time this was a disservice to her art. She wrote of relationships, both biographical and fictional, with an honesty and a razor dissection that had no equal. The Last Time I Saw Richard is a finely cut gem of short-story writing. You could make it into a film.
The last time I saw Richard was Detroit in '68, And he told me all romantics meet the same fate someday Cynical and drunk and boring someone in some dark café.
The album The Hissing of Summer Lawns is a torch into the American life, throwing light into the darkness of suburbia. Elvis Costello (no mean hand at a lyric himself) has said: "This is as good as any writing. That's a whole book's worth of writing".

Mitchell's strength is that of being able to analyse both the interior and exterior worlds. To only view her work through the prism of couplets such as those in The Circle Game ("And the seasons they go round and round/And the painted ponies go up and down") pretty as they are, is to short change yourself and her.
Maybe I've never really loved/I guess that is the truth/I've spent my whole life in clouds at icy altitudes/And looking down on everything/I crashed into his arms/Amelia, it was just a false alarm.
Mitchell's language can be clinical in its insight, such as in The Three Great Stimulants, which is based on the philosophy of Friedrich Nietzsche (she named her cat Nietzsche). "The three great stimulants of the exhausted ones are artifice, brutality and innocence. It should be corruption of innocence. The more decadent a culture gets, the more they have need for what you don't have at all," she told Vanity Fair.

It can be as close and soul-opening as driving across the desert, thinking of Amelia:

Her output through the '70s is peerless: Ladies of the Canyon, Blue, For the Roses, Court and Spark, The Hissing of Summer Lawns and Hejira. Mitchell has had popular success with The Circle Game, Big Yellow Taxi, Both Sides Now, Chelsea Morning and You Turn Me On, I'm a Radio, but their attainment is not the prime mover to her art. Indeed, she carries with Dylan, and fellow Canadian Neil Young a deep conviction to forge new paths. Thus it was Mitchell went into jazz, and to most of the mainstream music world, a fall from grace.

It was their loss. Still the words flowed, out onto Paprika Plains into Dreamland. But in this journey she found herself travelling more and more alone. The '80s and '90s were not kind to her, despite the quality of the work. "I was out of sync with the '80s. Thank God. To be in sync with the times, in my opinion, was to be degenerating both morally and artistically," she has said.

Of this point - the artist and the times - Mitchell created possibly the greatest paradox: , her paean to a generation, and an event to which she did not go. It was adopted as a hippie anthem, but listen to Mitchell sing this solo on piano. It is meditation and yearning and concision. There are no loose words, every single one is doing a job. This is a common, and essential virtue of all writers in whatever field. And she borrows to create. Thus you will find Yeats or Kipling shaped into song.

But, after decades of fighting perceptions and demands of what she should be doing, she turned her back on the industry. "The business had just worn me down to where I couldn't write and didn't want to write. There was no public recognition for my work and none at my record company."

Enter Starbucks, which in 2007 through its label Hear Music, put out Mitchell's first album in 10 years Shine. And it did. It was as if she had never left, but in the beauty there was despair. Of the times that inspired the song If I Had a Heart she has said, "My heart is broken in the face of the stupidity of my species. I can't cry about it. In a way I'm inoculated. I've suffered this pain for so long. The West has packed the whole world on a runaway train. We are on the road to extincting ourselves as a species". It was her last studio album. It may be her last. Mitchell suffered a brain aneurysm in 2015. She has been seen in public since, but rarely.

And so in her absence, tribute shows have flowered worldwide. Next Tuesday night (October 10) Melbourne singer-songwriter Rebecca Barnard is doing a show of Mitchell songs at the Drunken Poet in North Melbourne.

She says: "I was drawn to Joni Mitchell through an older friend in 1974. He was playing the album Clouds and it was my first experience with confessional love songs. I'd started playing guitar and was aware of chords but hearing her unique tunings was a whole new world.

"And her honesty in her lyrics knocked me out. Her voice was/is so unique. Beautiful tone and pitch and extraordinary phrasing that has influenced me as a singer. Hearing her doing jazz standards and her own songs arranged with orchestra was another revelation. She has an incredible jazz sensibility which I think is evident even in her folky period.

"As for favourite song or period. So hard but I guess the album Court and Spark, 1973 era, and the song had a huge impact on me. But then is an absolute masterpiece."

Mitchell turns 74 next month. The likelihood of another of original album, given her health, seems remote. So we are left with the spark and light of a true original, and that being so, a body of work that is timeless. Surely, that is worth a Nobel.

Critics of all expression
Judges in Black and White
Saying it's wrong
Saying it's right
Compelled by prescribed standards
Of some ideals we fight.

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Joni Mitchell Library - Nobel Prize: Time for Bob Dylan to hand the baton to Joni Mitchell: Daily Review (Australia), October 5, 2017

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Update: This article was published before the announcement of British author Kazuo Ishiguro being awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature. (None of his novels are set to music.) *** These are the clouds of Michelangelo Muscular with gods and sungold Shine on your witness in the refuge of the roads.

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Are we rolling?

How do you choose the greatest Joni Mitchell song - or even, abandoning the wild goose chase of objectivity, your personal favourite Joni Mitchell song? It's a daunting challenge, and one that not all of the illustrious contributors to this month's cover story would accept. When we asked David Crosby to pick a song, he gave us another one of his delightful pro-Joni and anti-Dylan rants, and scrupulously avoided specifics. "There's so many songs of hers that are so brilliantly written," he countered. "You can't say which one is the best. There are 30 or 40 best ones."

In the end, and with the help of Roger McGuinn, Matthew E. White, Graham Nash, Linda Perhacs, Mike Heron and quite a few more, we settled on 30 songs. To rank them in any kind of order, though, struck us an excruciating and ultimately pointless procedure; to be honest, we bottled it. On page 30, then, you'll find 30 insightful pieces on 30 exceptional Joni songs, arranged in the order they were released, beginning with Radiohead's Philip Selway on "Both Sides, Now" and ending with the 2002 orchestral version of "Amelia," nominated by Robert Plant.

I ended up contributing a few over-wrought words about "Song for Sharon" to the piece, and in this issue I also wrote about PJ Harvey's tantalising "Recording In Process" project, and Sam Lee's new album, The Fade in Time, another one of those records I seem to be fixated on at the moment that makes deep, scholarly and emotional connections with old traditions, without being hamstrung by them.

Serendipitous, too, that one of my favourite new albums that's turned up in the last few days is by The Weather Station, ostensibly a Canadian singer-songwriter called Tamara Lindeman. Like great swathes of the new Laura Marling album reviewed on page 74, The Weather Station's Loyalty doesn't really sound much like a record that could've been made in LA 40 years ago, but it does have a certain grace and profundity, a husky nuance or two that hits a few familiar emotional triggers. . . "I see something of myself in everyone," as "Hejira" goes, "Just at this moment of the world."

Speak soon.

John Mulvey, Editor

"We're captive on the carousel of time
We can't return, we can only look
Behind from where we came."

From "Both Sides, Now" to Travelogue, incorporating Laurel Canyon folk reveries, singer-songwriter milestones, jazz adventures and so much more, Uncut chronologically assesses the finest work of a singer-songwriter supreme. Thirty astonishing songs, chosen by ROBERT PLANT, PINK FLOYD, RADIOHEAD, GRAHAM NASH, REM, LAURA MARLING, ROGER MCGUINN, ELBOW, and many more collaborators, contemporaries, and starry-eyed acolytes. "She's probably," says a still-devoted DAVID CROSBY, "the best writer of us all."

"I don't think there's a singer-songwriter in the world that hasn't been affected by Joni," David Crosby tells Uncut. You want to be that good, we all did. We all do." As Crosby attests, in a career spanning almost half a century of music, Joni Mitchell has proved enduringly influential. During her artistic prime, she ploughed indefatigably through a wide variety of styles - from stark confessionals to jazz - in an astonishingly short period of time; her sophisticated work transcending the conventional songcraft of many of her many like-minded peers. Lately, there have been encouraging signs of activity. Towards the end of last year, she curated her own retrospective boxset, Love Has Many Faces, while in January 2015 she was unveiled as the face of a new Saint Laurent ad campaign.

On this occasion, we have chosen to look back at some of her greatest songs with help from a panel of her collaborators, friends and famous fans. Along the way, we hear tales involving picnics with Eric Clapton, hand-knitted sweaters, a birthday cake in the shape of a guitar, car journeys across Canada, late-night visits to bowling alleys and one eye-watering early morning encounter with the Flying Squad. One former paramour, we learn, admits he still sends her flowers every year for her birthday. But, critically, one of her more recent collaborators shares with us a remarkable piece of fresh information regarding her current activities. "I think there's always a chance of new music," they reveal. "She was writing a few months ago. . ."

1. BOTH SIDES, NOW. Clouds, 1969
PHILIP SELWAY, RADIOHEAD:

I think if you've got an interest in songwriting, Joni's one of the best reference points and guides in that respect. You can't go far wrong, can you? My favorite, because it happened twice, is "Both Sides, Now." It was on Clouds originally, and then it was the closing track on [2000's] Both Sides Now. The first was in her acoustic phase, you know, Clouds and Ladies of the Canyon and Blue, and it's such a strong song performed with just vocal and acoustic guitar. If a song can stand up in that way, and still have that power behind it, when there are no tricks to hide behind there. . .it either stands up in its own right at that point, or it sounds insipid. To me, on that version on Clouds, it sounds amazing. It's the perfect culmination to that record.

And then Joni returned to the song again when she did Both Sides Now in 2000, where she revisited some of her older songs. To me, she's almost like Ella Fitzgerald on that record and I found it really interesting, having "A Case of You" from Blue, and also "Both Sides Now," just comparing the two tracks: the younger Joni Mitchell, and then the wisdom and the depth that comes through in the version on Both Sides Now. When you hear the later version, you genuinely believe that she's really had the life that backs up the sentiment in the song. Her voice has dropped in pitch, and for some people that would be a huge worry, but actually she's used that to her advantage. It's like the before and after of songs, and it feels in some way like the two versions are bookends in her work.

2. MORNING MORGANTOWN. Ladies of the Canyon, 1970
MIKE HERON, THE INCREDIBLE STRING BAND:

The first time I heard "Morning Morgantown" was up in Scotland on late-night radio. I was fascinated. We'd actually met her through Joe Boyd. Joe had been involved with Dylan's appearance at the Newport Folk Festival. He had a long connection with those people. When we recorded The 5,000 Spirits or the Layers of the Onion, he sent a copy of the album to the Newport committee. They were putting on a festival of new names on the block. They had Joni Mitchell and Leonard Cohen. They booked us for it, too. That was November, '67. So when we met her, she hadn't yet made her first album. We sat around, me and Robin (Williamson) and Joni, and we swapped songs. She sang a few of her songs, and we sang a few of ours. She said she really liked what we were doing. I was flattered! Robin and I were into open-tunings, so we were taken as much by her guitar-playing as her beautiful

voice. I followed her career since. Hejira was her stand-out album, really. I was listening to some songs earlier, and her piano-playing is remarkable. I don't know if anyone else was doing that kind of piano playing at the time. It's not really Carole King; but it's not too jazzy at that point. Listen to Ladies of the Canyon. Songs like "Rainy Night House," for instance, I think she set the template for that kind of piano playing.

3. WILLY. Ladies of the Canyon, 1970
GRAHAM NASH:

"Willy," to this day, breaks my heart when I hear it. But her artistry is such that she takes a personal situation and turns it into a world situation. The relationship she's talking about can apply to anyone who's listening. That's the art of writing a great song, taking a simple thing and making astounding music from it. There are so many great songs for a start. I really believe that in a hundred years from now, when people look back on the 60's, the great writers will be Bob Dylan, John and Paul, and Joni. I like "Amelia," I think it speaks directly to your heart, and there is not much in the way of production. She concentrates on the lyrics and the melodies of her music and she wants to find the shortest path from your brain to your heart. She consistently does that. If you listen to "For the Roses," for instance. . .my God! Listen to "A Case of You"; holy shit, it goes straight to your heart! I love "River" on Blue, too. She influenced me, as well. There's a couple of songs I've written in tunings that I learned from Joni, particularly "Lady of the Island." I got tunings from Crosby, too, because he's a maniac that way. Hey, you know it's her birthday today? I've been sending her flowers on her birthday ever since the day we parted. Let's wish Joni a happy birthday today.

4. RAINY NIGHT HOUSE. Ladies of the Canyon, 1970
JOHN GRANT:

Choosing my favourite song is an easy one for me - on "Rainy Night House," I just felt completely understood. I feel like she is very special, to understate the issue greatly. The combination of the songwriting craft and the level of vocal ability mixed with virtuosity on the guitar, and the choices of sounds and backing voices and everything, all the production, is overwhelming. I was working in a record shop in Denver, I think, when I was introduced to her. I didn't think it was for me and I didn't get into her until much later. I think the first record I heard of hers was Blue, in California. I had a boss at the record store and he told me I needed to get Blue and Court and Spark. I was trying to get my own band going at the time and I wanted to be like Radiohead. Later, when I left Texas and moved to New York, and was working on my first solo record, Tim Smith, the former singer of Midlake, gave me a bunch of Joni Mitchell albums. The first one he gave me was Ladies of the Canyon, and I took that back and listened to it while walking around Brooklyn, and on the subway, and just fell deeply, deeply in love with her.

5. WOODSTOCK. Ladies of the Canyon, 1970
HENRY DILTZ, PHOTOGRAPHER:

I first met Joni at Mama Cass' house, when she had a picnic for Eric Clapton. He'd come to town with Cream and didn't know anybody, so she invited him to meet some friends. One of them was David Crosby and he brought this new girl with him he'd found in Florida and flown to LA to record her first record. We were all sitting out under the trees and Join sat there and played the whole album. Eric was spellbound. He was staring at her fingers, transfixed by her tunings. I would see Joni around at friends' houses for dinner, or The Troubadour. One day, we went round her house down the hill from me on Lookout Mountain Avenue, she was leaning out of the window, with her elbows on the sill, relaxed, talking to my partner, Gary Burden, which allowed me to shoot about 50 pictures of her over 10 minutes or so. But "Woodstock" is a special song to me, partly because I was Michael Lang's photographer at Woodstock. In all, I spent two and a half weeks at Woodstock, photographing the building of the stage onwards to the festival itself. Joni couldn't make it, of course, and was stuck in her hotel room. So she wrote the song; this idyllic metaphor for the concert rather than the reality.

6. THE CIRCLE GAME. Ladies of the Canyon, 1970
LINDA PERHACS:

So many folk singers were sticking with a pattern from the past, and men had more opportunity at that time to get contracts than women - we forget this. So when Joni Mitchell came aboard she broke all those rules. One thing that opened the door for me was that Joni was doing so well on Warners that Universal wanted somebody in that kind of position on their label. So do I owe her a thank you? We all owe her a thank you!

