Singer and songwriter, born in Fort McLeod, Alberta, W Canada. Her compositions, highly original and personal in their lyrical imagery, first attracted attention among folk-music audiences in Toronto while she was still in her teens. She moved to the USA in the mid-1960s, and in 1968 recorded her first album, Joni Mitchell (1968). Other highly successful albums followed, including Clouds, Ladies of the Canyon (1969), and Blue (1970). Many of her songs, notably Both Sides Now (1971), have been recorded by other singers. Later albums include Songs of a Prairie Girl (2005).
| Joni Mitchell | ||
|---|---|---|
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Self-portrait of Mitchell on the cover of her 2000 release Both Sides Now. |
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| Background information | ||
| Birth name | Roberta Joan Anderson | |
| Born |
November 7, 1943 in Fort Macleod, Alberta, Canada |
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| Genre(s) | Folk, pop, rock, jazz, world music | |
| Occupation(s) | Songwriter, producer, musician | |
| Instrument(s) | Piano, guitar, dulcimer | |
| Years active | 1967-present | |
| Label(s) |
Reprise (1968–1971, 1994–2000) Asylum (1972–1981) Geffen (1982–1992) Nonesuch (2001–) |
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| Website | jonimitchell.com | |
Joni Mitchell, CC (born Roberta Joan Anderson on November 7, 1943) is a noted Canadian musician, songwriter, and painter.
Mitchell's musical career began in small nightclubs and busking on the streets of Toronto and in her native Western Canada. Mitchell achieved fame in the early 1970s and was considered a key part of the Southern California folk rock scene. Retrospective appraisals of Mitchell's work have often labeled her the "female Bob Dylan", , but Mitchell has rejected that comparison.
Mitchell is also an accomplished visual artist. A blunt critic of the music industry, Mitchell has stopped recording over the last several years and now focuses mainly on her visual art, although in October 2006 she announced that she is working on material for a new album.
Early life
The child of a grocer and a teacher, Mitchell was born and raised in Fort Macleod, Alberta until the age of nine, when the family moved to Saskatoon, Saskatchewan, which Mitchell considers her hometown.
As Mitchell prepared to leave her home in Saskatoon to relocate to Toronto, she became pregnant. The experience remained a private part of her life during the ascendance of her career, but she made allusions to it in several songs, most notably the song "Little Green," (from "Blue") and, years later, the song "Chinese Cafe" from "Wild Things Run Fast" ("Your kids are coming up straight/My child's a stranger/I bore her/But I could not raise her").
Career
1960s folk singer
Mitchell took her surname from a brief marriage to folksinger Chuck Mitchell in 1965.
Much of her initial acclaim was as a result of other artists covering her songs.
Mitchell's own 1967 recording of the song was released on the flip side of the 1972 single "You Turn Me On I'm A Radio", but was not released on an album until the Hits compilation in 1996. Not surprisingly for someone from the Canadian plains, Mitchell had a finely developed sense for the passings of seasons and comings of age, themes that would appear on her "The Circle Game", which Tom Rush recorded a well-received take of in 1968.
Mitchell's songwriting reached its highest visibility when Judy Collins had a top-ten hit in early 1968 with "Both Sides Now".
The songs on Mitchell's first two solo albums, Joni Mitchell (Song to a Seagull) (1968) and Clouds (1969), were archetypes of the nascent singer-songwriter movement of the time.
Early and mid-1970s chart success
Mitchell moved to California in late 1967. Mitchell wrote the song after missing and then hearing glorified tales about Woodstock. "For Free" is the first of Mitchell's many songs that underscore the dichotomy between the benefits of her stardom and its costs, both in terms of its pressure and of the loss of privacy and freedom it entails.
Mitchell's confessional approach deepened on Blue (1971), widely considered the best of this period, as well as a template for confessional songwriting.
The more straightforward rock influence was still strong on her next two albums, recorded for new label Asylum.
Court and Spark was also notable for the first echoes of the influence of jazz on Mitchell's work, and despite the commercial success of that album and the subsequent live record Miles of Aisles, backed by the 70s pop-jazz outfit L.A.
Mid to late 1970s jazz experimentation
Mitchell's 1975 album The Hissing of Summer Lawns was the first album to stylistically depart from the folk/pop foundation Mitchell had developed. Although many fans and other artists often cite Hissing as their favorite Mitchell work, it was not well received at the time of its release. (Mitchell and Rolling Stone have had a contentious relationship, initiated years earlier when RS featured a "tree" illustrating all of Mitchell's alleged romantic partners, primarily other musicians.)
During 1975 Mitchell also participated in several concerts in the Rolling Thunder Revue tours featuring Bob Dylan and Joan Baez, and in 1976, she performed as part of "The Last Waltz" by The Band.
Hejira (1976) continued Mitchell's trend toward jazz. The instrumentation is very intimate, consisting only of Mitchell's acoustic guitar, the electric guitar of Larry Carlton, and Jaco Pastorius's fretless bass guitar (on one track, Mitchell and Carlton reverse roles.) The songs themselves, however, featured densely metaphorical lyrics and swooping vocal melodies providing contrast and counterpoint to the jazz rhythms of the arrangements. This album also highlighted as never before the unusual "open" guitar tunings that Mitchell used. Mitchell was featured in several photographs on the cover, including one where she was disguised as a black man.
