The Delete BinThe scene is the Newport Folk Festival in June 2022; a 79-year-old Joni Mitchell is on stage for the first time in nine years. She is surrounded by musical luminaries, all of whom owe an artistic debt to her in their own independent explorations of styles, musical colours, and emotional sentiments. The scene at Newport is a tribute concert of sorts, crucially with the guest of honour present to experience such well-deserved appreciation. A large part of the joy in the event is knowing that Joni herself finally, and undeniably, knows just how much she is loved, having lived long enough to literally sit on a throne surrounded by loving subjects and followers.
When she got her start by the mid-1960s, Mitchell had to forge ahead and make her own way through the dark forest of the music industry, employing her unique artistic vision, creative drive, and at times sheer bloody mindedness to carve her own path. This was an era when it was harder for independently-minded artists to determine what a music career can be beyond the demands of record labels and promoters and chart placements. These were, and are, not traditionally appreciated in women artists, or in women in general. Today her songs remain undiminished, often called confessional much to their author’s annoyance who never found much value in the term. You can understand why if you love them.
In the end, they’re songs about us listeners and the human experience we share as much as they may be about Joni Mitchell. Here are 20 examples to prove the point.
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The Dawntreader
Establishing herself in folk scenes in Canada and the United States, and as a songwriter for other artists, 1968’s Song to a Seagull was Mitchell’s initial foray as a recording artist. In the tradition of far-traveled folk songs, “The Dawntreader” is an update on seagoing themes reflected in the album’s title. On it, Mitchell weaves a tapestry of ocean-roaming scenes far from the bustle of cities, and possibly alluding to her friendship with producer David Crosby, an avid sailor.
Beyond those associations, this early cut characterized by ghostly textures, gossamer guitar, and mythological images contains a golden thread to follow in Joni Mitchell’s artistic journey; the tension between the impulse to wander versus the pull to settle down into a conventional life. Which one might provide the greatest sense of liberation and contentment? Joni Mitchell would spend a career exploring that question.
Listen: The Dawntreader
Chelsea Morning
A celebration of acoustic guitar and hammered dulcimer, “Chelsea Morning” from 1969’s Clouds is one of Mitchell’s most life-affirming songs. The title evokes New York’s Chelsea Hotel, a rock n’ roll landmark and site of many an encounter between Sixties pop music personalities. Having the eye of a visual artist, Mitchell dedicates this song not to carnality specifically, but rather to the simple beauty of the décor.
This series of still life paintings is full of literal colours, from the sun pouring in like butterscotch to the rainbow on the wall. It’s a reflection of emotional colours as well, with a narrator flush with the bliss of what occurred the night before, and seizing the day that follows by noticing her surroundings while being conscious of her own vitality, and delighting in all of that for all she is worth.
Listen: Chelsea Morning
For Free
A three-record veteran of the music industry by 1970, Mitchell considers the age-old relationship between art and commerce on this track; a fractious dichotomy that she would revisit over her career. In this case the word free holds all kinds of meaning and remains artfully unresolved as the man on a street corner plays the clarinet for free while Mitchell considers her own monetized fame as she listens.
On this cut, she ponders the nature of music itself and how it’s often perceived; a valued commodity when paired with fame, and something to ignore when it isn’t. Her piano aches with longing in this tune that reads as one of her most autobiographical, expressing her distance from the world around her as she captures a moment of singular beauty coupled with an outpouring of melancholy; yet another important dichotomy in her work.
Listen: For Free
Ladies of the Canyon
Depicted as a scene on the cover of her 1970 zeitgeist-capturing album, the title track “Ladies of the Canyon” celebrates a place and time and the ladies who embody both; Laurel Canyon in late 1960s Los Angeles. This was an artistic enclave that made international waves and, years later, inspired several documentaries featuring many of the high-profile L.A-based rock figureheads who once lived there.
On this cut, Joni lauds those who nourished that fertile environment; the previously unsung ladies who created a soft place for those hard-hitting rock n’ roll pioneers to land. The song’s happy-sad tone is both a celebration and, underneath, perhaps a lament as she views her nurturing neighbours at a distance; they who are seemingly untroubled and content in their supportive roles. Significantly, with Trina, Annie, and Estrella in place, Joni herself is absent from inclusion.
Listen: Ladies of the Canyon
A Case of You
Looming large on 1971’s Blue, “A Case of You” lives up to the promise of that album’s reputation for being the quintessential break-up record. This song contains the whole story; an emotionally complex tale of a relationship at its end for one who longs for a life beyond what a domestic one can offer, no matter how very, very, very fine a house it may be.
