Joni is 70, which means we only have at least 50-60 more years with her.
Please enjoy this classic interview, and a carefully-curated selection of videos of Joni Mitchell being perfect and then one video of a different cool dame covering “Down to You,” which is the best song by the best person in the world. This is also your annual reminder to stop whatever you’re doing and buy Sheila Weller’s triple biography of (BRACE YOURSELF):
Joni Mitchell.
Carole King.
Carly Simon.
Now, videos.
Impossibly young, and singing “California”:
Impossibly young, and singing “Big Yellow Taxi”:
Impossibly young, and singing “A Case of You”:
Impossibly young, and singing “Both Sides Now”:
“Both Sides Now” in 2000:
A complete concert from 1970:
An interview she did with the CBC:
The aforementioned cover of “Down to You” by Robin Adler and Mutts of the Planet:
Tags: birthdays, canadian, greatest living human, joni mitchell, music, national treasures
I would like to heartily endorse the Zadie Smith New Yorker piece about Joni: http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2012/12/17/121…
‘The last time I saw Richard was Detroit in ’68,
And he told me all romantics meet the same fate someday
Cynical and drunk and boring someone in some dark cafe
I JUST AAAAAAAAAAA
“Richard, you haven’t really changed,” I said,
“It’s just that now you’re romanticizing some pain that’s in your head
You got tombs in your eyes but the songs you punched are dreaming
Listen, they sing of love so sweet, love so sweet
When you gonna get yourself back on your feet?
Oh, and love can be so sweet, love so sweet”
FINE I’LL JUST LISTEN TO BLUE ALL DAY
Richard got married to a figure skater
And he bought her a dish washer and a coffee percolator.
That is just the coldest burn I can think of. And it sounds so benign on page.
THIS SONG THIS SONG THIS SONG
A dark cocoon until I get my gorgeous wings and fly away,
These dark cafe days
Perhaps my greatest fear is that I’ll end up like Richard.
I heard “California” the other day, which set me on a Joni kick, and now that it’s her birthday, I think it’s a sign I must read Girls Like Us.
Not always clear about whether or not I have a religion, but if I do, Joni Mitchell is one of the central tenets.
saaaaaaaame
No song makes me more homesick than A Case of You. Mitchell would probably hate it, or maybe not, but the song exists in my brain heavily skewed toward my (our) relationship with Canada as opposed to that with my wife. We’re both ex-pat Canadians living in the US and we are on a five year plan to move home, so then I always grok this out of context:
I drew a map of Canada
Oh Canada
With your face sketched on it twice
Oh you are in my blood like holy wine
Oh and you taste so bitter but you taste so sweet
Oh I could drink a case of you
I could drink a case of you darling
Still I’d be on my feet
I’d still be on my feet
(reaches out across the void of the internet to hold you)
(*sobs uncontrollably*)
I live in Canada but am leaving very soon. CBC2 plays this song constantly and I am pre-emptively homesick every time I hear it.
If it’s any consolation, I live in Canada (ie, home) and it makes me feel incredibly homesick. It’s just that wrenching a song.
Not really related, but…I <3 this song, and I generally <3 James Blake, but his cover of this song cracks me up, because it sounds like someone doing a parody of a cover of a Joni Mitchell song: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eJDSueNSMJE
I can’t decide whether I love or hate that cover. (ETA: I’ve been listening to it off and on for months, and I still can’t decide.)
Several members of the choir I’m a part of were FREAKING OUT about this version the other day, so I’ll have to listen to it when I have some more time. However, I think my views on the song will be colored by the fact that only one person in the room–there were 8 or 9 people–had heard of Joni Mitchell. I just. My heart breaks.
“Both Sides Now” is one of those songs that only comes together for me when you can listen to both versions. (Like The Beatles ‘Eleanor Rigby’ vs Aretha Franklin’s kickass reclaimation.)1970 Joni is feeling all jaded and heartbroken after some young tragic romance, and then 2000 Joni is looking back at her younger self’s sweet presumption that she knew all about love and heartbreak when she still has so much to learn, and the tone is almost affectionate but also deeply sad. You can hear the all the age and wisdom she’s accrued in her voice, and the string orchestration is so much more melancholy than the original’s light guitar.
SO THANK YOU FOR INCLUDING BOTH VERSIONS BACK TO BACK is what I guess I am trying to say.
OH MAN I was coming down here to say pretty much exactly the same thing. You said it better than I likely would have. I wish I could thumbs-up it more than once!
She re-recorded it, actually, and the later recording is featured in Love, Actually, a film I kind of adore.