There was Joan Baez, Judy Collins, and a few others, but they were following more traditional lines. Joni just came right out front and said, "I'm gonna do it my way." She was so doggone good that you couldn't argue with her. I love everything she does. I love the early albums, because those are the ones I was first familiar with and first struck by. Songs like "The Circle Game." People who create are out there to open new avenues, and Joni Mitchell is definitely one of the strongest we had last century. I never met her - I was in Topanga Canyon, and she was more in her community of people in Laurel Canyon, a lovely little haven but very close to the city. Not everybody may agree, but I never feel a personality that strong doing something so well is a first-timer at it, there's a history as a soul.

7. CAREY. Blue, 1971
MATTHEW E. WHITE:

"Carey" is like a journey. It's so personal, so intimate, so free, so independent - and very cleverly produced. There's this really unique way that '70s guys produce records, where there doesn't seem like a lot of production going on, there doesn't seem like there's a lot of decisions being made, and it's because they were so good at making records. But Joni is such an incredible singer - no-one can sing like that, you can try but you can't. "Carey" has such a cool tempo. It's kind of an 'up' song when so much of that record is a "down." I just feel like it just captured a moment of her life that was so fresh, and so fun. It's funny, because Blue is so stereotypical - it's a famous album or whatever, but it's famous for a reason. When I was on tour last, all I listened to were Blue and Kendrick Lamar's record Good Kid, Maad City. I liked listening to them back to back. They represent complete opposites on the musical spectrum in a lot of ways, but they're both so beautiful and well-made and well-crafted. But "Carey," I probably play this one throughout my house and in my car more than anyone else. It's really groovy and minimal in a lot of cool ways. It gives you so much with so little.

8. BLUE. Blue, 1971
VASHTI BUNYAN:

The first time I heard Joni play, I recall a borrowed cottage in the Lake District - winter 1968. The room with the TV in it had no heating. Wrapped in coat, jumpers and scarves, I watched a speckly black and white image of a young woman at a piano - playing a song that made me forget being cold. I was overcome with admiration for her being able to play and sing alone in front of an audience. I don't remember the song - I only know it was as heartbreakingly beautiful as she was and that I have carried that image with me always, like an old photograph. And so now I choose a piano-led song of hers from 1970 - which was probably when I next heard her. "Blue" . . .how well it conveys to me an era - and an LA canyon culture - one that I didn't ever know but which I feel I can hear so clear through the words of this song. She moved on into jazzy styles I had less feeling for at the time, which only goes to underline the courage with which she left her - in her label's opinion - more commercial songs behind. She never gave up doing what she wanted to do. But when I hear her voice - from whichever decade - it is with an immediate recognition. Many may try to imitate her but what is the point? It seems to me that to try to sound like someone else is no real compliment but a waste of a musical talent that could be going its own way. Own way - that would be much more like her.

9. CALIFORNIA. Blue, 1971
LEE RANALDO, SONIC YOUTH:

Joni managed through her personal experiences to embody the pulse of the times in so many ways. "California" is one of those songs which I always come back to. She's not quite wearing the pearls and perms that would come with the Court and Spark era, but it's certainly got this slightly jet-set vibe - there's a verse set in Paris, one on the Greek islands, and one in Spain. But deep within all this travelling is this unsettling sadness about the war and the fact that on those fronts nothing is really changing - she's travelling around the world, but the war is the thing that's on her mind, and going back to her adopted home in California. There's something about the lyrics to this one - it sends chills up me. It's not saying anything very directly, but it says so much in such economical means.

When Sonic Youth was working on Daydream Nation, I wrote "Hey Joni": It stemmed from an odd comment that Thurston [Moore] made - he mentioned "Hey Joe" while we were working on the song, and it gave me the inspiration to flip it around. Although the song wasn't really about her, I always thought by putting her name in the title I was professing my deep love for her music.

I don't think she was a touchstone for the group, tuning-wise, but definitely something about those rich modal tunings she was using left a big impression on me. Back then, it was really hard to sit down and figure out what her tunings were - now you can look on the Internet. So what Joni was doing was very mysterious, it's hard to figure out. I wonder if there are any Sonic Youth tunings that actually overlap with Joni's?

10. RIVER. Blue, 1971
LINDA THOMPSON:

This is a beautiful, dark song, with an amazing lyric and melody. I particularly love that minor-key "Jingle Bells" bit at the top and bottom of the song. That lyric, "I wish I had a river I could skate away on. . ." Who says that? People often use rivers in a lyric, and water in general, for washing them clean, drowning in, and even walking on. But skating away on . . . It's a most evocative picture.

I remember exactly where I was when I heard that song and the record Blue. I was living at the Chateau Marmont in Los Angeles, with my darling friend Joe Boyd. He was head of film music for Warner Brothers, then. He came home once with a test pressing of Blue. I remember being aghast with admiration and envy.

I met Joni once. Around Blue, she was managed by Peter Asher, and I worked for Peter for a while. She was with James Taylor at the time, and he often came by the office. She came once with one of her paintings, and a sweater she had knitted, and asked me to give them to James. Next time he came by, I gave them to him and relayed Joni's message. I guess they were on the rocks, because he told me he didn't want them. I'm upset to this day that I didn't take both items home. They probably got thrown away!

11. A CASE OF YOU. Blue, 1971
JIMMY WEBB:

I saw Joni the first time at The Troubadour in 1967. She looked like an angel and out of her mouth came cinema vérité: real life, real pain, real suffering and sometimes joy and excitement. She found this voice to reveal things that were not previously thought of as fitting, proper or even interesting subjects for songs. That got me thinking about my own songwriting. I was privileged to be round her a lot and heard many songs before they were finished. I heard the whole of the For The Roses album when I was staying in London making my Land's End album and she spent time with me. I had the chance to look over her shoulder and witness her methodology. She would take out her big Martin guitar and start playing these wildly interesting chords. The form of the song was constantly changing, she'd take out her notebook and have multiple versions completely written out. There was a tremendous amount of preparation. I love "A Case of You." It's a revelation. I wish I could have written the lyrics to that song. There's 10,000 ways to tell somebody you love them and that song is one of them. The metaphor is perfect and it has a lovely air and a beautiful melody. That's my kind of stuff. She's an interesting combination of world-weary and totally innocent. I loved her and love her still.

12. URGE FOR GOING. B-side of "You Turn Me On, I'm a Radio," 1972
MARK LANEGAN:

"Urge for Going" has got that kind of wistful, sad thing that I'm always drawn to. It's so devastatingly great, and it's one of my favourite songs. It was one of those things I heard about through other people or read about. I remember seeing her in Creem magazine in the '70s, but I didn't actually get to see her in concert until, I think, the late '90s, so it took many, many years between when I first heard and became a fan and actually saw her perform. And it was a good one, too. She was on tour with Bob Dylan and Van Morrison. What I remember most about her set was how very charming she was onstage - and really funny. Yeah, man. That was some tour. . .

13. COLD BLUE STEEL AND SWEET FIRE. For the Roses, 1972
JOE BOYD:

We met at the Newport Folk Festival in '67. She and The Incredible String Band were both on the bill on the Sunday afternoon. There was an evening of just drinking and smoking dope and sitting under a tree in the balmy Rhode Island summer and listening to Joni and Mike [Heron] and Robin [Williamson] swap songs for about three hours. She didn't have a record deal, but George Hamilton IV had a hit with "Urge for Going." She wanted to sort out a European publishing deal, so she came to London to stay. I was sharing a flat with a guy who was kind of involved in the underground, and the morning after she arrived we were all woken up by the Flying Squad. Joni was pushed up against a wall, frisked and threatened by the British bobbies in plain clothes. Anyway, I introduced her to Essex Music, and while she was here, The Incredible String Band were playing at the Speakeasy. She came and did a short set at the beginning of their show, and blew everybody away. Then she went back to America, and the rest is history. I guess my favourite song is "Cold Blue Steel and Sweet Fire." The lyrics look like they're about heroin. That was a period where there was an awful lot of drugs in Laurel Canyon. There's lines like, "Hollow gray fires escape thief/Looking for sweet fire, shadow of lady release." But one of the most amazing lines, it's so brilliant, is "Do you want to contact somebody first?/Leave someone a letter/You can come now, or you can come later." It's so bureaucratic, it's almost like signing you into the prison after you've been arrested, you know? She's playing guitar with James Burton on that track. There's this weird swing, it's a really complex rhythm track. And the use of the saxophone foreshadows things that she got into later on, doing much more musically complex material.

14. FOR THE ROSES. For the Roses, 1972
JEAN GRAND-MAÎTRE (ARTISTIC DIRECTOR, ALBERTA BALLET):

When we came together to talk about the ballet, The Fiddle and the Drum, it was during the Iraq invasion and she was really pissed off about it, and about Earth's ecological destruction. So a lot of the songs we selected were dark, but "For the Roses" is a much more poetic song. The orchestral version in the ballet is deeply melancholic. It's about the plight of the artist. When we invited her to create a ballet, we thought it was a long shot, but I didn't know that she loves dance. I think she enjoyed it because it made her do something new, and that's what she's always wanted. I call her the Stanley Kubrick of music, because she's made a masterpiece in every genre, just like he did. I was at her birthday party in LA last year, and she's got more energy than ever. Her mind never stops, it's a locomotive of thinking and feeling. She questions herself, and doubts herself, and criticises herself. I think there's always a chance of new music. She was writing a few months ago - but there was the event at the Hammer Museum in LA, so I think she put that on hold to finish the Love Has Many Faces boxset. The ideas are always there. As a Canadian, I can say she's one of the most important artists that our country has ever produced.

15. HELP ME. Court and Spark, 1974
MIKE MILLS, REM:

As with most people, your favourite songs are the ones which were played while things were happening in your life, and this came around at an interesting period in my life. "Help Me" was a song that always seemed magical and beautiful, and it showed what you could do that was non-traditional and yet very melodic and effective. When I heard this it must have been '74, so I would have been 15 or 16 - I was just discovering heartache, so the song made a lot of sense to me! Some of Court and Spark was kinda baroque, and that's what I enjoyed, the songs could be non-traditional but melodic, catchy and hummable. I know more about her singles than I do about her deeper tracks, but this was one song which impressed me with how you could have a radio hit with something which was complicated - complicated arrangements, songs and unusual melodies, and yet they were able to be big hits on the radio. She, like REM, I think, didn't care about having hits. She made the songs she wanted to make and if radio was going to move in her direction then I think she was fine with that, but I don't think she was out for hit singles.

16. SAME SITUATION. Court and Spark, 1974
LAURA MARLING:

My dad gave me Court and Spark when I was 11 or 12, along with a few others. He really liked this song, apart from anything because the melodies were so strange. He bought me a guitar and I remember sitting down in a room with him trying to learn a few songs, one of which was "Same Situation." The record had such an important effect on me. It's sort of a concept album in that it has a thread that follows all the way through and all of the songs connect into one, which is pretty rad for that era. I don't know what it is about that song, it hit me the most. It's funny, I feel that Joni Mitchell resonates in a special way with women; not exclusively, of course, but that song is so perceptive in the way it articulates specific thoughts and feelings.

17. FREE MAN IN PARIS. Court and Spark, 1974
FATHER JOHN MISTY:

I have a really distinct memory of being in high school, driving around late at night around Christmas, and the modern rock station played "River." That knocked me off my ass. Then, when I was about 20, I moved to Seattle and started listening to Blue incessantly. But "Free Man in Paris," I was with someone for three years who managed the band [Fleet Foxes]. We would listen to that song around the house and she would sing it. It was so specific, like it was tailor-made for this person that I loved at this point in my life. I was watching her life get overtaken by the work. So on some level, I relate to the song. You start out as a songwriter and then all of a sudden you feel like you're running a small business. You have employees and you've got the merchandise and people are asking you about budgets. So there's something about that song's portrayal of the black hole that a career in music can become. The irony is, you get into this thing for freedom and creative expression, live this lofty, spiritual existence, but before you know it, you're filling out Excel spreadsheets. But Joni is the real deal, and "Free Man in Paris" is a very special song.

18. BIG YELLOW TAXI. Miles of Aisles, 1974
MAX BENNETT, BASSIST, LA EXPRESS

The band had just started. We were working at the Baked Potato, the jazz club, and she came in. She went crazy for the band and asked if we would like to play on a couple of songs on her upcoming album. That was Court and Spark. Then we went on tour with her. We recorded Miles of Aisles at the Universal Amphitheatre. It was open air, and chilly at night, so we were onstage freezing every night while they were recording us. The version of "Big Yellow Taxi" from Miles of Aisles was fun to play live; we just kept adding little things to it while we were on the road. Things are never the same once you do the album and then you go on the road, you alter songs as you go along, and that tune became a lot of fun to play. Being in the studio with Joni was very different to [sic] being onstage. The studio is pretty much business; friendly business, though, because she respected the band. We were all professional jazz musicians and because she would skip beats or whatever she did to make a song unique, that never bothered us. She said once, the guys in CSNY couldn't get it because they were a different type of musician. When we were on the road, we hung out a lot together. Because we all liked to bowl, her manager would go to a bowling alley in the city where we were playing and ask them to keep it open so we could go bowling after the concert. Of all the people I've gone on the road with - Ella Fitzgerald, Peggy Lee - she was definitely the best.

19. THE JUNGLE LINE. The Hissing of Summer Lawns, 1975
AL STEWART:

I went to see the first concert she ever gave in England, a little showcase put on by the record company. There were about 20 people there. Then, a little later, I played the Royal Festival Hall. Fairport Convention were the headliners and Joni was the special guest; that would have been 1968. About 10 years later, I played at a benefit concert for an American charity called Bread & Roses run by Mimi Fariña, Joan Baez's sister. Joni was on that bill, too, so our paths keep crossing. I think a lot of her style comes from those guitar tunings; because she had an illness in her youth, she had to adapt to play the guitar in her own style. Everyone around the folk scene played D-A-D-G-A-D, but not Joni. "Jungle Line," though, is quite a departure. It's a very odd chord construction; very unorthodox. I don't even think there's any rhythm guitar on it. "Rousseau walks on trumpet paths/Safaris to the heart of all that jazz. . ." She is very literate. She uses words that pretty much no-one else would, but she uses them more in an emotional way than an intellectual way. So I'm always interested in what she does with the language, to conjure up a fresh take on something which otherwise would be quite run of the mill.

20. DON'T INTERRUPT THE SORROW. The Hissing of Summer Lawns, 1975
ROBBEN FORD, GUITARIST, LA EXPRESS:

In 1974, I got a phone call from Tom Scott inviting me to tour with Joni and the LA Express. We went on the road for the most part of nine months all over the US. But my first experience working with her in the studio was on The Hissing of Summer Lawns. I was 22 and still very inexperienced in the studio. I remember, she would ask you to do things that weren't necessarily your instincts. For instance, on "In France They Kiss on Main Street," she said, "I'd like you to plug the electric guitar into a fuzz tone, into the console." To me, that was the most foreign request I could have imagined. But it turned out different and unique. She was always looking for something different, and she was always very gentle about the way she suggested things, there was never any attitude, it was always, "Why don't we just try it?" I remember visiting her later in the studio when she was recording Don Juan's Reckless Daughter. She was playing some synthesised keyboard overdubs on one of the songs, and she was sitting in a chair that was quite high up off the ground and underneath her legs were swinging in the air! She was like a little girl with crayons, she just had that freedom. I love "Don't Interrupt the Sorrow," though. It's got this very slinky feel and this groove that just keeps on going. I play Dobro guitar on it, and Larry Carlton is playing this very flowy electric guitar that comes in and out. It's a great, unusual piece of music. I'm very proud to have been on it.