All at once, the song positions lost love as a kind of homesickness, complete with feelings of displacement and transience in its absence as residual feelings endure. Mitchell proves herself as a songwriter with a keen sense of detail as to the vagaries of the human heart when it comes to love. Here on this tune, affection lives alongside an ardent need to move on; both bitter and sweet in equal measure as life itself often is.
Listen: A Case of You
California
“California” remains to be one of Joni Mitchell’s most beloved and melodically playful travelogues. In it, she removes herself from familiar environs long enough to miss them and understand them all the better. Ringing dulcimer in hand, her bright and youthful vocal bursts with joie de vivre in a montage of vivid European scenes set during challenging times amid the war and bloody changes.
From Paris to the Greek isles and onto Spain, Mitchell expounds on what insights being away from home lend to her as to her place in the world. The result is another expression of the homesickness in “A Case of You”, repositioned here for the love her adopted country and state that turns out, after long travels, to be the closest thing to home she’s got. This doesn’t mean she’s done with her tendency for wandering, of course.
Listen: California
Let the Wind Carry Me
On 1972’s “Let the Wind Carry Me” from her fifth record For the Roses, Joni Mitchell considers the differences in values between her and her parents with the realization that she comes by a wanderer’s life very honestly. Her piano is a contemplative late-night bluesy excursion; a departure from folkier textures and toward the jazzier end of the musical spectrum as her role as record producer with a specific sound in mind continued to evolve.
The song is fulsomely cinematic as she confronts her own history, examining what she really wants for herself in the present. More of an ensemble approach than the more solitary arrangements of the past, Mitchell is joined by Tom Scott’s interjecting saxophone, accompanying a chorus of Joni Mitchells in tight harmony; self-administered emotional support as she comes to a conclusion she can live with – at least momentarily.
Listen: Let the Wind Carry Me
Help Me
A major radio hit from 1974’s Court and Spark, “Help Me” is another examination of love and freedom; a theme Joni Mitchell hadn’t quite put to bed. Mitchell doubles down on a more jazz-oriented sound that remains radio-friendly, exploring the increasing complexities of love and commitment. “Help Me” looks at the difference between her own drive to balance love with personal freedom versus that of her rambling and gambling sweet talking ladies’ man of a lover.
Melodically complex, this song showcases her instincts and skills as a sophisticated arranger to buoy up her sound, which is down to Mitchell’s strength of personality and artistic vision. The result was her biggest hit single yet and one that carries Mitchell’s distinct musical signature as producer as well as singer-songwriter, leaving her image as Sixties blonde girl with acoustic guitar well behind her.
Listen: Help Me
The Same Situation
The title of this song that’s also featured on Court and Spark may relate to a theme recurring in her work; the constant pull and push to balance ambition with a longing for love. In this, “The Same Situation” is something of a sister track to “Help Me”; a conflicted tale of love, freedom, and self-consciousness, with plenty of doubt and anguish in that mix to make this song a powerful statement about what lovers expect of each other, and what they end of getting.
Another piano-driven tune, Mitchell adds subtle textures including soaring strings that captures that same cinematic quality she’s expanded on since For the Roses. Her singing on this tune is extraordinary, leaning into the themes of conflict and confusion over what it is she really wants in a lover, and what a lover might demand of her.
Listen: The Same Situation
Edith and the Kingpin
On 1975’s The Hissing of Summer Lawns, Joni Mitchell became less the diarist and more the novelist, drawing from her jaded Southern Californian environment populated by hustlers and ne’er do wells. “Edith and the Kingpin” is the story of a gangster’s moll who meets her paramour eye to eye in contrast to her demure rivals. Within it, it’s a story about women’s experiences in the face of male dominance that are decidedly contemporary.
This is one of Mitchell’s stickiest melodies despite its complexity, wrapped in jazzy changes. It’s certainly one of her most sublime vocal performances, scaling the heights while revealing hints of her lower register that would come to characterize her singing in later years. Brass and woodwind, fluid electric guitar, and murmuring electric piano provide a sterling counterpoint to this haunting tale with an equally haunting mood.
Listen: Edith and the Kingpin
The Hissing of Summer Lawns
Another novel inside of three minutes and change, Joni Mitchell creates a sympathetic tale of a woman made to become part of a collection by her husband as a kind of centerpiece his own accomplishments. Leaning even further into a soft jazz fusion sound, Mitchell’s voice is an emollient supplemented by her soaring scat singing in this song about possession, appearances, and lack of agency.
Significantly, Mitchell’s narrator isn’t judgmental of the woman herself, staying in her husband’s curated world with a love of some kind, her life still remaining to be her own choice. What is being judged is the social environment in which such tales are more common than not. “The Hissing of Summer Lawns” is a look at life in the leafy upper middle-class suburbs, hiding stories of dissatisfaction and denial amid verdant grass and cerulean swimming pools.
