FEATURE:
Down to You
IN THIS PHOTO: Joni Mitchell in a 1968 shoot for Vogue/PHOTO CREDIT: Jack Robinson/Getty Images
Reacting to the Joni Mitchell/Cameron Crowe Interview
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IT has been a tough past few years…
PHOTO CREDIT: Mark Seliger (2019)
for Joni Mitchell. She has said that she has Morgellons syndrome and, in 2015, Mitchell suffered a brain aneurysm which required her to undergo physical therapy and take part in daily rehabilitation. Mitchell made her first public appearance following the aneurysm when she attended a Chick Corea concert in Los Angeles in August 2016. She has made a few other appearances and, in November 2018, David Crosby said that she was learning to walk again. On 7th November, Joni Mitchell turns seventy-seven, and many wonder whether she will record music again. 2007’s Shine was her nineteenth studio album, but I guess illness has affected how Mitchell views her career and whether she wants to release any more material. What we have from her is amazing and iconic, and I hope Joni Mitchell grows stronger and we have her in the world for many more years to come. The Guardian published an article earlier this week where I (and many people) learned a lot about her life, songwriting, and current life. A vinyl bundle containing Live at Canterbury House, and Early Joni – 1963 was released on Friday. It is a rare glimpse into her earlier work and a songwriting starting to blossom. Many of us associate Mitchell’s peak with albums like Blue (1971), but she was an accomplished and original songwriter years before.
IN THIS PHOTO: Cameron Crowe
I want to quote from the Cameron Crowe (who is American director and screenwriter) from The Guardian, as he asks Joni Mitchell some great questions - and there is a mutual respect there! I like the fact Mitchell gave her blessing to the new releases and she is eager for people to hear these early works. A lot of artists are less keen to look back or are quite guarded about their pre-fame music, but I think we might see a lot more from Joni Mitchell when it comes to reissues and great vinyl bundles – let’s hope so at least! In a rare interview, Cameron Crowe and Joni Mitchell looked back on her life and new release. We learn that, for years, Mitchell was reluctant to have her earliest material out there as it was somewhat incomplete or ingenue. It is fantastic that there was a breakthrough:
“Some of the tapes are new discoveries, others had been meticulously collected and catalogued years earlier by “court archivist” Joel Bernstein. When Mitchell recently cranked up her living room stereo and listened to all the material for the first time, the project came to glorious fruition. Neil Young even gave some counsel, suggesting the songs be presented in chronological order. Mitchell, who has usually taken a more thematic approach to collections of her music, agreed”.
Mitchell discussed her songs with Crowe, but I was interested in how she approaches performance. Some people are divided when it comes to her voice and the way she deliver songs. Rather than perform songs in a very simple way, there is proper emotion and dynamics at play:
“CC I remember you once saying every vocal performance is acting: “You must be the character who wrote the song when you sing it.” When you listen to this early music, are you playing a character? And “No, it’s me” is a valid answer.
JM It’s not like that. It’s, you know, the words to the song are your script. You have to bring the correct emotion to every word. You know, if you sing it pretty – a lot of people that cover my songs will sing it pretty – it’s going to fall flat. You have to bring more to it than that”.
Love is a central part of most songwriters’ work, and each has a very different experience. I have always found Mitchell’s songs of love among the most affecting and poetic ever. She is one of those songwriters who can describe passion and complex emotions like nobody else. In her teenage years and twenties, I can only imagine Joni Mitchell falling in and out of love and, at hard times, sitting down and putting all these thoughts down! Even this many years down the line, it appears that love is still very important to her and, though they say wisdom comes with age, it is refreshing to know that someone as smart and grounded as Joni Mitchell has fallibility:
“CC What was your concept of love back then?
JM I didn’t have one. I just occasionally would fall into it, or thought I did. I’d have a strong, palpitating attraction to somebody; that’s what I called love, I guess.
CC Has your idea of love morphed or changed over the years?
JM Not that much, really. It’s still the same. I make the same mistake over and over again, and I’m just a fool for love.
CC As it should be. Do you feel like you’ve been in love a lot?”.