21. COYOTE. Hejira, 1976
SIMON NICOL, FAIRPORT CONVENTION:

I can never get tired of "Coyote." There's a particularly good live version, from the Greek Theatre in 1979. It has her stamp; that unusual degree of storytelling going on during that period, and she tells the story in quite a tongue-twisting way, really. The delivery is more energetic than reflective. It sounds like she's having a ball, especially when she's with Jaco and the others in the band from that period. I met her a couple of times. She was stepping out with Joe Boyd when he first signed us. This was 1967 or '68, and she found herself in London to talk publishing with somebody and she was staying with Joe for a week or so. He invited us round to meet her one afternoon. I was 16 or 17 and she was this sophisticated super hippy, with this North American aura about her. I recall she had a very smart Martin D28 guitar. We sat in the room and she sang about half a dozen songs. That's where we got "Eastern Rain" and Chelsea Morning" and the other songs of hers that are on our early albums. Then the next time I saw her was 1970 or '71. She'd parted company with Joe by then, but somehow we ended up in her house in Laurel Canyon in the afternoon, having tea. It wasn't going to be Builders: it was Earl Grey drunk in little Chinese tea cups, the ones without handles. We sat on the deck in her lovely garden, overlooking the canyon. That was jolly.

22. HEJIRA. Hejira, 1976
JONATHAN WILSON:

I was a young jazz fanatic when I heard the Mingus album and the recordings she'd made with Jaco Pistorius [sic]. Yet when I listen back to "Hejira," the way she melts jazz into her thing seems so effortless. Her sensibilities and her ethereal qualities speak to me, the harmonic depth and chords that she achieved being self-taught is staggering. But on "Hejira," the way she cross-polinates [sic] between styles is very affecting. I always think about when I was in my studio with David Crosby, and just the reverence with which David - or Graham [Nash], Jackson [Browne] or whoever - talk about her. David told me about when he first heard her, and how she blew his mind and he was so excited to bring her back to town to share this stupendous talent, and he's like a proud parent. You know, I ended up at her 70th birthday party. It was completely random. We were downstairs at this Hollywood club and upstairs had a VIP space. I thought I'd pop up and see what was going on. I sneaked my way up and Joni sitting there [sic]. It was her birthday party. They had a beautiful cake in the shape of a Martin guitar. I spoke to her briefly and wished her a happy birthday.

23. SONG FOR SHARON. Hejira, 1976
JOHN MULVEY, EDITOR:

When I listen to Hejira, I don't often notice the music that much. The jazz humidity, Mitchell's remorseless journey away from folk and the expectations of her fans; these details often seem at least incidental, at times irrelevant. What I hear, perhaps more than any other record I own, are the words, great measured cascades of them, and the way Joni Mitchell delivers them as a stream of consciousness that never loses its meticulous poetic poise.

Hejira works best as a single piece, a bittersweet travelogue of sorts. But its pleasures are most satisfyingly exemplified by "Song for Sharon," where bassist Max Bennett (not, you'll note, Jaco Pastorius here) and drummer John Guerin empathetically track Mitchell's voice and guitar for the best part of nine minutes.

Such is the focus on the lyrics, that the rhythm seems to be set by her ruminations, line by line.

"Song for Sharon" is about the conflicting attractions of rootless freedom and romance, about the divergent paths of Mitchell and a friend from childhood, about the consolations that music, at least occasionally, can offer. Ideas and stories rear up and evaporate - a trip to Staten Island to buy a mandolin is memorably hijacked by "the long white dress of love on a storefront mannequin" - but while nothing is resolved, I can think of few songs that present more effectively the contradictory impulses of a great artist. One moment, Mitchell is keen to embrace "a wide wide world of noble causes/And lovely landscapes to discover." The next, she's frankly admitting, "All I really want to do right now/ Is find another lover."

And always, unerringly, she has the precise words for imprecise emotions. After a friend kills herself, and her friends call up, "all emotions and abstractions," Mitchell nails the vagaries of the human condition with, I think, one of my favourite couplets in any song. "It seems we all live so close to that line," she sings, as if the perfect words just materialized in her head, "And so far from satisfaction. . ."

24. DREAMLAND. Don Juan's Reckless Daughter, 1977
ROGER McGUINN:

I covered "Dreamland" on my Cardiff Rose album. I was riding on the tourbus with Joni on the Rolling Thunder Revue. Sitting next to her, she had a little composition book and she was filling it up with new songs, and I was getting ready to record Carfiff Rose. I didn't have enough songs to complete it, so I turned to Joni and asked her if she had any spare. She said, "Well, McGuinn, I got this one song you might be able to use, but there's a line in it I'm not sure about." I said, "Yeah, what's that?" She said, "I wrapped a flag around me like a Dorothy Lamour sarong. . ." I said, "Well. . .I can work with that!" [laughs] So I changed it to "Errol Flynn sarong." She must have had 25 or 30 songs in there, and then she lost the book! I don't know if she ever recovered it, somehow it slipped out of her possession. I guess she remembered some of them, but I recall she was quite devastated at losing it. On my version, I was trying to emulate some of Joni's phrasing, on the vocals. And I remember she came to the studio, and she said, "Well, it sounds pretty good but you need to work on the vocal, "and I said "Well, no no, that's the way I wanted it." I don't think she appreciated my version. It was so different from hers. Joni's not really a technician of music. She plays by ear, she makes up her own theory, and makes up colours and things to explain what she's feeling, what she's trying to express with her music. I remember being at Leonard Cohen's house for dinner with her, and she and Leonard were talking about this kind of language that they'd developed, about music in terms of colours, which was a very interesting conversation.

25. CHINESE CAFÉ/UNCHAINED MELODY. Wild Things Run Fast, 1982
LARRY KLEIN, BASS:

I was called to play on some sessions that ended up becoming Wild Things Run Fast. I was 25, and she was unlike any woman that I have ever been around or worked with. I was completely impressed with her. In the studio, she was very open and adventurous and curious and completely game for trying new ways of approaching music. We became an item and she wrote "Chinese Café/Unchained Melody" somewhat early on in our relationship. She was travelling across Canada by car, from Calgary to Saskatoon, a trip we did several times ourselves together, but this particular time she was travelling by herself. There is something in the simplicity of the song and its sentiment that is extraordinarily touching to me. It has this wistful quality to it, of someone looking out at the world changing. The hook of the chorus is, "Nothing lasts for long." She's using that line in relation to human experience but also the ecology of the planet. Then she interlocks it with "Unchained Melody," and the way in which she undulates between her new poem and snatches of that old song, is amazing to me. When we worked on that together, it had this incredible power to make me cry, or at least just make emotions well up inside of me. To this day, when I listen to the recording that we made of it, it has the same quality for me. There's just something, so evocative about it and said. But sad in a bittersweet way, you know, in the way that melancholy is kind of sweet.

26. MY SECRET PLACE. Chalk Mark in a Rain Storm, 1988
NICK MASON:

This came from the period when she was married to Larry Klein. I've always loved the sound of her voice, right from when we listened to her first album, and she's one of those artists where I have virtually all her albums and so it's very hard to find a single song or moment that encapsulates it all. I would never get tired of hearing a song like "Chelsea Morning" or "Big Yellow Taxi" for instance, but I love some of the work she's done on Shine just as much as any on her earlier albums. Part of what I love about her music is how she's changed, that's the interesting thing. I love the things that have remained constant - the quality of the singing, the interpretation of the songs - but the music itself has also become more sophisticated, especially after she began to work with Larry Klein. He brought a real jazz influence to her music that I loved. You can hear that change on the two versions of "Both Sides, Now" [from Clouds and Both Sides Now]. If I had to pick one of the songs from the albums he produced, it would be "My Secret Place" from Chalk Mark in a Rain Storm because she's doing duets with various guest artists and that one was with Peter Gabriel, so it's a two-for-one as I'm such a fan of Peter, too. Their voices just combined perfectly.

27. COME IN FROM THE COLD. Night Ride Home, 1991
MICHAEL BONNER, ASSOCIATE EDITOR:

"The '80s were very hard on me," Mitchell confessed to Texas radio station KGSR-FM in 1998. "Everybody that could, robbed me in the greedy '80s." Indeed, Night Ride Home - her first album in the '90s - marked a significant return for Mitchell. The songs privileged her old jazz guitar phrasings, discretely accompanied by co-producer Larry Klein's sensitive bass playing. A highlight among several graceful reminiscences that feature on the album, "Come In from the Cold" finds Mitchell chronicling a narrator's sadness - in relationships, youthful ambitions that never came to fruition, the failings of her generation, the ageing process. Its layers of nostalgic ruminations create a pervasive sense of loneliness and isolation: "I am not some commission [sic]/Like a statue in a park/I am flesh and blood and vision/I am howling in the dark."

28. MAN FROM MARS. Grace of My Heart OST, 1996/Taming the Tiger, 1998
STEPHEN TROUSSE, UNCUT CONTRIBUTOR:

When ex-husband Larry Klein approached Joni in 1998 to contribute a song (maybe something in the vein of "For the Roses"?) to the soundtrack he was curating for Allison Anders' Brill Building movie à clef, Grace of My Heart, she turned him down flat. What was she - some kind of short-order hack? She reconsidered, so the story goes, when her favourite cat, Nietzsche, went missing for over a fortnight and the grief hurt her into writing a song that, purely coincidentally, was perfect for the film (where it was sung by Kristen Vigard). As alibis go, it's up there with Blood on the Tracks being about Chekhov. When she finally released "Man from Mars" herself on 1998's Taming the Tiger, the song was comfortably declawed and domesticated, arranged on a plump bed of new age synth and fretless bass. But check out the original piano version with Joni's demo vocal, accidentally released on first pressings of the soundtrack album and swiftly deleted to be replaced by the cast recording, but now easily findable on YouTube, for one of the rawest reckonings of loss ("There is no center to my life now/No grace in my heart") in the entire Mitchell songbook.

29. A CASE OF YOU. Both Sides Now, 2000
GUY GARVEY, ELBOW:

This is the orchestral version of "A Case of You" from Both Sides Now. The song itself is very nostalgic, she was talking about past love, and it's fairly melancholy. To hear her sing it as an old lady with a smoky old vocal and a big lush orchestra behind her, it's just really beautiful. The first time you hear it is unbeatable, especially if you don't know what you're listening to, which was the case when I heard it. My sister Becky has always made me compilations, especially when the band is going on tour. Becky said, "I want to be with you when you hear the first track on this compilation." She was working at Granada TV, and I went to meet her in the canteen. There was a chap from Coronation Street at the next table, I can't remember his name. I just remember thinking, "I wish he'd shut up, I can't hear this." I recognized the chords when the strings picked up and when her voice came in with its age and its richness and its experience and its longing and its heartbreak, there I am, sat blubbing next to whatever his name from Coronation Street. It's just really beautiful. You can hear her influence in "Starlings" or "The Bones in You." Her phrasing and her lines are organic, and it twists and it dives and it jumps around, and that's why it's so beautiful. It's as natural as birds in the sky.

30. AMELIA. Travelogue, 2002
ROBERT PLANT:

On Travelogue, that more recent double album with the orchestra, there's a great version of "Amelia." I love that orchestral version. If I ever commissioned anybody to look at me for 40 years and then write a song about me, it would be that song, it's all encapsulated there. What happened on Travelogue is she revisited a lot of her old songs, but the thing is the emotive quality of the voice has changed - as has mine. The voice has to change or you give up, so you have to keep using it. There's a lot of muscle involved, but also a lot of it is in the mind, gaining confidence. That helps you move to a better place. With "Amelia," I love also the drama and the thought in the orchestration. It's a beautiful contrast to the emotive quality of the lyrics and combines with her vocal performance. It's so beautiful. Joni had a huge effect on me, as she did on a lot of other people. Not so much as an influence, but as a really big, strong member of the fraternity that I really admired. She was part of that group effecting social change, attempting to embrace and demonstrate an awareness of the circumstances of America through music. I think that was a magnificent time, and all power to those people that did that. I wouldn't say I aspired to it myself. I'm a Black Country boy.

"She is probably the best writer of us all": DAVID CROSBY salutes the genius of Joni

I DISCOVERED JONI in a club [The Gaslight South, Coconut Grove] in Florida in '67, I walked in and she was standing there singing. It was one of those early songs like "Michael from Mountains" or "Both Sides, Now." I was stunned. She had the voice and the guitar playing.

She's already been singing for a while with her husband, Chuck Mitchell, and then by herself after she got smart and realized that she was good on her own. It was a hell of an experience to walk in and run into somebody who was writing songs at that level.

I produced her first album, and left it pretty simple. If I did her any kind of favour, other than introducing her to everybody, it was to keep that record pretty pristine. What folk singers did back then was a kind of indicated arrangement. We all learned how to be the whole band on one guitar, and her arrangements were superb. I was afraid that people would try to take her stuff and translate it into a band and lose the magic of how she played.

Joni had a lot of great qualities, but one of them has always been that she was a superb musician, not just a great singer, not just a great songwriter. I didn't like the big lush orchestrations of her stuff as much, because I really love when it's her playing the guitar and the dulcimer and her giving her own swing to it

I think if you look back on this past 50 years from, say, 50 years from now, I don't think anybody is close to Joni Mitchell or Bob Dylan in significance and songwriting. The two of them stand out. Now, I think Bob is a fantastic poet, and I'm a huge believer in Bob Dylan, I've made records out of his songs dozens of times, I think he's fantastic - but Joni's a better musician. I don't think there's any question about it. She's certainly a better singer, 10 times the singer Bob ever was, and as good a poet in her own way. But it's apples and oranges, they approached things completely differently. If you listen to her poetry, it's hard to deny man - I mean, Christ. I've been singing "Amelia" lately, and damn, her poetry's good! There's so many songs of hers that are so brilliantly written. You can't say which one is the best. There are 30 or 40 best ones.

At the time when I first met her and brought her back to California we were going together, and I don't know if it lasted a year but it lasted a long time. It was good, but it was daunting. I would sing her a song and she'd sing me three back that were all better than the one I sang her. Something like that can either make you feel belittled or it can encourage you to do better. And what it did with me is it encouraged me to do better. It made me write songs like "Guinnevere."

She's probably the best writer of us all, and I still think that. I don't think there's any question. I don't think there's a singer-songwriter in the world that hasn't been affected by Joni. If you listen to her songs, and you're a singer-songwriter you can't help but be affected by her. You want to be that good, we all did. We all do.