Listen: The Hissing of Summer Lawns
Coyote
In the next few years, Mitchell was involved in a few major rock music events. One was Bob Dylan’s Rolling Thunder Revue. Another was an appearance with The Band on their historic The Last Waltz. Her observational eye on the rock n’ roll touring life with some of the biggest names of the era reveals that such sojourns can represent a state of moral limbo where the usual rules don’t apply.
“Coyote” from 1976’s Hejira finds its narrator ardently pursued by a would-be suitor with his multiple irons in the fire when it comes to women. Joni sings of an unlikely affair with great bemusement, aware enough of its transient nature to have no regrets in retrospect. Mitchell’s ringing open-tuned chords and Jaco Pastorius’ warm basslines both add a kind of restfulness to a song about temporary connections in the indulgent mid-1970s.
Listen: Coyote
Refuge of the Roads
A road song of a different kind, this one isn’t so much a document of a rock n’ roll life, but rather one about being in between places while one figures things out. A culmination of all of these same kinds of themes she explored on the Hejira record, “Refuge of the Roads” is an expression of Mitchell’s propensity for the heroine’s journey while expressing the longing to find a place to belong, too.
By this time in her career, Joni Mitchell bore down on a new kind of sound that delved even deeper into impressionistic territory and further away from the right angles of most rock music. Jaco Pastorius’ bass is a multi-tonal marvel on this track, practically a second voice to Mitchell’s own, to create a kind of unresolved openness; exploring the musical in-between places in parallel to its lyrics.
Listen: Refuge of the Roads
Dreamland
Employing Africanized polyrhythms against a Calypso-like melodic lilt, “Dreamland” from 1977’s Don Juan’s Reckless Daughter is Joni Mitchell’s mesmeric and mythical sonic tapestry of peoples and cultures in the shadow of colonialism’s violent legacy. This is a song about the luxury of enjoying a place and then leaving it behind whenever one wishes, even if those who live there must remain, burdened with the weight of history.
Despite this grave subtext, “Dreamland” is one of Mitchell’s warmest travelogues, imbued with that same sense of restfulness we’ve heard on the album that precedes it. Former head Byrd Roger McGuinn recorded his jazz-rock version the year before. Joni’s turn is the more intimate; more a drum circle than a rock ensemble. A highlight is the backing vocal from Chaka Khan; an effusive and passionate texture that provides vital counterweight to Mitchell’s lead.
Listen: Dreamland
Moon at the Window
Having worked with several prominent jazz players for many years by this time, including the irascible genius Charles Mingus, Joni Mitchell’s ear caught the radio again by 1983’s Wild Things Run Fast. The atmospheric textures in a rock paradigm presented by The Police inspired her to explore similar avenues while not jettisoning jazz completely. “Moon at the Window” is one of the best examples of that fine balance.
This is a song about finding contentment in solitude and struggling with feelings of isolation all the while. Mitchell is the quintessential jazz singer here, joined by multitracked Jonis, and by the legendary Wayne Shorter’s impressionist soprano saxophone phrases as John Guerin’s drums and Larry Klein’s bass lock in. In a kind of turnaround, Police frontman Sting’s initial solo career would not sound entirely unlike this track, with any musical debt paid in full.
Listen: Moon at the Window
The Reoccuring Dream
By the mid-to-late Eighties Joni Mitchell who’d spent a good deal of her career singing of feelings and experiences as a reflection of our own as listeners, turned her artistic eye outward to the larger culture. She also leaned into new production approaches, always vigilant to preserve her artistic voice as evolving recording technology allowed her access to new toolsets. The positive result of this was music that’s less subject to easy categorization and evidence of Mitchell’s continuing boundary-pushing.
“The Reoccuring Dream” from 1988’s Chalkmark in a Rainstorm is a sound collage of vocal samples and snippets mixed with tightly arranged multitracked harmonies. The song creates a sense of depth and distance, as lyrics cast a satirical eye at mass media advertising in an increasingly corporately dominated world, hectoring us to dream all the wrong dreams of new-fangled kitchen appliances instead of lasting peace and justice.
Listen: The Reoccuring Dream
Two Grey Rooms
On 1991’s Night Ride Home, and after spending the Eighties in more experimental modes, Joni Mitchell pulled together all of her developed interests and strengths into a unified, warmer sound. This included the painterly impressionism in her melodies, tight jazz-inspired harmonies, and with the folk-pop textures heard in her music from the start. “Two Grey Rooms” closes the album, and exemplifies a renewed focus.
It’s also another of her songs that disproves Mitchell as an exclusively confessional singer-songwriter. It’s the tale of a privileged man who rejects his affluent life to live near the former lover of his youth whom he never got over; taking the two grey rooms near the docks to see him go to and from work each day, loving him from afar, close but also so distant. It is one of Mitchell’s most heartbreaking and heartfelt love songs.