I have always been interested whether it was books or people where Mitchell acquired most of her inspiration. She told Crowe that she was never a big reader, and a lot of her observations were acquired from interactions and travel rather than reading. Reading the interview more and more, and it is clear that there is this trust between Cameron Crowe and Joni Mitchell - and she reveals things that she might not have told anyone else. In regard to Mitchell’s discomfort with fame, that really didn’t start in her first few years. I can imagine the reaction Blue achieved in 1971 would have been quite overwhelming, and I think that is a problem if you are a phenomenal songwriter who does not court the limelight: the better and more popular you become, the more suffocating and discomforting that can be. Some songwriters court the big stage and that adulation but Mitchell, I think, would have been content to play coffee houses in New York or somewhere like that. She told Cameron Crowe about her feelings towards bigger shows:
“JM I don’t know. I know I didn’t really like it, I wasn’t comfortable with it. I liked playing the coffeehouses, where I could step off the stage and go sit in the audience and be comfortable, or where there wasn’t a barrier between me and my audience in the clubs. The big stage had no appeal for me; it was too great a distance between me and the audience, and I never really liked it. I didn’t have a lot of fame in the beginning, and that’s probably good because it made it more enjoyable”.
The thing we all want to know is how Joni Mitchell is feeling now and what her future holds. It has been a very strange and tough past few years for her, and I guess songs do not flow as naturally as they might otherwise have done. We all would love to see some new material from Joni Mitchell but, as the interview revealed, that might not be on the cards:
“CC Does the muse still speak to you?
JM It hasn’t for a while. I haven’t been writing recently. I haven’t been playing my guitar or the piano or anything. No, I’m just concentrating on getting my health back [from a 2015 aneurysm]. You know what? I came back from polio, so here I am again, and struggling back.
CC Is that how you would characterise the last five years?
JM Just inching my way along. I’m showing slow improvement but moving forward”.
After so many years in the music industry, I think Mitchell is genuinely moved by the praise she gets and how fans want to connect with her. It would be easy for her to hide away and not really get out there but, when she has attended public events in the past few years, there were these lines of fellow artists who all wanted to ask her questions. Mitchell revealed how it feels to get so much love:
“JM It means a great deal to me. I got a letter from a little girl in Ireland who wrote to me. Her father was in a rock’n’roll band and they were going off to play someplace. She went outside to see them off, and one of the guys in the band came up to her and said, “Here, you should have this.” And he gave her what she called a “wonky tape recorder.” It had The Circle Game on it and he said, “This is a song that you should know, a girl your age.” At that time the English were terrorising Ireland, and they’d fly over in battalions with helicopters, and they’d do it at 8pm, right when the people were putting their children to bed. She said it was terrifying, this brigade of helicopters going over, and “I survived the war by putting the wonky tape recorder up to my ear and listening to The Circle Game.” It’s hard to beat that, in terms of reward for your song. I found that very exciting”.
The first batch of releases where we get to hear some early Joni Mitchell in 1963; the songs might not be as complete and accomplished as her later work, but they are revealing insights into a genius songwriter who would inspire generations. Mitchell gave her appraisal of the early work and how it compares to her future recordings:
“The later work is much richer and deeper and smarter, and the arrangements are interesting too. Musically I grow, and I grow as a lyricist, so there’s a lot of growth taking place. The early stuff – I shouldn’t be such a snob against it. A lot of these songs, I just lost them. They fell away. They only exist in these recordings. For so long I rebelled against the term: “I was never a folk singer.” I would get pissed off if they put that label on me. I didn’t think it was a good description of what I was. And then I listened, and – it was beautiful. It made me forgive my beginnings”.
It is humbling to hear these recordings, and it is wonderful that Mitchell is recovering and granted a personal, in-depth and candid interview with Cameron Crowe. I guess she would consider herself retired, and it may be a stretch to think there is music coming at some point. She seems healthier, happier and stronger than a few years ago, and there will be more treats to come from the Joni Mitchell archive. When we weigh all of that up then, realistically, that is…
ALL we could ask for.