Interviews by Michael Bonner, Tim Pinnock and Peter Watts.

We hope you enjoyed our 30 greatest Joni songs. But did we miss anything out? What are your favourite Joni songs? Why not send your Mitchell missives to uncut_feedback@timeinc.com

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Joni Mitchell Library - The 30 Greatest Songs of Joni Mitchell: UNCUT, April 2015

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Are we rolling? How do you choose the greatest Joni Mitchell song - or even, abandoning the wild goose chase of objectivity, your personal favourite Joni Mitchell song? It's a daunting challenge, and one that not all of the illustrious contributors to this month's cover story would accept.

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"Crown and anchor me or let me sail away..."

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"Crown and anchor me or let me sail away..."

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With the release of their first eponymous studio album in 1969 and their subsequent appearance at the Woodstock festival, Crosby, Stills and Nash were launched into the firmament of rock stardom. Having all come from individual, successful bands - Crosby from The Byrds, Stills from Buffalo Springfield and Nash from The Hollies - they eventually acquired the status of what would be known as the 'supergroup'. Joni Mitchell was deeply into a romantic relationship with a highly creative and famous fellow musician. Her own musical creativity was a strong force that had been driving her life for the past five or six years when Graham Nash asked her to marry him. Joni was very much in love with Graham but doubts began to creep into her mind about sustaining her own career and identity if she married him. Both of Joni's grandmothers had been women with unfulfilled musical talents. Joni had dedicated the ' Clouds' album to Sadie J. McKee, her maternal grandmother. She felt that it might be her genetic destiny to bring that musical legacy to front and center.

In the male dominated music business she feared that she might be overshadowed in a marriage to a high profile performer. Joni had toured with CSN and had been featured in 'Celebration at Big Sur', the film of the 1969 Big Sur Festival. She began to develop negative feelings about appearing in front of thousands of people, finding the experience intimidating and frustrating in comparison to the intimate atmospheres of the clubs where she had been the focus of attention for smaller audiences. In 1970 she made it known that she was retiring from public performance. She was not comfortable with either the mass adulation the popularity of her recordings was generating or the mass indifference that she seemed to encounter in crowds where she was not necessarily the main attraction. She went on an extended sabbatical, which included a trip to Europe. As the amount of the time of their physical separation increased, the possibility of a permanent union between Joni & Graham diminished. Joni sent Graham a telegram from Crete. It contained the sentence "if you hold sand too tightly in your hand it will run through your fingers." The two would remain lifelong friends with great affection for one another but the prospect of a marriage had come to an end.

Joni's travel in Europe included an extended stop in Matala Crete where she became involved with the eccentric community of ex-pats and societal drop-outs living in its nearby caves. Although the trip abroad created a physical distance from Graham and some emotional distance from their relationship, it must have also produced a sharp awareness of Graham's absence from her life. The sorrow she felt as she realized that a significant piece of her love life was coming to an end combined with the unique experiences of her travels to give Joni the raw material for her next album.

The song ' Blue', the title track of Joni Mitchell's fourth album, begins with the lines:

Blue
Songs are like tattoos
You know I've been to sea before
Crown and anchor me
Or let me sail away

The songs that make up 'Blue' have given the record as a whole the staying power of a tattoo. 'Blue' has been consistently named in almost every radio listener's poll and music publication's list of 'desert island disks' or 'the greatest albums of all time' that has appeared over the last two or three decades. While this distinction places the music and its creator in a select, exalted group, it is also a double-edged sword. Joni Mitchell has created a large collection of widely diverse, complex and challenging music since the 1971 release of 'Blue'. 'Blue' is usually categorized musically as 'folk' and lyrically as 'confessional', both designations that, especially in recent years, provoke Joni's bristly denial. Certainly she has never been anchored in a single style and has sailed in a variety of musical genres during the course of her artistic voyage.

But there is no denying the timeless beauty of 'Blue'. Its appearance at a relatively early point of her career only serves to underscore the depth and brilliance of Joni Mitchell's talent.

Those few words from the first verse of 'Blue' can be construed as a metaphorical expression of a nexus of emotions and events in Joni Mitchell's life. People had been paying to see her perform since her coffee house days. She had also given birth, been married and divorced. Both personally and professionally she had 'been to sea before' by the time she met Graham Nash and then recorded 'Blue' two years later. The intense personal connection to Joni that her core audience felt made her songs into indelible impressions and Graham Nash left a permanent mark on Joni's heart. But Joni found that neither her heart nor her creative muse would be anchored. Although Graham would retain a deep love for her and a large part of Joni's audience would remain attached to her early material, in the end both the lover and the fans would have no choice but to let the singer chart her own, solitary course.

The devoted admiration of an increasingly large number of people had led Joni Mitchell to attach great importance to public perception of who and what she was at this point of her life. With a strong sense of the need for honest expression, Joni delivered extraordinary vocal performances of unguarded emotion when she recorded 'Blue'. The collection of songs on the record provide an extravagance of original, inventive melody perfectly fitted to finely crafted lyrics. Joni applied the system of alternate tuning she had been using with the guitar to the Appalachian dulcimer and used its sound on four of 'Blue's ten tracks. She also played piano and guitar. With the addition of James Taylor's guitar playing, some pedal steel from Sneeky Pete, Russ Kunkel on drums and Stephen Stills' contributions on bass and guitar, 'Blue' featured more players than any of Joni's previous albums. 'Blue', ' River' and ' A Case of You' are superbly written perspectives of a doomed love affair that hold their own beside the great torch songs of pop music and they are sung with a heartbreaking combination of passion and emotional fragility. In contrast, there is a buoyancy that drives the hopeful optimism of the upbeat ' All I Want' and the bright red devil-may-care attitude of ' Carey'. 'Carey' is a musical character sketch of one of the people Joni met in Matala Crete. 'California' also has its origins in her travels in Europe but in this song, Joni is hearing the call of her Laurel Canyon life and longing to go back to it. She paints a picture of domestic harmony that seems to harken back to her life with Graham Nash in ' My Old Man', a song that tellingly includes the possibly conditional lyrics 'we don't need no piece of paper from the city hall keeping us tied and true'. In contrast, ' This Flight Tonight' is an expression of regret felt just after acting on the decision to leave a lover. This song has the odd distinction of having been covered by the heavy metal rock band Nazareth who released it as a single in 1973 that was a hit in Canada and the UK but failed to chart in the US. 'Blue's closer, ' The Last Time I Saw Richard' leaves the singer sitting in a cafe, blowing the candle on the table out and tasting the bitter dregs of disillusionment in her romantic view of love with the dim hope that it's 'only a phase, these dark cafe days'.

The songs that make up 'Blue' were newly written at the time Joni recorded them with one notable exception. Copyrighted in 1967, the song ' Little Green' was included on 'Blue'. At the time of 'Blue's release, the song appeared to be one of Joni's character sketches, a portrayal of a young unwed mother compelled by circumstance to give her baby up for adoption. It is the only song on 'Blue' not written from a first person perspective. The song fits well into the emotional content and sequencing of the album and apparently there was little notice of what might have seemed to be the incongruous inclusion of a story that did not appear to derive from Joni's own experience on a record that had such an intense, personal feel to it. In 1971 it was not publicly known that Joni was revealing an episode from her own life in 'Little Green'.

Joni Mitchell has been quoted as saying 'I sing my sorrow and I paint my joy'. This statement may explain why 'Blue' was the first of Joni's albums that did not feature her painting in the design of its cover. The previous release, ' Ladies of the Canyon' was packaged in a mostly white sleeve with a very simple drawing of Joni filling up the left side. She appears to be holding up a portion of her skirt which is partially painted in bright watercolors, depicting a sunny hillside with houses, greenery and cars, most likely a view from her home in Laurel Canyon. The hand written lyrics appear inside the gatefold . 'Blue's cover is a blue and white processed photograph of Joni's face with a microphone in front of her mouth. The face emerges from solid dark blue shadow and the eyes appear to be closed, giving the impression of immersion in a deep emotional place.

Joni made a brief trip back to L.A. in March of 1970 to pick up a Grammy Award for 'Best Folk Performance' which she won for her album 'Clouds'. She returned to Europe but was back on the western side of the Atlantic for the Mariposa Folk Festival at Centre Island, Ontario in July. One of the other performers on the bill at Mariposa that summer was James Taylor. She was in England in August where she was part of the Isle of Wight Festival lineup. This turned out to be a raucous affair with Joni scolding the crowd during her set, yelling 'You're acting like tourists, man!' In October, Joni traveled to Vancouver, British Columbia where she performed with James Taylor, Phil Ochs and the Canadian band, Chilliwack at a benefit concert that helped launch Greenpeace. The concert was staged to raise money for the purpose of leasing a fishing boat to sail to the Aleutian Islands to protest the U.S. Atomic Energy Commission's testing of nuclear weapons on the island of Amchitka. Joni was the closer, performing songs from her first three albums plus three songs from the yet to be released 'Blue'. Joni invited James Taylor to join her on stage at the end of her set and the two closed the concert performing as a duo, ending with 'The Circle Game'.

By this time Joni and James were more than a musical duo. Joni was once again involved with a musician who was well on his way to building a long and highly successful career. She was also taking tentative steps out of her 'retirement' from the stage, performing with James at the Paris Theatre in London and appearing as 'surprise guest' at several of Taylor's concerts in the U.S. In January of 1971, Joni and James recorded back-up vocals for Carole King's version of the Goffin/King standard 'Will You Love Me Tomorrow' that would be one of the tracks on King's mega-hit album, 'Tapestry'. By all accounts the relationship between the two singer songwriters was a passionate one and there is speculation that some of the songs on 'Blue' were based on their love affair. Possibly the last of Joni's 'guest appearances' at a James Taylor concert occurred on March 28th, 1971 in Honolulu and 'Blue' was recorded in the same month. At some point of 1971 the affair seems to have burnt itself out, however, and James was involved with Carly Simon by the end of that year. He married Carly in November of 1972.
Back to Biography table of contents:

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Joni Mitchell Library - Crown and anchor me or let me sail away...: JoniMitchell.com, June 3, 2014

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With the release of their first eponymous studio album in 1969 and their subsequent appearance at the Woodstock festival, Crosby, Stills and Nash were launched into the firmament of rock stardom. Having all come from individual, successful bands - Crosby from The Byrds, Stills from Buffalo Springfield and Nash from The Hollies - they eventually acquired the status of what would be known as the 'supergroup'.

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Young Joni contracted polio when she was nine, and spent time in a polio ward where she first began to sing for others - also beating the prediction she would never walk again. Growing up in the late 1950s she listened to a lot of local Canadian radio, but classical music appears to have first captured her ear. "I loved Debussy, Stravinsky, Chopin, Tchaikovsky," she would recount in a later interview, "anything with romantic melodies, especially the nocturnes."

Unable to afford a guitar as a teenager, she bought a cheap ukulele and a Pete Seeger songbook and taught herself to play. Learning some folk songs, she began performing for movie money and pocket change to pay for cigarettes, a life-long habit she began early on. Still, music was a secondary interest at the time, as she wanted to be an artist.

Her first club performances as a 19 year-old folk singer came in late October early November 1962 at the Louis Real Coffeehouse in Saskatoon, Saskatchewan. And through 1963 and early 1964 there were also performances at ski lodges, a few "hootenannies," as folk-singing gatherings were called, as well as coffeehouse and club appearances in Calgary, Regina, and Edmonton.

After a year at the Alberta College of Art and Design she moved to Toronto in June 1964 to make a more determined bid as a folk singer, but initially had difficulty finding the money to enter the musicians union, which was needed to play most venues. She also worked at local department stores for a time to make ends meet.

In Toronto, while performing at The Penny Farthing club in March 1965, she met Chuck Mitchell, a young musician from America. In their early meeting she chastised him for badly altering some Bob Dylan verse. Still, they struck up a romance, and the two were married in June 1965. It was a union that Joni would later describe as a "marriage of convenience," for at that time she was an unwed mother with a young baby daughter fathered by a former college boyfriend who had left before the baby's birth. She had given birth in February 1965, and while single, relied on local foster care to help with her child. At first, it appeared Chuck and Joni would raise the child together, but that changed and the child was put up for adoption. The birth and adoption would remain private for much of her career.

Tom Rush adopted "Urge for Going" in his own routine, and performed it to great reception on his hometown circuit in Cambridge, Massachusetts. In fact, he was eager to have more of Joni's material. "I remember asking her, 'What else do you have? What else do you have?'" She sent him an early version of the "The Circle Game," which she wasn't happy with but he instantly liked and would later use in a 1968 album, titled The Circle Game. Rush would also have Joni come to New England and open for him at a series of engagements there.

Back in Detroit, and also in some Canadian venues, Chuck and Joni continued their performances together. The "Chuck & Joni show," as it was sometimes called, consisted of an opening song or two together, a closing song or two together, and solos in between.

At their Detroit home - a top floor apartment in the 1890s Verona building, a five-story walk-up near Wayne State University - they were a gracious and sociable couple. In fact they entertained lots of visitors and up-and-coming musicians there. A long line of them stayed at the Mitchell place when they played in Detroit - Gordon Lightfoot, Jerry Corbitt, Jesse Colin Young, Tom Rush, Dave Van Ronk, Bruce Langhorne, Eric Andersen, Rambling Jack Elliot, and others.

Joni, meanwhile, sought more autonomy in performing, and over the objections of her husband, she began making single bookings, although they would still do some joint performances.

David Geffen, who would later become Joni Mitchell's agent, also first heard her perform at the Gaslight - when she and Chuck Mitchell were performing there together. Geffen was then the agent for singer Buffy Sainte-Marie, whose new album at the time included Joni Mitchell's "The Circle Game," which Geffen especially liked, and was the first time he had ever heard her name.

Meanwhile on the club/coffeehouse circuit, Chuck and Joni continued to appear together, honoring their commitments through early 1967. But by that time, their marriage was over. Their last joint appearance came in May 1967.

Joni Mitchell then moved to New York City to pursue her dream of becoming a solo artist. She eventually settled in New York's Chelsea district as her home base.

While in New York during the summer of 1967 and performing at the Café Au Go Go she met Steve Katz who played with the house band there, The Blues Project. She had a brief romance with Katz who in turn, introduced her to Roy Blumenfeld, the Blues Project's drummer. Blumenfeld and Joni then spent a part of the summer of 1967 together until Blumenfeld's French girlfriend came home from Europe.

"I was crazy in love with Joan Mitchell," Roy would tell author Sheila Weller in her 2008 book, Girls Like Us. "The way I felt about her....it scared me..." Joni's song, "Tin Angel," using the name of a New York restaurant, is in part about Roy. Roy would later say that Joni Mitchell's music "was more original than Dylan's."

Another of Joni's Blues Project band member friendships turned out to be Al Kooper, the group's keyboardist, lead singer, and chief composer. Kooper was also a friend of Judy Collins, who would invite Joni to the Newport Folk Festival, in Newport, Rhode Island.

