Joni Mitchell

The Canadian Roberta Joan Anderson, aka Joni Mitchell, is the most refined of rock's “ladies.” Few other songwriters have managed to combine psychological introspection in their lyrics with an austerity of arrangement worthy of chamber music. Her songs, in fact, are not merely open-hearted confessions, testimonies to the dying gasps of the hippie era: they are small musical gems, orchestrated with rare taste and restraint. And her own genteel demeanor, in stark contrast to the icons of her time, allowed her to carve out an utterly singular role in the rock arena.

Mitchell's is a crystalline talent, evident from childhood, when she was already playing piano, ukulele and guitar. As the songwriter herself has recalled, it was only in overcoming polio, which struck her violently at the age of nine, that she developed a deep artistic sensibility. It was a junior high school teacher, Mr. Kratzman, who helped shape this inclination, guiding her in both painting and poetry. “If you can paint with a brush, you can paint with words,” he liked to tell her. And it is to him that Mitchell dedicates her self-titled 1968 debut album (later reissued as “Song To A Seagull”): “To Mr Kratzman who taught me to love words.” It marks the start of a dazzling career that soon makes her a sensation on the folksinger circuit, first in Canada (Toronto), then in the United States (New York first, California later). The subsequent albums “Clouds” and “Ladies Of The Canyon” further boost her fame. By now Mitchell is a folk star, so much so that she's enlisted by Carole King for her epochal “Tapestry” and by James Taylor for his “Mud Slide Slim And The Blue Horizon”.

But it's with “Blue” (1971) that the Alberta-born songwriter definitively hones her art. Widely seen as a meditation on the end of Mitchell's relationship with Graham Nash, the record actually revisits the central theme of “Ladies of The Canyon”: the unease that creeps through everyday life, but rendered in tones less picturesque, sunny and ironic. At the same time, the scrutiny of personal affairs intensifies, spilling over into harsh admissions of guilt. As in “River”, where Mitchell recalls giving up her daughter for adoption, or in the vanished love of “Last Time I Saw Richard”. What's striking, though, is her romantic drive to seek happiness, even though it proves impossible. The result is a persistent melancholy, “Blue” indeed, but also a yearning for freedom that often clashes with love: “I am on a lonely road and I am travelling looking for something to set me free” (from “All I Want”). Her personal experiences become a universal feeling, never rhetorical, all filtered through a distinctly feminine sensibility. That's why, in “This Flight Tonight”, “A Case Of You” and the title track, Mitchell seems to suggest that unhappiness is not merely a matter of individual circumstance, but also stems from the obstacles placed by the people we meet along the way. A path metaphorically framed as a journey: to Africa (“Carey”), to her native Canada (“A Case Of You”), to her adopted homeland (“California”), or simply to a frozen river to skate away on (“River”). A genuine travel diary, also because it was written during a European holiday, far from the West Coast and its moods. And the album carries this sense of separation: from her homeland, from her loves, from her past.

Beyond her remarkable compositional skill and the versatility of the arrangements, what really grips the listener is Mitchell's vocal technique, built on the contrast between high soprano tones (in the tradition of medieval singing and operatic arias) and deeper registers, roughened by her smoking habit. The result is a kind of neurotic litany, the ideal vehicle for her tormented self-analysis. Musically, the stylistic traits of her previous records only partly resurface. Only faint echoes remain of the “sunny” West Coast sound and of her friends CSN&Y. Even the guitars of Stephen Stills and James Taylor settle into this delicate watercolor, where everything is rendered hazy and minimal.

The opening “All I Want” also marks Mitchell's seemingly most cheerful moment, as she's found a new lover and showers him with a whole wish list: “I want to talk to you/ I want to shampoo you/ I want to renew you again and again/ Applause, applause—life is our cause/ When I think of your kisses, my mind see-saws”. And yet even here the contradiction of feelings is searing: “I hate you some, I love you some. I love you when I forget about me”, or again: “I want to be strong… I want to belong to the living” and “Do you see how you hurt me, baby? So I hurt you, too”. Taylor's guitar and Mitchell's own are steeped in Latin flavors and stand out against the emotional pulse of the bass, while the vocal remains sweet and crystalline throughout.

Though it opens the record, “All I Want” actually marks the end of the long vacation described in two other songs, “Carey” and “California”, both still tinged with Latin atmospheres: the former is a buoyant calypso evoking African suggestions: “The wind is in from Africa/ Last night I couldn't sleep/ Oh, you know it sure is hard to leave here but it's really not my home”; “California”, meanwhile, unveils a choir, a few flashes of tango and a pedal steel guitar, as Mitchell confesses all her “saudade”: “Oh, it gets so lonely/ When you're walking and the streets are full of strangers”. “California” is also a lesson in perfect balance between Russ Kunkel's smooth bass lines and James Taylor's nervy guitar chords.

The folk melody of “Little Green”, carried by a gentle guitar arpeggio, recalls “I Don't Know Where I Stand” from the second album, but sharpens its lyricism with a handful of subtly cryptic lines. “This Flight Tonight” even ventures into a kind of “stream of consciousness”. But Mitchell's poetic gift reaches its peak on the title track, a genuine distillation of pain and confession among the most moving in rock history, unfolding on the wings of a mysterious melody. Love here is delicate, light as a breath of wind: “Eccoti una conchiglia/ Dentro ci sentirai un sospiro/ Una ninna nanna nebbiosa/ Ecco la canzone che ti ho dedicato”. Lines that leave you breathless, as only Tim Buckley and Leonard Cohen know how to write.

Even the brightest colors, the rhythms, the quirks, gradually dissolve into that great blue river that dominates and envelops everything. And so all that's left is to sink into this hazy melancholy, which soaks the aching piano-and-voice ballad “My Old Man”, the merciless mea culpa of “River” (“I'm so hard to handle/ I'm so selfish and so sad/ Now I've lost the best baby/ That I ever had”), which opens and closes on a hint of the “Jingle Bells” piano motif, or the sorrowful memory of “The Last Time I Saw Richard”, recalling the days of the “dark cafe” and a love lost forever, whispered over the piano's muted chimes. And to gauge the depth of turmoil Mitchell had reached by this point, a single song like “A Case of You” would suffice: amid Taylor's guitar riffs and the slow unfolding of a melody, it reveals an act of love both mystical and total: “But you are in my blood like holy wine”. Love has by now become a religious mission, surrendering to solitude a sin.

A cornerstone of female singer-songwriter music — together with Carole King's “Tapestry” and Laura Nyro's “Eli And The Thirteenth Confession” it forms a sort of “sacred trinity” of the genre — “Blue” is an intimate record, a collection of songs that unfold one by one like pages of a diary. The lyricism of the verses is as intense as it is functional to the context: a bitter everyday reality, made of nostalgia and silences, melancholy and inadequacy, friends lost in the darkness of drugs, and loves that leave deep wounds. Thanks to these songs, Joni Mitchell would become the standard-bearer of a “confessional folk” marked by intense lyrics and an unprecedented, original candor, steering the modern language of popular music toward new horizons. For her lucid dissection of pain, for that supremely elegant folk-pop, a close relative of rhythm and blues, and for the disarming sincerity of her confessions, the Mitchell of “Blue” brings to mind Billie Holiday.

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02/11/2004