Joni Mitchell is having the kind of season many artists don’t get even in their prime.
In March, she was awarded Canada’s prestigious Juno Lifetime Achievement honour. She walked onstage to a standing ovation, at 82. Weeks earlier, at the Grammys, she won Best Historical Album for Joni Mitchell Archives – Volume 4: The Asylum Years (1976-1980), a six-disc set drawn from the vaults of her most restless creative period. And on June 22, in a coordinated act of communal listening, cinemas in Helsinki, Los Angeles and Sheffield went dark to play Blue (1971) — turning 55 that day — in a deep-listening session (of the kind I have written about in recent editions of this column).
I attended the Helsinki session, where we sat in total darkness, to an album delivered whole. Blue sounded, on that summer evening, like it could have been recorded the previous week.
Now, all three moments are really the same story, told in different ways: a six-decade-late acknowledgment that Mitchell was never the “confessional singer-songwriter” that critics made her out to be. She was a musical virtuoso. We are only now catching up.
THE CRAFT BENEATH THE CONFESSION
Blue holds up to any scrutiny. Mitchell wrote its guitar songs in open tunings she invented herself — eventually more than 50 non-standard configurations, a personal harmonic vocabulary that gives the music its shimmer and its sense of chords being discovered rather than merely deployed.
She also co-produced the album with Henry Lewy, designed the cover, and arranged the dulcimer parts. Her control over the whole object, not just the songs, fits her description of herself as “a painter derailed by circumstance”. Even her voice was an instrument being reinvented: the bright, precise soprano of the Blue years thinned over the decades, first by smoking first and then by the 2015 brain aneurysm, into the low, weathered alto of her later work. Rather than fight the change, she wrote for it, letting Hejira (1976) and everything after sound vastly different but equally deliberate.
Yet, for most of her career, her oeuvre was discussed in terms rarely applied to male artists making equally naked work: “raw”, “confessional”, “personal”; accurate words that were also markedly diminishing.
Bob Dylan’s equally autobiographical Blood on the Tracks (1975) got called Shakespearean. Mitchell noticed and said so, which didn’t endear her to some critics, but at least she had the last word. Then again, when Dylan reportedly fell asleep while she played him the just-finished Court and Spark, her response was dry: he was probably trying to be “cute”.
THE JAZZ YEARS
If Blue is her most-celebrated record, Court and Spark (1974) is arguably her most complete: a jazz-inflected pop album made with Tom Scott’s LA Express that was neither diluted jazz nor compromised pop but something else entirely.
Help Me became her only Top 10 single; the album topped the Village Voice’s Pazz & Jop poll and later entered the Grammy Hall of Fame. At this year’s Grammys, accepting her award, Mitchell told the origin story: her regular session players couldn’t handle her chord changes, so her drummer told her she’d need real jazz musicians. She went looking in the clubs and found LA Express.
Hejira, two years later, pushed further. The album is built around Jaco Pastorius’s fretless bass, an instrument he played with a continuous, almost vocal tonality. Amelia, the album’s centrepiece, is at once a tribute to the pioneering aviator Amelia Earhart, a lament for a dead relationship, and a meditation on dreams, accomplished in five minutes without seeming rushed or forced.
In 1978 came the boldest move of Mitchell’s career: Jazz great Charles Mingus, dying of a progressive neurological disease, called and asked her to collaborate on his final compositions. The resulting album, released months after his death, paired Mitchell’s lyrics with music by Herbie Hancock and Wayne Shorter. Rock critics were baffled while jazz critics largely weren’t, in a split that said more about critical benchmarks than about the music itself.
Across Court and Spark, The Hissing of Summer Lawns (1975), Hejira, Don Juan’s Reckless Daughter (1977) and Mingus (1979), Mitchell pulled off something few of her peers ever managed: not pop with a sprinkling of jazz, but true jazz records that carried her voice.
After the aneurysm, there were periods she Mitchell couldn’t speak. It was thought she might not perform again. She returned at the 2022 Newport Folk Festival, at 78, seated in a chair beside Brandi Carlile, reminding several thousand people why they’d come.
At the Junos this spring, she addressed the aneurysm with her usual dark practicality: it had helped her quit smoking by way of the coma, she said. The line landed as a laugh and a small piece of vintage Mitchell: finding the usable thing within a terrible experience. Canadian prime minister Mark Carney, presenting the award, said her music had shifted culture and redefined what song-writing could be.
WHAT REMAINS
Hancock built an entire Grammy-winning album, River: The Joni Letters (2007), out of her songs. Shorter played on Court and Spark. When he wanted to collaborate with a vocalist, Mingus called her, of all the songwriters working in 1978.
Those are the associations of a musician other musicians recognised as a genius.
Prince was a fan, and would point out to her specific chords he had stolen from her catalogue. Bjork has cited Mitchell’s album-as-total-object thinking as a model for her work. Rufus Wainwright, a massive fan, has performed several of her songs, including most notably A Case of You, Blue, and Both Sides Now.
This was no confessional folk singer, but a musician whose vocabulary other musicians kept wanting to borrow.
In the dark in Helsinki, none of this required argument. Blue made its case the way it always has, and when Court and Spark followed, as a bonus, the jazz moves filled the room. That is the gift of such a season of recognition, however belated: it demands that we finally listen to what was there all along.
(To reach out, email sanjoy.narayan@gmail.com. The views expressed are personal)