The July 1967 program at the Newport Folk Festival then included the likes of Joan Baez, Judy Collins, Tim Hardin, Fred Neil, Odetta, Phil Ochs, Tom Paxton, and others.

Joni, after being introduced at the festival by Judy Collins, played a short set that included "Michael From Mountains," "Chelsea Morning" and "The Circle Game" - a set that stunned the audience, and according to Lachlan MacLearn who was there - prompted "a tumultuous and prolonged standing ovation."

It was also at the Newport Folk Festival that summer that Joni met Judy Collins' Canadian friend, Leonard Cohen, by then a rising poet and singer. Joni was much taken with the 42 year-old Cohen, and the two began a romance. This affair, like others, is credited with fueling Joni's "love muse," helping to inspire her songwriting. Among the Joni Mitchell creations credited in whole or part to her time with Cohen, are said to be: "Rainy Night House," "The Gallery" and "A Case of You."

As became her practice, Joni wrote snatches of material based on what moved her at the moment, these figuring into songs she might not complete until months or years later. The Cohen affair, in any case, ended within a year or so, after Joni discovered Cohen wasn't everything she thought he was. Still, Cohen described Joni as "prodigiously gifted," and a "great painter too."

Through 1967, Joni continued her performances in various U.S. and Canadian venues, among them: The 2nd Fret in Philadelphia, Le Hibou Coffee House in Ottawa, The Riverboat in Toronto, The Living End in Detroit, and The Gaslight Café in Coconut Grove, Florida.

Those who heard Joni Mitchell sing in those early years were typically blown away. David Crosby was one of those smitten by her sound - and her good looks. Crosby himself was already a famous singer-songwriter who had successfully performed with the Byrds (e.g., "Mr.Tambourine Man" 1965, "Turn Turn Turn," 1965," Eight Miles High" 1967). He would also soon become a founding member of another folk-rock group, Crosby, Stills & Nash. But it was sometime in late August/early September 1967 when Crosby had his first encounter with Joni Mitchell. By this time, he had left the Byrds over personal differences and had gone to Florida to sort things out.

"I went looking for a sailboat to live on. I wanted to do something else. Find another way to be. I was pretty disillusioned." Then he walked into a coffee house in Coconut Grove, Florida and heard Mitchell singing. "[I] was just completely smitten," he would later say. "She was standing there singing all those songs ... 'Michael From Mountains', 'Both Sides Now', and I was just floored. I couldn't believe that there was anybody that good...."

Crosby would also fall for Joni, and would later write at least part of a song alluding to his feelings about her with "Guinnevere," which appears on the first Crosby, Stills & Nash album. Joni Mitchell moved in with David Crosby for a time when she came to southern California in 1967, but according to her, they were "never an item," save for a brief romance in Florida. Crosby would later say of Joni: "It was very easy to love her, but turbulent. Loving Joni is a little like falling into a cement mixer."

Still, Crosby became her personal promoter and helped her settle into a special little corner of Los Angeles known as Laurel Canyon, which became a famous singer-songwriter enclave where an incredible amount of high-quality rock and folk-rock music would originate. Crosby had her play at the homes of his Hollywood friends - "Mama" Cass Elliot among them, she of the then flourishing Mamas & Papas group. Still, in the U.S. music industry at the time, folk music was a tough sell. But Crosby, with his Byrds success and some connections in the music business, was determined to produce a Joni Mitchell album highlighting her folk and vocal talent. (According to later sources, Joni wasn't always comfortable with Crosby's help in presenting her to his friends - "treating her like a prized, talented possession," according to author David Browne - and as Joni would note elsewhere: "It was kind of embarrassing ... as if I were his discovery.")

Joni soon had her own manager as well. In late October 1967, while performing at the Café Au Go Go in New York, she met Elliot Roberts, who then managed Buffy St. Marie, who suggested he check out Joni's performance. Roberts later recounted this first meeting with Joni to Vanity Fair: "I saw Joni in New York... at the Café au Go Go.... I went up to her after the show and said, 'I'm a young manager and I'd kill to work with you.' At that time, Joni did everything herself; she booked her own shows, made her travel arrangements, carried her own tapes. She said she was going on tour, and if I wanted to pay my own expenses, I could go with her. I went with her for a month, and after that, she asked me to manage her."
In New York, she had also met Mo Ostin, general manager of the Reprise record label, by way of Tom Rush, who had already recorded two of her songs. It had not gone unnoticed that a number of her songs were being snapped up by others beyond Tom Rush, including: Judy Collins (Both Sides Now, Michael From Mountains), Buffy Sainte-Marie (Song To A Seagull, Circle Game), Ian & Sylvia (Circle Game), Dave Van Ronk (Clouds, Chelsea Morning), Fairport Convention (Eastern Rain), and George Hamilton IV, a country musician whose version of "Urge For Going" became a big country hit in 1967.
Still, folk music at the time did not have the business appeal that rock `n roll did. Elliot Roberts, however, helped Joni negotiate a recording deal with the Reprise record label in mid-March 1968. Joni, who already had her own publishing company, Siquomb Music, secured a pretty good deal with Reprise. For one, she was given total and complete artistic freedom. It was then quite rare for a woman to be writing and recording her own material, let alone to be an unaccompanied solo act. At the contract signing in Burbank, California, and pictured at left were: Elliot Roberts, David Crosby, and Mo Ostin. Crosby would produce her first album, and for the most part, to his credit, he let the album's recording sessions focus on Joni Mitchell and her acoustic music without regard for the more "rocked-up" marketing wishes of the studio.
Song to a Seagull, was released in March 1968 and included ten of Mitchell's acoustic songs, including some of those that had bowled David Crosby over in Florida.
Music Player
"Cactus Tree"- Joni Mitchell
https://www.pophistorydig.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/06/Joni-Mitchell-Cactus-Tree.mp3

Among the album's ten songs are: "I Had A King," "Michael From Mountains," "Night In The City," "Cactus Tree" and others. "Cactus Tree," the last song on the album, is offered above in the music player. It's a song about a long line of suitors and another from her muse-driven trove of auto-biographical love-loss-hurt-vs-freedom songs. As narrator in this song, she is loving to all her suitors, though warning each one, in so many words, "don't get too close, as I have things to do and places to go." Indeed, as she sings, "she's busy being free."
In terms of the other songs in this album, 'I Had a King,' takes it cues from the ending of her first marriage, and is her statement of moving on and becoming independent, with no regrets or blame. "Michael From Mountains" is about a new-found love, described earlier, a song that some listeners find very moving. "Night in the City' is regarded by many as the best song on the album. In some countries, this song was released as a single with "I Had A King" on the B side, as shown in the French release at left. Joni does the guitar and piano work on this track, along with her great vocal range, and Stephen Stills provides the backing bass guitar. Other songs on the album include: "Marcie," "Nathan La Franeer," "Sisotowbell Lane," "The Dawntreader," and "The Pirate of Penance."
David Crosby, meanwhile, fared well in the album, as Joni referenced him in some way in at least three of the songs: the first stanza of "Cactus Tree," a line in "Dawntreader," and parts of "Song to a Segull." (Crosby, however, would fare less favorably on a later Joni composition - "That Song About the Midway," on her 2nd album, Clouds - which had some excoriation for Crosby's dalliances with others while with Joni - a "Goodbye David' song," Crosby would later acknowledge.)

Following the recording sessions for Song to a Seagull, Joni was on the road for a good part of 1968. In March she was playing Le Hibou in Ottawa. In June she had twelve shows at The Troubadour in Los Angeles, and through early July 1968 she played seventeen dates at The Bitter End in New York. In August she appeared at the Philadelphia Folk Festival. Back at her new home in California's Laurel Canyon, Joni Mitchell's personal life was about to take a new turn.

It was August 1968 when Graham Nash arrived at the house on Lookout Mountain Avenue in Laurel Canyon section of Los Angeles. He had just flown in from London and was in the process of splitting from the famous British rock band, The Hollies, over differences. His marriage was then on the rocks as well. He had come to Los Angeles to visit Joni Mitchell - the woman, he explained later - "who had captured my heart."

Nash and Mitchell had met earlier that year, in March, after a Hollies show in Ottawa, Canada when they became romantically involved. His August 1968 arrival at the Laurel Canyon house was the first he had seen Joni since then. "She was the whole package," he would later write, "a lovely, sylphlike woman with a natural blush, ...and an elusive quality that seemed lit from within." They began living together thereafter, as Joni invited him to stay at her Laurel Canyon home.

But also there that August night when Nash arrived from the airport with his guitar case in tow, were David Crosby and Stephen Stills - two singer-songwriters who, like Nash, had also departed from their rock groups - Crosby from The Byrds, and Stills from Buffalo Springfield. These three bandless musicians started some impromptu jamming and singing that evening and discovered they made wonderful harmony together. As Joni Mitchell recalled for Vanity Fair in 2015: "[T]he first night they raised their voices together I do believe happened at my house. I just remember in my living room the joy of them discovering their blend." That soon led to the formation of Crosby, Stills and Nash, and about a year later, their blockbuster debut album bearing the group name.

By the time of the Miami Pop Festival of late December 1968, Graham Nash and Joni Mitchell were traveling together as a pair. And Nash, like his friend and new bandmate Crosby, would later write songs about Joni and his relationship with her - "Our House" and "Lady of the Island" - songs that would later appear on Crosby, Stills & Nash albums.

Joni Mitchell and Graham Nash - whom she called "Willy" and wrote a song about him in that name - also visited Joni's parents in her Canadian hometown of Saskatoon. The pair had talked about marriage briefly, but their relationship eventually ran its course and ended. But Joni would remain close to the Crosby, Stills & Nash group (and later Neil Young, a fellow Canadian, as well), and often performed and/or traveled with them.

Mitchell's music, meanwhile, was rising in notice, and through the late 1960s, she continued one of her most productive periods of song writing and recording. In fact, she had written many more songs than she had recorded, with some of her work doing well for other artists. In 1967-68, at least three artists had released albums with one or more of her songs on them: Tom Rush, Buffy Sainte-Marie and Judy Collins. But it was Collins' recording of Joni's "Both Sides Now" that helped move Joni's music to a new level. Collins had first included the song on her 1967 Wildflowers album and then released its as a single in October 1968. Two months later the single was a Top Ten (#8) pop hit. That helped raise interest in Joni Mitchell's songwriting, and created anticipation about what she might do with her second album.

Clouds, was released. Among its ten tracks were her own versions of songs that had already been covered by other artists, including "Chelsea Morning," "Tin Angel," and "Both Sides Now."
Music Player
"Both Sides, Now" - Joni Mitchell
https://www.pophistorydig.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/06/Joni-Mitchell-Both-Sides-Now.mp3

"Both Sides Now," had been written by Joni a good 18 months before it ran up the charts for Judy Collins. It was inspired in March 1967 during a plane ride as Joni was reading Saul Bellow's novel, Henderson the Rain King, and in particular, a passage where the main character is also traveling by plane viewing clouds out the window, as Joni was doing when she put the book down and started writing. The novel also includes the line, "we are the first generation to see the clouds from both sides," presumably referring to the newly available commercial aviation and viewing clouds from above.

Joni's perspective at the time, and forming the first stanza of "Both Sides Now," recalled how children see clouds from the ground below, concocting all sorts of fanciful and innocent images, and then in later life, as adults, seeing them more as bearers of bad weather. The song then continues to use the two different perspectives of looking at clouds as metaphor for the larger themes of life and love, adding in the verse, that even with life's new perspectives and experience - its trials, tribulations, judgments of others, ups and downs, etc. - she really doesn't understand life or love after all.

Mitchell was 21 when she wrote the song, and some suggest it is also derived, in part, from the failure of her first marriage, and as later learned, her decision to give up her baby daughter for adoption. Rolling Stone magazine ranked "Both Sides, Now" at No. 171 on its December 2004 list of "The 500 Greatest Songs of All Time."

Other songs on the Clouds album deal with love, lovers, and the uncertainty of new love - i.e.,"I Don't Know Where I Stand," "Tin Angel," "That Song About the Midway," and "The Gallery."

The "love/relationship" factor would continue to play heavily in her other albums during the early 1970s, a time some describe as her folk/ confessional period.

But Clouds also includes "The Fiddle and The Drum," a song that compared U.S. government during the Vietnam War to a bitter friend, and, "I Think I Understand," dealing with mental illness.

David Cleary of AllMusic.com, in a favorable review of the album, also singled out another of its songs: "Imaginatively unusual and subtle harmonies abound here, never more so in her body of work than on the remarkable 'Songs to Aging Children Come,' which sets floridly impressionistic lyrics to a lovely tune that is supported by perhaps the most remarkably sophisticated chord sequence in all of pop music."

That summer, Joni also appeared as the opening act for her friends Crosby, Stills, and Nash, who were just about to break out big with their first album, Crosby, Stills, and Nash. She would open their first big concert at the Auditorium Theater in Chicago on August 16th, where by some accounts, she nearly stole the show. But earlier that month, on August 1st, 1969, at the Atlantic City Pop Festival held at the Atlantic City Race Track, she left the stage angrily due to the inattentiveness of the large crowd. It would not be the last time she would lose patience with outdoor festival crowds, as she would come to prefer the friendlier confines of the smaller clubs and coffeehouses she had known, as well as the studio.
The Johnny Cash TV Show aired. On the June 7th show, Joni then 26, and fresh from her first Grammy win, joined Cash in a duo on the song, "I Still Miss Someone." In July and August she did a number of folk festivals, beginning with the July 18-19 Newport Folk Festival in Newport, RI where she met James Taylor. In July, she also made other appearances, including the South Shore Music Circus in Cohasset, MA; The Music Shed at Tanglewood in Lenox, MA; the Schaefer Music Festival at the Wollman Skating Rink Theater in New York; and the Mariposa Folk Festival held on Centre Island, Toronto (where she and Joan Baez were the featured performers). Another festival performance in early August came at The Sounds Of Summer Mississippi River Festival in Edwardsville, IL where she and Arlo Guthrie were featured performers.
Joni had already been featured on the cover of the May 17th, 1969 edition of Rolling Stone magazine, then in its early years. Inside the magazines, she was featured in a piece entitled, "Introducing Joni Mitchell." The cover of that edition also included the tag line, "The Swan Song of Folk Music," which was somewhat premature given her rise, though at the time reflected the prevailing perspective in the music industry. Happily, despite the tag line, Joni would prove, at least for a time, that folk music and/or folk-rock, were on the upswing. And by that summer's end, she would become known for something else as well.

As Geffen would later describe their arrival, coming into New York for the festival: "I was bringing Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young ...and Joni Mitchell to Woodstock. And I arrived at La Guardia Airport. And I picked up the New York Times and it says, '400,000 People Sitting In Mud.' And thought, 'no way am I going to Woodstock.' And so they [Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young] went on to Woodstock. And Joni and I went back to my apartment at Central Park South, and we watched it on television..."
The Dick Cavett Show. It appeared at the time that horrendous traffic congestion and bad weather might make it difficult for her to get back to the city, as filming for the late night show occurred on Monday afternoon.
Joni Mitchell, however, by staying at Geffen's 59th Street New York city apartment and not going to Woodstock, would instead compose a song titled "Woodstock" - a song that would become an anthem of sorts for her generation, defining one of the era's key events. The song would become a big hit for Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young and would also be recorded by Joni for her Ladies of the Canyon album (more on this album later below).