Yes, that version always makes me sad because it reminds me of Emma Thompson being sad, and there is nothing more devastating than that.
A thing I did back in September – drove through the desert listening to Amelia on a loop. No regrets.
Joni is such good traveling music. A little melancholy, a little hopeful, always moving.
If you, like me, have Court and Spark engraved on your gray matter, you might enjoy this cover of its title track by Norah Jones, Herbie Hancock, Wayne Shorter and Dave Holland (and a few others).
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=voacEdDekZI
And here’s Norah talking about it: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AiNxT5xv7y0
The album this is from is fantastic, and Joni does one track herself. Highly recommended.
“engraved on your gray matter”–that is a very good way of describing this. i’ve tried to explain it to people: “you know, like a soundtrack in your head, except it doesn’t play all the time?” this is much clearer.
Joni is the one artist my dad and I agree on, to the dismay of my mother and husband. ALL JONI ALL THE TIME. Hejira is basically my childhood soundtrack. But there’s that point in your life where you listen to Blue and you’re like OH MY GOD WHAT IS THIS PERFECT GIFT? I’d heard it hundreds of times, and then I bought it when I was 20 and just out on my own making stupid boy and life decisions and it spoke to me like it never had before. (Strangely, Nelly Furtado’s Whoa Nelly was purchased the same day and has been loved just as much. You go, Canadian women.)
I was just listening to Whoa Nelly before this post made me turn it off to listen to Joni all day! HOW GREAT IS THAT ALBUM? i hadn’t listened to it in years and then “I Will Make U Cry” came on when I had my ipod on shuffle the other day.
i mean i don’t want to derail the discussion of Joni Mitchell obviously, one winter in college i had a tape (stolen from my mom) with Blue on one side and Court and Spark on the other and never played anything else in my car and my friends were like “why are you doing this to us, why is all your music so sad”
My poor husband, the spring he spent attempting to woo me from “friend” to “girlfriend”, I kept going to sleep listening to Blue and Court and Spark and Portishead on shuffle each night, so he’d stay over on my twin bed with me and lie awake in the dark listening to Joni. For like, two months. I admire his dedication.
that is true love.
I worked in a womyn’s bookstore in high school, and I played “Blue” every single day on loop, and no one ever complained.
When I turned thirteen, my parents got me a copy of Blue like it was some sort of right of passage.
My dad obsessively played Songs to A Seagull every September (and now so do I).
But for my entire family, the crown jewel of Joni’s catalogue is her performance of “Coyote” with The Band. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=20wqh5DskYc
Because it never gets better than “staring holes in his scrambled eggs”.
I was visiting my mom recently, and she asked me to go through her CDs and put something on. I picked a Joni Mitchell album (don’t remember which one), and when it started playing, she looked at me in surprise and said, “I never thought of Joni as someone I could listen to with other people.” I spent a lot of time thinking about that, later.
I vividly remember playing Blue in my room in high school – my mom came in and said, “Wait, what are you doing? This was *my* adolescence!”
oh jeez oh wow this is a very personal story.
My friends and I recently got into a “fight” on my FB about which lyric from Blue is the best. Conclusion: ANY LINE YOU CAN THINK OF THIS MOMENT.
I deal in dreamers
And telephone screamers
Lately I wonder what I do it for
If l had my way
I’d just walk through those doors
And wander
Down the Champs Elysées *
Going cafe to cabaret
Thinking how I’ll feel when I find
That very good friend of mine
(steel guitars)
Canada should make a National Holiday in her honor.
I am mildly obsessed with Jay Brannan’s cover of “All I Want”: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YZiQWL9Sux0
Oh man, this is terrific–thanks for linking it!
Glad you like it! He also does a cover of the Cranberries’ “Zombie” that I just love.
I met a completely insufferable dude who professed that he does not listen to music for pleasure, with the exception of Cat Stevens and “that woman who dated Graham Nash.” He meant Joni, of course.
Evidently, the only thing that defines a woman, regardless of her many merits and achievements, is the man (arguably, a man with less name recognition than her) she once dated.
Oh. My mother and Joni Mitchell have the same birthday. Ten years apart. I didn’t know that. Well. That kind of explains more than I really wanted explained.
I love everything about this post and these comments, EXCEPT one thing: that Sheila Weller book is *awful*.
My brother refused to believe Joni Mitchell wrote Woodstock, and still insists CSNY did it better. He is so, so wrong. And that episode of Six Feet Under. Oh God. Ruth!!!!
Oh man, this is terrific–thanks for linking it!