Mitchell's next work was to be a collaboration with legendary bassist Charles Mingus, who died before the project was completed in 1979. Mitchell finished the tracks with a band featuring Pastorius, Wayne Shorter and Herbie Hancock and the resulting free-form, sometimes arhythmic music was daring and eclectic.
Mitchell released Shadows and Light, a second live album that documented her recent tours, in 1980. 1982's Wild Things Run Fast marked a return to pop songwriting, including "Chinese Cafe/Unchained Melody" that incorporated the chorus and parts of the melody the famous Righteous Brothers hit, and "(You're So Square) Baby I Don't Care" - which charted higher than any Mitchell single since her 70s sales peak. Though it was influenced largely by Mitchell's marriage to producer Larry Klein, Mitchell complained that critics reduced the new music to a batch of "I love Larry" songs. Of Dolby's role, Mitchell later commented, "I was reluctant when Thomas was suggested because he had been asked to produce the record (by Geffen), and would he consider coming in as just a programmer and a player?
Chalk Mark in a Rainstorm (1988) saw Mitchell collaborating with multiple artists, including Willie Nelson, Billy Idol, Wendy and Lisa, Tom Petty and Don Henley.
After the release of Chalk Mark in a Rainstorm, Mitchell participated in Roger Waters' massive performance of The Wall in Berlin.
Turbulence and resurgence in the 1990s
For her final Geffen album, 1991's Night Ride Home Mitchell presented what she described as a batch of "middle-aged love songs." "Indigo" was Mitchell's most simple, straightforward set of songs in years, mixing politics ("Sex Kills") with romance ("Sunny Sunday") and winning two Grammy awards, including Best Pop Album. Mitchell released her most recent set of 'original' new work with Taming the Tiger (1998).
"I hate music": the 2000s
Both Sides Now (2000) was an album composed mostly of covers of jazz standards, performed with an orchestra. The album contained reappraisals of "A Case of You" and the title track "Both Sides Now", two early hits transposed down to Mitchell's now-dusky, soulful alto range. Mitchell had stated that this would be her final album. In 2003, Mitchell's Geffen recordings were collected in a four-disc box set, The Complete Geffen Recordings. Included were remastered versions of all four albums, personal notes by Mitchell herself and three bonus tracks - A wordless vocal demo of what would become "Two Grey Rooms" (from Night Ride Home) the basic piano demo for "Good Friends" (from Dog Eat Dog), and an unreleased cover of Bob Dylan's "It's All Over Now, Baby Blue."
A series of themed compilations of songs from earlier albums were also released: The Beginning of Survival (2004), Dreamland (2004), and Songs of a Prairie Girl (2005), the last of which collected the threads of her Canadian upbringing and which she released after accepting an invitation to be a featured performer at a Saskatchewan Centennial concert in Saskatoon before the Queen. art
Recently, Mitchell has voiced her discontent with the current state of the music industry, describing it as a "cesspool", and stating that she "hates music" and "would like to remember what [she] ever liked about it."
Although Mitchell has stated she will no longer tour or give concerts, she has made occasional public appearances to speak (for example) on environmental issues. Currently, Mitchell divides her time between her longtime home in Los Angeles and a cabin in Sechelt, BC, and is said to be focused mainly on her visual art, which she does not sell and which she displays only on rare occasions.
Possible comeback
In an October 2006 interview with the Ottawa Citizen, Mitchell apparently "revealed she's recording her first collection of new songs in nearly a decade".
Musical legacy
Unique guitar style
Almost every song she composed on the guitar uses an open, or non-standard tuning;
Influence on other artists
Mitchell could be labeled a "musician's musician";
For instance, Prince's song "The Ballad of Dorothy Parker" off the album Sign 'O' the Times, pays tribute to Mitchell, both through his evocative Mitchell-like harmonies and through the use of one of Mitchell's own techniques: as in Mitchell's song "This Flight Tonight", Prince references a song in his lyrics (Joni's own "Help Me") as the music begins to emulate the chords and melody of that song. Mandy Moore also expressed a huge admiration for Mitchell upon the release of her 2003 album Coverage on which she covered Mitchell's classic "Help Me".
A number of artists have had hits covering Mitchell's songs;
Although Mitchell usually refrains from commenting on other artists, particularly ones that she influences, she has expressed satisfaction with the work with two jazz-based artists who have interpreted her songs, Cassandra Wilson and Diana Krall. Although most listeners tend to remember Mitchell's earlier, more commercially popular work, many musicians have found inspiration in her more experimental work, particularly The Hissing of Summer Lawns and Hejira.
Led Zeppelin's "Going to California" was said to be written about Robert Plant's infatuation with Mitchell, a claim that seems to be born out by the fact that, in live performances, Plant often says "Joni" after the line "To find a queen without a king, they say she plays guitar and cries and sings". Jimmy Page uses a double drop D guitar tuning similar to the alternative tunings Mitchell uses.
Awards and honours
Mitchell was inducted into the Canadian Music Hall of Fame in 1981 and into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1997.
Mitchell received an honorary doctorate from McGill University on October 27, 2004.
Discography
(with U.S. chart positions)
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