I came upon a child of God
He was walking along the road
And I asked him where are you going
And this he told me
I'm going on down to Yasgur's farm
I'm going to join in a rock 'n' roll band
I'm going to camp out on the land
I'm going to try an' get my soul free

Then can I walk beside you
I have come here to lose the smog
And I feel to be a cog in
something turning
Well maybe it is just the time of year
Or maybe it's the time of man
I don't know who I am
But you know life is for learning

By the time we got to Woodstockcelebration
We were half a million strong
And everywhere there was song and

And I dreamed I saw the bombers
Riding shotgun in the sky
And they were turning into butterflies
Above our nation

We are stardust
(billion year old carbon)
We are golden
(caught in the devil's bargain)
And we've got to get ourselves
back to the garden

a capella version of "The Fiddle and the Drum." The Jefferson Airplane performed "We Can Be Together," Stephen Stills performed his "4 + 20" song, and David Crosby joined Grace Slick in a version of "Somebody to Love." Cavett's "Woodstock show," as it would be called (which can be found today on YouTube), was seen by many young people who had heard about the festival, or read about it in the newspapers, but weren't able to get there. When Cavett asked David Crosby about what he had seen at Woodstock and if he thought it was a success, Crosby (who had arrived at Woodstock with Nash and Stills by helicopter, getting quite an overview of the scene coming in) replied: "It was incredible. ... It looked like an encampment of the Macedonian army on the Greek hills, crossed with the biggest band of Gypsies you ever saw."
In the months and years that followed the giant festival, it would be the "Woodstock" song that Joni Mitchell had written about the gathering - which she composed on the basis of reports from her then boyfriend, Graham Nash, plus what she saw on television - that would have lasting impact.

The version of "Woodstock" that first reverberated across the nation, however, was that recorded by her friends, Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young (CSN&Y). When they first heard it, they decided to record it. By March-April 1970 the song was receiving airplay in three ways: the CSN&Y single of "Woodstock;" the CSN&Y album De Ja Vu, which included the single version; and Joni Mitchell's album, Ladies of the Canyon, also released at that time with her version of the song. The CSN&Y single became a popular national hit, rising to No.11 on the Billboard Hot 100. Stephen Stills provided a distinctive lead guitar opening for that version and also the lead vocals, backed with Crosby/Nash harmonies. This version also ran over the closing credits of Woodstock the film, which had a much anticipated opening in March 1970 as well.

Joni Mitchell's version of the "Woodstock" song also came out about this time as well. Her version, however, has a different pace and feel to it, some finding it a more haunting treatment. The song is an "all-Joni-Mitchell-production" - she sings the main verse, plays a tremoloed Wurlitzer electric piano, and provides her own backing chorus with layered, multi-tracked Joni Mitchell voices. It is the more contemplative of the two versions, and coming from the composer, reveals, perhaps, more of her intention. She would also perform the song in September 1969 at the Big Sur Folk Festival, one month after Woodstock.

The lyrics to "Woodstock" tell the story of the narrator meeting a person on his way to Max Yasgur's farm - the actual festival location in upstate, Bethel, New York. The traveler also explains he's going for the music but also other reasons - to camp out on the land and try to get his soul free. Then comes the "we-are-stardust" chorus that is part metaphysical, part spiritual, suggesting a getting back to nature and/or a "Garden of Eden" like place.

As the narrator joins the traveler on his trek, she explains that she too, wants to "lose the smog" and the feeling of being "a cog in something turning." And maybe there is opportunity ahead, this time, for some revelation and learning. Repeat chorus and refrain that there is hope/power in our stardust, i.e., "we are golden;" a chance for change and getting back on the right path. Reaching Woodstock, they find "half a million strong" and much celebration. Buoyed by this hope, the narrator lets herself dream that things might be different. At a time when the Vietnam War was the national concern, she conjures "bombers... turning into butterflies." Peace is the hope.
In the final chorus, more detail is added to the stardust concept: that it is, in fact, "billion year old carbon," which science by that time had borne out. And as some interpretations have it, although "we are golden" and this Woodstock generation is strong, it and we are also "caught in the devil's bargain." That being the biblical bad deal Eve made with the devil, eating the forbidden fruit from the Tree of Knowledge, for which she and the rest of us were expelled from paradise, i.e, the garden. And now in modern times, as sinful souls, we are left to grapple with, presumably, war, racial injustice, crime, pollution, etc.,. Still, we have the ability to work at these problems and "get back to the garden."
Mitchell, in somewhat less grander terms, would later explain her feelings and perspective on writing "Woodstock," as offered in a 1995 Goldmine magazine piece. First, she explained that not being able to get to site that weekend made her want to be there all the more, and gave her a special interest in the event:

"The deprivation of not being able to go provided me with an intense angle on Woodstock. I was one of the fans. I was put in the position of being a kid who couldn't make it. So I was glued to the media. And at the time I was going through a kind of born again Christian trip - not that I went to any church, I'd given up Christianity at an early age in Sunday school. But suddenly, as performers, we were in the position of having so many people look to us for leadership, and for some unknown reason, I took it seriously and decided I needed a guide and leaned on God. ...So I was a little 'God mad' at the time, for lack of a better term, and I had been saying to myself, 'Where are the modern miracles? Where are the modern miracles?' Woodstock, for some reason, impressed me as being a modern miracle, like a modern day fishes-and-loaves story. For a herd of people that large to cooperate so well, it was pretty remarkable and there was tremendous optimism. So I wrote the song 'Woodstock' out of these feelings..."
David Crosby, who was there, offered his praise for Joni's "Woodstock" song: "She captured the feeling and importance of the Woodstock festival better than anyone who'd been there."
And years later, others found her poetry of that moment worthy of memorial. The Princeton University Class of 1969 - at their 25th reunion in 1994 - dedicated a piece of sculpture featured in a quiet garden on campus (shown at left), that has the final "we-are-stardust" verse etched into its body along with Joni Mitchell's by-line.

Following Woodstock, Joni continued her performances in the U.S. and Canada, appearing at the Vancouver Pop Festival at the Paradise Valley Resort in Squamish, British Columbia and the California Exposition & State Fair at Sacramento, CA, both in the August 22-24 time frame. She also had a series of a half dozen or so August dates at the The Greek Theater in Los Angeles, opening on her final date there for Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young. In mid-September it was on to the Big Sur Folk Festival at the Esalen Institute in Big Sur, CA, where she performed solo and again with CSN&Y and John Sebastian. Some of these performances were later featured in the film, Celebration at Big Sur. In late September, Canadian Broadcasting (CBC-TV) aired the earlier performances at the Mariposa Folk Festival (July 25-27) with Joni, Joan Baez, Ian and Sylvia, Doc Watson, and others.

Through the last quarter of 1969, there were more performances, among them an October 19th Gala 50th Anniversary Concert at the Pauley Pavilion, at UCLA in Westwood, CA where Joni performed nine songs alone and three with the Los Angeles Philharmonic Orchestra. On October 27th, 1969 she did a performance at the Rockefeller Chapel, at the University of Chicago. On November 1st it was on to her hometown of Saskatoon, SK where she performed at Centennial Auditorium. More college and university concerts followed in November and December: California State University at Fullerton on November 22nd, where John Fahey opened for her; an afternoon concert at Holy Cross College in Worcester, MA on November 29th; and an evening concert that same day at Alden Memorial Auditorium at Worcester Polytechnic Institute also in Worcester.

On December 5th 1969, she performed at Symphony Hall in Boston, and on the following day she did two evening performances at Crouse College Auditorium in Syracuse, NY. Two days later she performed at the University of Hartford in Hartford, CT and on December 10th at Springfield College in Springfield, MA. Over the next four days, December 11th through the 14th, she performed at Brandeis University in Waltham, MA; M.I.T in Cambridge, MA; the Kleinhans Music Hall in Buffalo, NY; and The Masonic Temple Theater in Detroit, Michigan, where she was a surprise guest performer at a CSN&Y concert.

By April 1970, Joni Mitchell's 3rd studio album, Ladies of the Canyon, had been released, and in addition to "Woodstock" it also included "The Circle Game," and "Big Yellow Taxi," the latter known for the line, "they paved paradise and put up a parking lot." The song was written by Mitchell on a trip to Hawaii, seeing the beautiful paradise-like islands, but also, out her hotel window, a huge, never-ending parking lot. An environmental anthem for some, the song also references the pesticide DDT - "Hey farmer, farmer, but away that DDT now." Released as a single, "Big Yellow Taxi" became a Top 20 hit in several countries. Ladies of the Canyon, meanwhile, became quite popular on FM radio, and it sold well over the summer and into the fall, eventually becoming her first gold album, selling more than 500,000 copies.

I slept last night in a good hotel
I went shopping today for jewels
The wind rushed around in the dirty town
And the children let out from the schools
I was standing on a noisy corner
Waiting for the walking green
Across the street he stood
And he played real good
On his clarinet for free

Now me I play for fortunes
And those velvet curtain calls
I've got a black limousine
And two gentlemen
Escorting me to the halls
And I play if you have the money
Or if you're a friend to me
But the one man band
By the quick lunch stand
He was playing real good for free

Nobody stopped to hear him
Though he played so sweet and high
They knew he had never
Been on their T.V.
So they passed his music by
I meant to go over and ask for a song
Maybe put on a harmony
I heard his refrain
As the signal changed
He was playing real good for free

Among other songs on the album is one titled "For Free," the second track, written by Mitchell. It's a song about a traveling music star in an anonymous city who comes upon a local musician playing a clarinet on a street corner - "for free."

The song's narrator - a music star like Mitchell, presumably - comes to this town for a gig. While there, she is out and about walking through town doing some shopping, and in the course of her outing, comes to an intersection with a traffic light - "waiting for the walking green" - where she sees a street musician across the way plying his craft.

The scene has her thinking about her own career by comparison - "now me, I play for fortunes, and those velvet curtain calls." She is also driven to her concerts in a limo and escorted by two gentlemen, bodyguards, no doubt. And if you want to attend one of her shows, it will cost you a fair penny. But the guy playing on the street that day - the one by the quick lunch stand - "he was playing really good for free."

She laments the fact that "nobody stopped to hear him," and attributes this lack of interest to a fickle public that knew "he had never been on their T.V.," so they passed his music by. She had in mind to join him - "maybe put on a harmony." But the signal changed, and life went on. Still, "he was playing read good for free."

The song is emblematic of Mitchell's style at the time, likely something she experienced in her travels. It is also a simple story, with a poignant tale, accompanied by a basic piano and Mitchell's gorgeous voice; a perfect little song and vignette.

YouTube, there is at least one video clip that has Mitchell at the piano performing "For Free" in a televised segment.
In early 1970 Joni Mitchell decided to take some time off to travel and to paint, and renew her creative juices. She was feeling isolated, finding that success had a way of cutting her off from the rest of the world. She would perform at a few festivals in the summer of 1970, but did not take on a regular concert schedule. She felt she needed new material. "I need new things to say in order to perform," she told one reporter. "You just can't sing the same songs." She was also still ending her relationship with Graham Nash.

On her sojourn that spring, taken in part with a friend named Penelope, Joni traveled throughout Europe, visiting France, Spain, and Greece. On the isle of Crete she took up the dulcimer and while there began writing a series of songs dealing with her adventures. Among these were "Carey" and "California," the former song about an American guy, Cary Raditz, who she became involved with while on Crete.

Later that summer, Joni agreed to perform at the Isle of Wight Festival off England in August 1970 - a giant festival with 250,000 or so attending, some of whom became rowdy and impolite to performers. Joni, for one, was interrupted during her performance by one stage crasher (actually, someone she knew from Crete who was quite out of line), driving her to near tears. Still, she delivered her performance while asking the audience to be civil toward performers.

Although she was not on a hectic touring schedule that latter part of 1970, Joni was still making selected appearances in the U.S. and in Europe. In the fall of 1970, Joni joined actor Dennis Hopper, Michele Phillips of the Mamas & Papas, Micky Newbury and Johnny Cash for a late night of food, fun, and music at a Nashville restaurant after that year's first taping of The Johnny Cash Show. In London, England in October 1970, she gave a concert of her songs on guitar, piano and dulcimer for the BBC's "In Concert" series. In Vancouver, British Columbia she, Phil Ochs and James Taylor performed at an October Greenpeace benefit concert. That month she also joined John Hartford and Pete Seeger for a "folk-rock" TV special in Los Angeles. On October 29, 1970, she and James Taylor appeared together for a BBC radio performance at the Paris Theater, broadcast in late December that year. In early November she appeared during the encore session of a James Taylor concert at Princeton University where she and Taylor sang "You Can Close Your Eyes" together.

Blue was hailed and lauded by critics as well as her musical peers. She had written some of it years earlier, some during her European travels of 1970, and more when she came back home.

In fact, Mitchell's buffeting from the loves of her life once again proved the powerful ingredient in her song-making. In its deepest moments, Blue is part Graham Nash, part James Taylor. And as mentioned earlier, even relationships dating to the 1960s, such as that with Leonard Cohen, may have also influenced some of the album's lyrics.
Blue

Well there're so many sinking now
You've got to keep thinking
You can make it thru these waves
Acid, booze, and ass
Needles, guns, and grass
Lots of laughs, lots of laughs

Everybody's saying that hell's thehippest way to go

Well I don't think so
But I'm gonna take a look around it though
Blue I love you

Graham Nash, writing of Joni and this album in 2012, noted: "Listening to Blue is quite difficult for me personally. It brings back many memories and saddens me greatly. It is, by far, my most favorite solo album, and the thought that I spent much time with this fine woman and genius of a writer is incredible to me. I watched her write some of those songs and I believe that one or two of them were about me, but who really knows?"

Prior to the making of Blue, Mitchell had broken up with Nash, and on her travels to Europe had a fling with Cary Riditz on Crete, and then came back to the States where a relationship with James Taylor began. All of that and more figures into the emotional stew at work in this album.

Despite James Taylor's difficulties with heroin, Mitchell became quite taken with him during their time together and was said to have been devastated when he broke off the relationship. It was around this time that she began recording Blue. Among the songs on the album believed to be inspired in whole or in part by her involvement with and parting from Taylor are "All I Want" and "Blue," as well as "This Flight Tonight."

On the song "Blue" - in this instance, Blue being the unnamed subject of the narrator's plea and love song - there is palpable and powerful emotion. On this song, as well as others on this and previous albums, Mitchell's performances send out very visceral waves of emotion; feelings unseen of course, but yet somehow moving from voice, piano wire, and guitar string through the air as a kind of empathetic current, deeply penetrating and deeply felt by those who receive it, some brought to tears and/or deep internal feeling as they listen to her songs. Mitchell seems to possess a certain kind of emanating emotional aura that flows out of these performances in a very tangible way.