Listen: Two Grey Rooms
Sex Kills
Reflecting her continuing interest in electronic textures mingled with traditional rock instrumentation, “Sex Kills” from 1994’s Grammy-winning Turbulent Indigo is a callback to her more political Eighties period. Violence, greed, disease, and unsustainable consumerism remained in place by 1994, and were only getting worse. The song certainly stood out on the radio as a bold set of statements about where we were heading as a civilization.
Mitchell’s textured voice is full of genuine concern, not judgement, accompanied by shards of distorted and echoey guitar that is a million miles away from her associations as a Sixties folk singer. But make no mistake: this is a protest song of epic proportions, exemplifying Mitchell’s social conscience but also her skill as a producer and songwriter as she delivers an impressionist painting of a society cast in a dark colour palette.
Listen: Sex Kills
Stay in Touch
On “Stay in Touch” from 1998’s Taming of the Tiger, Mitchell showed that her ability to write intimate songs about relationships remained undiminished, centering on people doing their best to manage their accumulated baggage while seeking to connect. This tune features her use of the Roland VG-8 Virtual Guitar to replicate her open-tunings, helping her to more easily realize the chord voicings offset here by the warm textures of Mark Isham’s muted trumpet.
This is a song infused with the wisdom that only advancing mileage can provide, and perhaps one Mitchell could only write by the late Nineties. By then, Joni had traveled far across many landscapes, with many characters joining her along the way. But this tune goes beyond Mitchell’s experiences, suggesting a good general rule applicable to all of us; to make ourselves available to each other even as we wander, which is as good a takeaway of Joni Mitchell’s work as any.
This Place
After decades of negotiating emotional territories between a sense of belonging and the freedom to wander, “This Place” from 2007’s Shine is the sound of a songwriter who’s come home at last. Full of brightness and loving affection for a landscape, the song is a delectable spread of guitar paired with Greg Leisz’s pedal steel and Bob Shepard’s soprano sax. But amid all of the bucolic grandeur in the first verse, there’s a catch in the ones that follow.
The place in question in this song is Mitchell’s sanctuary on British Columbia’s Sunshine Coast she purchased in the early 1970s; an arboreal landscape of forested, rocky outcroppings by the sea rich in resources perfect for Californian developers to grind down into gravel to make into soulless McMansions. After nearly forty years by then, they were still paving paradise and putting up parking lots, symbolically speaking. Luckily too, Joni remained in place to write about it.
Listen: This Place
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Runners up and bubbling under:
- Both Sides Now
- Urge for Going
- The Last Time I Saw Richard
- River
- Carey
- You Turn Me On, I’m a Radio
- A Free Man in Paris
- People’s Parties
- Raised on Robbery
- The Jungle Line
- In France They Kiss on Main Street
- Shadows and Light
- Black Crow
- Furry Sings the Blues
- Amelia
- The Dry Cleaner from Des Moines
- Night Ride Home
- The Sire of Sorrows (Job’s Sad Song)
- The Magdalene Laundries
- Shine
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Listeners across generations that certainly include other innovative and influential musicians, love Joni Mitchell. The greatest part about that is this: Joni Mitchell knows it. Over years of health challenges and at least one near miss in 2015, seeing her on stage with Brandi Carlisle, Wynonna Judd, and other songwriters and players at the 2022 Newport Folk Festival was a delivery system for pure wholesome joy. Once again, you could see how Joni knew how loved she is. They replayed the scene when she received a standing ovation at this year’s Grammys in celebration of her Best Folk Album win for Joni Mitchell at Newport, that show based on her appearances in 2022.
So many artistic geniuses pass their time on earth and then away, never fully knowing the magnitude of their work relative to the many lives it’s touched and then made better. Mitchell’s hero Vincent Van Gogh is a good example. And Joni Mitchell is on that level – a creative genius never to be replicated or replaced, rightly celebrated with the tremendous gratitude that comes with the sublime greatness of work that will endure in the same fashion.
For more on Joni Mitchell, check out jonimitchell.com for song lyrics, artwork, biographical information, and commentary.
If you have a hankering from more thoughts (and more songs!) from Joni Mitchell’s catalogue, here’s another list of 10 great Joni Mitchell Musical Moments from the back pages of The Delete Bin.
To get a taste of Joni Fest, check out this performance of Gershwin’s immortal “Summertime” at the Newport Folk Festival 2022 in which Joni takes center stage, literally enthroned, and with exceptional accompaniment by all concerned. There are several clips of performances from that same show. Do yourself a favour; go down that rabbit hole.
Also, Joni Mitchell and The Joni Jam are set to appear at the Hollywood Bowl in October. Keep your eyes and ears open for news and reviews.
Enjoy!
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