Released in June 1971, Blue was a powerful watershed for Mitchell as well as a critical and commercial success. By September, Blue peaked at No. 15 on the Billboard albums chart, while hitting No. 3 on UK albums chart. In January 2000, the New York Times chose Blue as one of the 25 albums that represented "turning points and pinnacles in 20th-century popular music." Among the songs on Blue, in order of their appearance are: "All I Want," "My Old Man," "Little Green," "Carey," and "Blue" on side one, and "California," "This Flight Tonight," River," "A Case of You," and "The Last Time I Saw Richard" on side two.

Reviewing the album in 1971, Robert Hilburn of the Los Angeles Times called it "a marvelously sensitive portrait of love and romance..." He also added that it ran the gamut of emotions - "...There's happiness in 'My Old Man,' tenderness in the poignant 'Little Green,' mischievousness in 'Carey,' regret in 'This Flight Tonight,' longing in 'River' and a kind of shattered idealism in 'The Last Time I Saw Richard.'

"Little Green" - the song available at the top of this story - is autobiographical and dates to 1964 when Mitchell became pregnant by her boyfriend at the time who later left her. Joni had given birth to the child in February 1965, naming her Kelly Dale Anderson, choosing the name after the color, kelly green. The child, initially placed in foster care while Joni struggled as a poor folk singer in Toronto, was later given up for adoption. "I was dirt poor," she later explained. "An unhappy mother does not raise a happy child. It was difficult parting with the child, but I had to let her go." Mitchell wrote "Little Green" in 1967.

The existence of her daughter was not publicly known until 1993, when a roommate from Mitchell's art school days in the 1960s sold the story to a tabloid magazine. Kelly's adoptive parents, David and Ida Gibb, renamed her Kilauren. Joni and her daughter were reunited in 1997 and since then a number of press accounts have appeared about their relationship.

Other songs on the album are not sad in the way that "Little Green" is sad, but most are soul-wrenching in other ways. And some, like "California," describe travels in Europe with a longing to be home. Still, it is the love and loss-of-love songs, such as "River," that have the deep and abiding power in this album.

"River," the third track on side two of Blue, has become one of Joni Mitchell's most famous songs. It's cast in a Christmas setting, believed to be southern California where Mitchell was then living, along La Brea Avenue in Los Angeles. In the song, the narrator is in a painful time, dealing with a recent breakup and not feeling particularly cheery. She longs to escape her emotional difficulties. "I wish I had a river I could skate away on," she sings, a river so long it "would teach my feet to fly." In Canada, no doubt, Mitchell, in her youth, likely found a river or two to skate away on. But in southern California, no frozen rivers were available to take her away from her sadness. The song's spare, piano-driven arrangement paints a vivid picture of loss, longing, and some self-blame as well.

And although "River," was not intended to be a holiday song, it is now often heard during the holiday season when Christmas music is played. In fact, more than 100 artists have covered the song, including Taylor, who put "River" on his own Christmas album.

"Most Christmas songs are light and shallow, but 'River' is a sad song," Taylor explained. "It starts with a description of a commercially produced version of Christmas in Los Angeles . . . then juxtaposes it with this frozen river, which says, 'Christmas here is bringing me down.' It only mentions Christmas in the first verse. Then it's, 'Oh, I wish I had a river I could skate away on' - wanting to fall into this landscape that she remembers." Taylor also adds: "It's such a beautiful thing, to turn away from the commercial mayhem that Christmas becomes and just breathe in some pine needles." But he adds, "It's a really blue song."

The demise of the personal relationship is the major point of the song, as Mitchell turns the blame on herself at one point: "I'm so hard to handle / I'm selfish and I'm sad / Now I've gone and lost the best baby I've ever had." So she's thinking maybe she's made a big mistake here, sending her lover away. And about now, she really needs that river.

During his Washington Post interview, Taylor asked rhetorically: "Do I want to know who she made cry, who she made say goodbye?...Well, I haven't asked her that question. That's the only mystery in it: Who was it whose heart she broke?... There were a lot of us." In fact, some believe the song is actually about Graham Nash, as she wrote this particular song in 1969, and sang it publicly in late 1969 as "River/Willy."

"River" is also one of Mitchell's songs that has received wider exposure through its use in Hollywood films and TV shows. Over the years, the song has been used in televised episodes of: Thirtysomething(1987), The Wonder Years(1988), Ally McBeal(2000), Alias(2002), and ER(2007). It was also used in the films Almost Famous(2000) and Love Actually(2003). In fact, many of Mitchell's songs have been used in various films, TV programs, and documentaries over the years - garnering at least 85 soundtrack credits to date, according to Imdb.com, the movie data base website. In other cases, her music has made it into the film's narrative or dialogue as in the 1998 film, You've Got Mail, in which there are numerous references to Mitchell's songs by Tom Hanks and Meg Ryan.

After her North American tour, she began residing at David Geffen's house in Los Angeles. She would also sometimes travel in Geffen's social circles. In 1972 she and Geffen attended a fundraiser for Democrat George McGovern's presidential campaign. There she met Jack Nicholson and Warren Beatty, among others. She and Jackson Browne by this time were ending their relationship, and Geffen sought to cheer up his friend and housemate by taking her away from the L.A. scene for a time with a trip to Paris.
Joni would later write about Geffen and Paris in one of her songs, described below. At this point in her career, her contract with the Reprise record label had ended, and coincidentally, housemate David Geffen was then starting his own recording label, Asylum, which Joni signed on with. Blue, Joni Mitchell sold her house in Laurel Canyon, and purchased a piece of property near Half Moon Bay in British Columbia, Canada where she could have privacy and quiet not available to her in Hollywood. In the latter half of 1971 she retreated to this property for a time where she built a small house. When she needed to be in L.A. for recording or other business, she would stay with her agent, David Geffen. By February of 1972, Joni resumed performing, beginning a 13-city North American tour. Jackson Browne, then a rising singer-songwriter, became her opening act for the tour, and the two became involved in what would be something of a stormy relationship.
Mitchell's albums following Blue kept her career on an upward trajectory. Her fifth album, For the Roses, released in October 1972, did well on the music charts, rising to No. 11 on Billboard and also going gold. A single from the album, "You Turn Me On, I'm a Radio," peaked at No. 25 on Billboard for two weeks in February 1973, her first American hit single.

Two other songs of note from this album - "Cold Blue Steel and Sweet Fire," about a heroin addict, and "Judgment of the Moon and Stars" (Ludwig's Tune), inspired in part by Beethoven - were also popular tracks. In 2007, For The Roses was one of 25 recordings chosen that year by the Library of Congress to be added to the National Recording Registry - the only one of her albums so far selected for that distinction.

The new band helped power songs like "Raised on Robbery," which cast Mitchell as a hard rocker. Backing her now on a tune like "Robbery" were fellow Canadian Robbie Robertson on guitar (later of The Band) and also Tom Scott on saxophone. David Crosby and Graham Nash contributed background vocals on "Free Man in Paris." And several other musicians also contributed throughout the album.

Geffen was Mitchell's agent from nearly the beginning of her career, and he would be around her and her friends not only in recording, contract, and negotiating sessions, but also on social and informal occasions. In the Laurel Canyon years, he would visit with Joni and friends and help her when she needed a friend to lean on or a place to stay.

"Free Man In Paris" is a song that hits at the travail of those who work in the popular music industry, and in particular, a guy like Geffen who was then engaged with many pop artists "stoking the star-making machinery behind the popular song."
Court and Spark, came in January 1974 and would become her most commercially successful album. It went to No. 2 on the Billboard albums chart and No. 1 on the Cashbox chart.
Mitchell, who had already begun taking swipes at the pop music industry in earlier songs, would have a double effect with this song, as a thank you to her friend and agent for his hard work in helping her, but also as a critique of the industry that was taking a toll on its own, and sometimes, as Joni saw it, trying to crush her art in favor of dollars. There would be more of Mitchell's music industry critique in the years ahead.

The way I see it he said
You just can't win it
Everybody's in it for their own gain
You can't please 'em all
There's always somebody calling you down
I do my best
And I do good business
There's a lot of people asking for my time
They're trying to get ahead
They're trying to be a good friend of mine

I was a free man in Paris
I felt unfettered and alive
There was nobody calling me up for favors
And no one's future to decide
You know I'd go back there tomorrow
But for the work I've taken on
Stoking the star maker machinery
Behind the popular song

I deal in dreamers
And telephone screamers
Lately I wonder what I do it for
If l had my way
I'd just walk through those doors
And wander
Down the Champs Elysées
Going cafe to cabaret
Thinking how I'll feel when I find
That very good friend of mine

I was a free man in Paris
I felt unfettered and alive
Nobody was calling me up for favors
No one's future to decide
You know I'd go back there tomorrow
But for the work I've taken on
Stoking the star maker machinery
Behind the popular song

Geffen, meanwhile, may have felt that he was in the meat grinder too, but was soon doing quite well in the music business. In fact, by 1970 he had founded Asylum Records with Elliot Roberts, the label that Mitchell had joined for her albums, For The Roses, Court and Spark, and others to come. In fact, Asylum would also sign a number of artists, among them: Jackson Browne, Bob Dylan, Tom Waits, Linda Ronstadt, and others. By 1972, Asylum would be acquired by Warner Communications and merged with Elektra Records.

Geffen went on to become a Warner Brothers executive for a time, establish Geffen Records in 1980, DGC Records in 1990, and in 1994, one of the three founders of DreamWorks SKG. As of 2014, Geffen's estimated net worth was $6 billion, making him one of the richest people in the entertainment industry.

So, while David Geffen might have been a free man in Paris momentarily in the early 1970s, enjoying some well-deserved R&R, as history would seem to suggest, he went back to work and built himself a nice little entertainment empire.

Still, "Free Man in Paris" has a nice airy feel to it, and is an enjoyable and relatable piece of music, especially for any listener who has an overbearing, high-pressure work load and a longing to find some escape, whether Paris or the Great North Woods.

Meanwhile, Mitchell herself was "courting and sparking," as she would later put it, beginning a relationship with L.A. Express drummer John Guerin. In 1974, Joni purchased a Spanish style home on a private road in the Bel Air section of L.A., and she and Guerin set up house there.

She began working with some of the best musicians in the jazz and fusion worlds, composing new music, and winning their respect, among them - bass player Jaco Pastorius, drummer Don Alias, saxophonist Wayne Shorter (all of whom worked with the progressive jazz group Weather Report), jazz guitarist Pat Metheny, and others.
Hissing was where a lot of people got off the Joni bus." But Joni Mitchell, like Bob Dylan, was not about to be circumscribed by her fans' preferences. She had to follow her muse and move into new territory; that was just who she was. So the music continued, and so did the poetry, now in a different form.
In late 1978, Charles Mingus, the famous jazz bassist, composer, and orchestra leader, asked her to work with him on his last project. Mingus was then in the final stages of Lou Gehrig's disease. The album Joni helped produce and compose for him, Mingus, was released after his death in June 1979.

In 1982-1992 Joni Mitchell was married to bassist and sound engineer Larry Klein, and during that decade, with Klein's help and others, she released more albums, three on Geffen Records - Wild Things Run Fast in 1982, Dog Eat Dog in 1985, and Chalk Mark in a Rain Storm in 1988. In the popular market, however, much of this work did not fare well. The 1980s were also a time when Mitchell broadened her social critique taking aim at televangelists in one of her songs, while supporting causes such as the plight of Native Americans (Wounded Knee incident). She also continued to level barbs at the music industry. In a 1995 Vogue interview with writer Charles Gandee, she noted: "...Another thing was that in the eighties we moved into a particularly unromantic period in music. Videos had just begun, and they had a tendency to feature cold women with dark lipstick and stilettos grinding men's hands into the ground. It was an anti-love period, and my work - Wild Things Run Fast, in particular - was a joyous celebration of love, which basically made people sick."

In the 1990s she regained some of her popularity. Night Ride Home, released in March 1991, was closer to her earlier acoustic work. Her next album, Turbulent Indigo, also viewed by some critics as having more accessible material, though still offering social critique at turns, was called a strong comeback. Turbulent Indigo won two Grammy Awards, including Best Pop Album. In the late 1990s she re-united with her daughter, Kilauren Gibb, and her grandchildren. In the year 2000, Mitchell turned out a collection of standards along with a couple of her older songs with Both Sides Now, which received a Grammy award for Best Traditional Pop Vocal Album. In 2007, jazz pianist Herbie Hancock released his River: The Joni Letters, an album dedicated to Mitchell's music, and also the first jazz album to win Album of the Year at the Grammy Awards.

In recent years, Mitchell has collected a variety of honors and awards for her musical and songwriting accomplishments. In December 1995, Billboard honored her with The Century Award, its highest award for distinguished creative achievement. In 1996, she received the Governor General's Performing Arts Award for Lifetime Artistic Achievement, Canada's highest honor in the performing arts. In 1997, she was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. In April 2000, the TNT cable TV network presented a celebration in her honor at the Hammerstein Ballroom in New York City, with an all-star cast of performers singing her songs, from Elton John to Diana Krall. In 2002 she became only the third popular Canadian singer/songwriter to be appointed a Companion of the Order of Canada, that country's highest civilian honor. She also received a Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award that year. In 2007 she was inducted into the Canadian Songwriters Hall of Fame and Canada Post also honored her that year with a postage stamp. In 2015, she was awarded the SFJAZZ Lifetime Achievement Award. Yet for Joni Mitchell, perhaps the highest praise has come from her peers and those who have been touched by her words and music.

Joni Mitchell's music and poetry have touched a lot of people. Those who heard her perform or listened to her songs in her early years seem to have been especially moved by her ability to reach into their inner core.

David Crosby, awed from the first time he heard her, would simply say of her singing and songrwriting, "there's some magic that took place there." Gene Shay from Philadelphia's Second Fret, where Joni played in her early years, echoed a similar sentiment about her performances: "Everyone was saying that there was a magic to her songs," said Shay. "She'd come up with these marvelous melodies and wonderful words."

"Joni exorcises her demons by writing those songs," said Stephen Stills in a 1974 Time magazine story on Joni, "and in so doing she reaches way down and grabs the essence of something very private and personal to women." True enough, but it wasn't just women she touched - though women did seem to have an extra sensory something that "got" what she was sending out.

"When I first saw her, hardly anybody was there...I mean the coffeehouse was empty. She was standing almost a little pigeon-toed. She was all involved in tuning her guitar, and she covered her face with her hair. It's almost like she wants to erase who she is, and just let the voice be, let the songs be who she is. Then she started to sing "I Had a King," [a poignant song about an ill-fitting marriage with the opening lines, 'I had a King in a salt-rusted carriage / Who carried me off to his country for marriage too soon...'] I was going through a divorce then. And I just felt, I don't know what it was about that song. Talk about a new way of conveying--through music, through words--a new way of conveying an existential reality... It was really something... And, oh, I just started to sob. ...She sang it as if she was singing for me. She was my voice, you know... She was everybody's voice... I was amazed that she was so young; there was so much wisdom in her work."
The Riverboat coffeehouse in Toronto where Joni was playing. Malka was simply knocked out by what she heard:
Malka that night would talk with Joni after she performed to the mostly empty coffeehouse, telling her she had something special and could become a star. The two became life-long friends and Malka would compile a book on Joni in 2014 based on the conversations she had with her over 30 years, Joni Mitchell: In Her Own Words.

Yet women in particular looked up to Joni Mitchell as a trailblazer and would grow up with her music over the years. In 2003, filmmaker Susan Lacy, who made the 90-minute PBS documentary, Joni Mitchell: Woman of Heart and Mind for the "American Masters" TV series, also offered her personal views on what Mitchell meant to her:
Joni Mitchell: Woman of Heart and Mind: "Joni took this really potent popular image - that had been building for seven or eight years anyway - the California girl, the Beach Boys' girl, the beautiful golden girl with the long, blonde hair parted in the middle. And Joni not only was the girl, but she was also the Bob Dylan, the Paul Simon, the Lennon and McCartney, writing it. I mean, she was the whole package. She was the subject and she was the painter. And that was incredibly powerful for people."
In my teens, 20's, and even into my 30's, when I was disturbed or needed to reflect on things, I would sit at the piano and play Joni Mitchell songs. When I had children, my favorite song to sing with them was "Circle Game," which they learned from the time they could sit up. I loved her music then and still do. Her songs were a touchstone to my own experiences and emotions. I grew up listening to Joni Mitchell - going from my teenage years into adulthood.

I saw her as the free spirit we all wanted to be. She represented an incredibly interesting mix of mysticism, beauty, talent, and femininity but, with a backbone of steel. She was doing it her way. Wouldn't we all like to be like that?

Love, for Joni Mitchell, during much of her career, was more than just love. Her love relationships fueled her creative process. She loved being in love; it inspired her; it was how she wrote much of her material. "Being in love is extremely important to her muse," said jazz musician and producer Larry Klein, her husband for ten years in the 1980s. "A lot of her creative impulses come from whatever that phenomenon is that happens to us when we fall in love." Joni was a free spirit in her dealings with men, given licence in the era of "sex, drugs and rock n roll" to be whoever she wanted to be. And she pushed it to the limit. She acted just like men had for eons. But as a genuine romantic, she also took her relationships to heart, good and bad. And that is clear in her music. Sometimes though, the scars ran deep. A few bad depressions and one rumored suicide attempt appear to be part of that history. When Rolling Stone magazine included her by name in an early 1970s story with a line graphic connecting partners in the Laurel Canyon love nest, Joni was hurt and angry. She saw the age-old double standard at work. And although there were marriages and near marriages in her life's course, Joni seemed to have a compulsion to stay free. "I remember getting a telegram from Greece from Joan," said Graham Nash of his early 1970s relationship with her. "The last line of which was, 'If you hold sand too tightly in your hand, it will run through your fingers.' It was Joan's way of saying goodbye to me." And so she remained: in love, recovering from love, or on the hunt for love through much of her career. Of course, the record for all of this - or at least some of it - is found in her lyrics, explicit and between the lines, in the hundreds of songs she has written. It's a legacy of heart and soul, delight and torment, doubt and self discovery; a legacy that remains an open book of one person's journey with life and love.

"Back in 1968, when I was 30, my entire life blew up. I had a life plan and it collapsed for no rational reason. I had been a newspaper reporter in New York but left the job to help editor Clay Felker start New York magazine. My marriage was breaking up and I was falling in love with Clay. The song that carried me through those years and all stages of my life is "Both Sides Now" by Joni Mitchell..."

In that song, Sheehy found Mitchell's voice to be genuine, neither "cynical or put off by life;" she admitted her confusion while still marveling at what she saw around her, though shedding her illusions. "In 1969, after my divorce," said Sheehy, "I let go of my illusions about marriage."

Some years later, after a second marriage and after her husband had died in 2008, Sheehy was devastated. "I put on Joni's version [of "Both Side Now"] with strings from 2000 and heard a deeper voice full of sorrow and wine and cigarettes. Eventually I found my way out of that dark place and dared to love again."

Yet Joni Mitchell is more than simply a troubadour of the female soul or a love balladeer - as anyone who has followed her career knows.

Whether finding exquisite phrasing to capture an image or some moment of the heart; using her "weird chords" (open tuning) to bend the sound for the right tonal conveyance; or pushing the bounds of experimental jazz, Joni Mitchell has been a thoughtful and pioneering musician.
In addition, her interviews, especially in the later years, are full of thoughtful, honest and sometimes stinging critique. She became outspoken on a range of topics, whether the state of the environment or the corruption of modern culture - including her own music industry. Still, for millions, it will be her poetry and music that bear the lasting gifts - whether from the "acoustic Joni" or the "jazzy Joni."
Although this piece has explored more of the early parts of her career, and is meant more for those who know little about her, there is much more detail on the life and work of Joni Mitchell at her website, JoniMitchell.com. See also the various Joni Mitchell biographies, interviews, and profiles noted below in "Sources" at the end of this article.

For additional stories on music at this website see the "Annals of Music" page. See also "Noteworthy Ladies," a topics page with additional story choices on famous women. Thanks for visiting - and if you like what you find here, please make a donation to help support the research and writing at this website. Thank you. - Jack Doyle

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Date Posted: 15 July 2015
Last Update: 19 July 2019
Comments to: jdoyle@pophistorydig.com

Article Citation:
Jack Doyle, "Joni's Music: 1962-2000s,"
PopHistoryDig.com, July 15, 2015.

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"Joni Mitchell," in Holly George-Warren and Patricia Romanowski (eds), The Rolling Stone Encyclopedia of Rock & Roll, New York: Rolling Stone Press, 3rd Edition, 2001, pp. 657-659.
Sources, Links & Additional Information
Stephen Holden, "The Evolution of the Singer-Songwriter"(Joni Mitchell section), in Anthony DeCurtis and James Henke (eds), The Rolling Stone Illustrated History of Rock `n Roll, New York: Random House, 1992, pp. 483-484.
Joni Mitchell Website.
Wally Breese, "Biography: 1964-1968, Early Years," JoniMitchell.com, January 1998.

Mark Scott, "Oh, But California...," 2014 Biography Series, Part 2 of 16, JoniMitchell .com, May 16, 2014.

"Joni Mitchell," Wikipedia.org.

A.L. McClain, "Two Single Acts Survive a Marriage," Detroit News, February 6, 1966.

RS Editors, "Introducing Joni Mitchell: The Canadian-Born Singer-Songwriter Makes Folk Music Hip Again," Rolling Stone, May 17, 1969.

"Joni Mitchell Joins Reprise," Record World, March 16, 1968.

Susan Gordon Lydon, "In Her House, Love," New York Times, April 20, 1969.

"Rock Stars Will Dominate Cavett Show Next Tuesday," New York Times, August 12, 1969.

"Woodstock (song)," Wikipedia.org.

Mike Evans, Paul Kingsbury, Woodstock: Three Days That Rocked the World.

Gary Von Tersch, Album Review, "Joni Mitchell, Ladies of the Canyon" (Reprise), Rolling Stone, June 11, 1970.

"Ladies of the Canyon," Wikipedia.org.

Robert Christgau, The Village Voice, July 30, 1970.

Bernard Weinraub, "Isle of Wight Festival Turns Slightly Discordant," New York Times, August 30, 1970.

Michael Watts, "Glimpses of Joni," Melody Maker, September 19, 1970.

Robert Hilburn, "Joni Mitchell's Bid for Top Album," Los Angeles Times, June 29, 1971.

Lynn Van Matre, "Singing-Songwriters: 1971 Is Woman's World," Chicago Tribune, July 4, 1971.

Cameron Crowe, "Joni Mitchell Defends Herself: The Rolling Stone Interview," Rolling Stone, July 26, 1979.

Jack Hamilton, "Why Joni Mitchell's 'Blue' Is the Greatest Relationship Album Ever," The Atlantic, February 14, 2013.

John MacFarlane, "Listening Again to Blue Gives Writer a Case of Joni Mitchell," Toronto Star, March 6, 2013.

Mick Brown, "The Flowering of Joni Mitchell," Telegraph Magazine, February 23, 1991.

Stephen Holden, "Joni Mitchell Finds the Peace of Middle Age," New York Times, March 17, 1991.

David Wild, " A Conversation with Joni Mitchell," RollingStone.com, May 30, 1991.

William Ruhlman, "From Blue to Indigo," , February 17, 1995.

Bill Higgins, "Both Sides at Last," Los Angeles Times, April 8, 1997.

J. Freedom du Lac, "Joni Mitchell's Blue 'River' Flows Onto Holiday Playlists," Washington Post, Thursday, December 21, 2006.

"For the Roses," Wikipedia.org.

"Free Man in Paris," Wikipedia.org.

Michael Posner, "Little Green a Little Blue," Toronto Globe and Mail, April 11, 1998.

Andrew Purvis, "Joni, No Longer Blue," , June 24, 2001.

"Joni Mitchell: For Free (Live) HQ," YouTube .com.

"Clouds (Joni Mitchell album)," Wikipedia .org.

David Cleary, AllMusic.com, Review of Joni Mitchell's Clouds.

Wally Breese, "A Conversation With David Crosby," JoniMitchell.com, March 15, 1997.

"Inductee: Joni Mitchell," Rock & Roll Hall of Fame, 1997.

David Wild, "Women in Rock: Joni Mitchell," Rolling Stone, October 31, 2002

PBS-TV, "Joni Mitchell: Woman of Heart and Mind," American Masters, April 2003.

"Filmmaker Interview - Susan Lacy," American Masters/PBS.org, April 2nd, 2003.

David Yaffe, (Dance), "Working Three Shifts, And Outrage Overtime," New York Times, February 4, 2007.

Sheila Weller,"The Rebel Angels," Vanity Fair, April 2008; Excerpted from, Girls Like Us: Carole King, Joni Mitchell, Carly Simon-and the Journey of a Generation, New York: Atria Books / Simon & Schuster, 2008.

George Bulanda, "Sixties Folklore" (interview with Chuck Mitchell), Detroit News, February 24, 2009.

"Joni Mitchell Biography - 1965 to 1967 (Chapter 8)," Girls Like Us - The Music.

Jeff Meshel, "Joni Mitchell, `Cactus Tree'," Jeff Meshel's World, August 5, 2011.

David Wild, "Morrissey Interviews Joni Mitchell," Rolling Stone, March 6, 1997.

Wally Breese, "A Conversation with David Crosby," JoniMitchell.com, March 15, 1997.

Jason Ankeny, "Album Review, Blue, Joni Mitchell," AllMusic.com.

Tom Manoff, "Joni Mitchell's Stylistic Journey," , April 2nd, 2003.

Barney Hoskyns, "Lady of the Canyon," The Observer, October 15, 2005.

Susan Whitall, "Joni's Journey; From an Apartment in Detroit, Mitchell Composed Some of Her Most Famous Songs," Detroit News, June 5, 2008.

Tom Casciato, "Loving Joni Mitchell: You Don't Have to Be Gay," , March 7, 2011.

Rich Kamerman, "Joni Mitchell Part 2 - Lady Of The Canyon," KamerTunesBlog, October 1, 2011.

Ruth Charnock, "Joni Mitchell: Music & Feminism," United Academics Journal Of Social Science, May 2012.

Katherine Monk, Joni: The Creative Odyssey of Joni Mitchell, Greystone Books, September 7, 2012.

Brian D. Johnson, "Leonard Cohen's Tale of Redemption," (Canada), October 22, 2012.

Roger Friedman, "Graham Nash: Listening to Joni Mitchell's 'Blue' is 'Quite Difficult for Me Personally'," ShowBiz411.com, November 15, 2012.

Graham Nash, "The Beatles: Please, Please Me, and Joni Mitchell: Blue," in Jeff Gold, 101 Essential Rock Records/The Golden Age of Vinyl From the Beatles to the Sex Pistols, Gingko Press Inc.; 1st edition, November 30, 2012.

Leah Collins, "Throwback Thursday: Cartooning with Joni Mitchell and Adrienne Clarkson," (Canada), June 6, 2013.

Graham Nash, "'Come to My House and I'll Take Care of You': Graham Nash on His Romance with Joni Mitchell and Making Music with Crosby and Stills," (London), September 14, 2013.

Marc Myers, "The Many Sides of Joni Mitchell's 'Both Sides Now'; Joni Mitchell's Classic Speaks to the Many Stages of Life, Says Gail Sheehy," Wall Street Journal, August 19, 2014.

Caroline Howe, "The Secret Torment of Joni Mitchell: Unflinching Insight into the Reclusive 70s Icon's Battles..." The Daily Mail (London), September 1, 2014.

Malka Marom, Joni Mitchell: In Her Own Words, ECW Press, September 2014.

Sean O'Hagan, "Joni Mitchell: The Sophistication of Her Music Sets Her Apart from Her Peers - Even Dylan," TheGuardian .com, Sunday, October 26, 2014.

Judith Timson, "Happy Birthday Joni Mitchell, and Thanks for Everything," Toronto Star, November 7, 2014.

Michelle Davies, "Joni Mitchell's Colourful, And Often Tragic, Life Story," Marie Claire, November 2014.

Marc Myers, "When Joni Mitchell Met Cary Raditz, Her 'Mean Old Daddy'," Wall Street Journal, November 11, 2014.

Marc Myers, Anatomy of a Song, "Joni Mitchell on the Muse Behind 'Carey'," Wall Street Journal, November 11, 2014.

Lisa Robinson, "An Oral History of Laurel Canyon, The 60s and 70s Music Mecca," Vanity Fair, March 2015.

Kenneth Partridge, "Joni Mitchell: One of Music's Greatest Singer-Songwriters Creates an Inspired Box Set," M Music & Musicians, April 2015.

"Joni Mitchell: Seven Essential Songs," (Canada), April 1, 2015.

Maura Johnston, "Joni Mitchell's Long Battle With 'Male Egos'," Refinery29.com, April 2, 2015.

Jeff Meshel, "215: Joni Mitchell, 'Blue'," jmeshel.com, April 3, 2015.

"Joni Mitchell Through the Years," Photo Gallery, Houston Chronicle, April 28, 2015.

"Paintings by Year," Joni Mitchell artwork, JoniMitchell.com.

Bridget Oates, "Joni Mitchell, Bob Dylan & Doug Kershaw Played Johnny Cash's First Show, June 7, 1969″( w/video), GuitarPlayer .com, June 5, 2015.

Tom Pinnock, "James Taylor: 'It Was Wonderful Working With Joni Mitchell'," (U.K), June 19, 2015.

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# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Young Joni contracted polio when she was nine, and spent time in a polio ward where she first began to sing for others - also beating the prediction she would never walk again. Growing up in the late 1950s she listened to a lot of local Canadian radio, but classical music appears to have first captured her ear.