By Clare ThorpOptions correspondent
![Getty Images Joni Mitchell - who is performing at the Grammys 2024 - and Taylor Swift](https://ichef.bbci.co.uk/images/ic/480xn/p0h8v0mb.jpg.webp)
At present’s greatest musical stars routinely naked their souls in songs – however girls are nonetheless typically judged for revealing an excessive amount of. Joni Mitchell – acting at tonight’s Grammys – helped lay the groundwork for intimate feminine songwriting.
On Sunday evening, the nice and the nice of the music world will collect in downtown Los Angeles for the 66th Annual Grammy Awards. This 12 months, feminine artists are set to dominate, with Taylor Swift, SZA, Olivia Rodrigo, boygenius, Lana Del Rey and Miley Cyrus every up for a number of gongs. If Swift takes dwelling the perfect album award for Midnights, she’ll make historical past as the primary ever artist to win it 4 occasions. If SZA beats her to it, she will likely be the primary black girl to win the award in 25 years.
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However one of the anticipated moments of the evening will come from an artist who received her first Grammy greater than half a century in the past. Joni Mitchell – a nine-time winner – will carry out on the present for the primary time in her profession, aged 80. It is available in the identical week as she introduced two reveals on the Hollywood Bowl later this 12 months.
Each of those are considerably of a shock – although welcome ones. In 2015 Mitchell had a mind aneurysm that left her quickly unable to stroll or discuss. She hadn’t carried out dwell since 2002, and her well being struggles advised she by no means would once more. So her current return to the stage (a dwell recording of her shock look on the 2022 Newport People Pageant is nominated for greatest folks album) feels miraculous. But her efficiency on the Grammys is not simply vital for what it represents – an unbelievable story of resilience – however due to the affect she’s had on lots of the artists who will likely be within the room together with her.
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![Getty Images SZA described her 2021 song Joni as 'a trap song from the perspective of Joni Mitchell' (Credit: Getty Images)](https://ichef.bbci.co.uk/images/ic/480xn/p0h8v0dk.jpg.webp)
Lana Del Rey has steadily peppered her songs with Joni references. Phoebe Bridgers – one third of boygenius – has cited Mitchell as one among her greatest influences, as has Olivia Rodrigo. SZA’s 2021 monitor Joni is a tribute to the singer. Then, after all, there’s Taylor Swift, whose 2012 album Pink is considered partly impressed by Joni’s 1971 album Blue, and who shares an inclination in the direction of emotionally candid lyrics. Final 12 months’s album of the 12 months winner – Harry Kinds’s Harry’s Home – takes its title from a Mitchell monitor. Joni might have been largely away from the limelight for a while, however her presence within the music trade is felt throughout.
Early years
Born in Canada in 1943, Joni reached her mid-twenties having already skilled greater than most: surviving polio, giving her little one up for adoption, and leaving her first marriage to folks singer Chuck Mitchell. Songwriting turned her option to course of what she was going via. She launched her first album Music to a Seagull in 1968. Her second, Clouds, received her a Grammy for greatest folks album and propelled her into the general public eye.
However fame made her really feel claustrophobic – as did domesticity. In 1970 she left her lover Graham Nash – who wished to marry her – and ran away to Europe. “My grandmother was a pissed off poet and musician,” Mitchell defined in 2003 documentary A Girl of Coronary heart and Thoughts. “She kicked the kitchen door off the hinges on the farm. As a lot as I cherished and cared for Graham, I simply thought, I am gonna find yourself like my grandmother, kicking the door off the hinges.”
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![Getty Images Mitchell told Rolling Stone, 'I guess I really started singing when I had polio. Neil [Young] and I both got polio in the same Canadian epidemic' (Credit: Getty Images)](https://ichef.bbci.co.uk/images/ic/480xn/p0h8qgh2.jpg.webp)
Mitchell had a imaginative and prescient for her life and her artwork, and pursued it fearlessly – ripping up the rulebook for what was anticipated of girls on the time. “I wanna wreck my stockings in some jukebox dive,” she sang on All I Need, the opening monitor of her fourth studio album, Blue. The file is broadly thought-about her masterpiece – and the one through which she lays herself most naked. She wrote about her relationship with Nash, affairs with James Taylor and Cary Raditz (who she met within the caves of Matala, Crete), of feeling heartbroken, homesick, lonely. On Little Inexperienced, she sings concerning the little one “born with the moon in most cancers” that she gave up (Mitchell was finally reunited together with her daughter within the Nineteen Nineties).
“I used to be demanding of myself a deeper and better honesty, increasingly revelation in my work,” she stated in A Girl of Coronary heart and Thoughts. Mitchell felt she owed it to her viewers to make music that “strikes towards the very nerves of their life… and so as to do this you must strike towards the very nerves of your personal”. It wasn’t simply the lyrics that wrung out each drop of feeling, however the music too, with Joni “twisting the knobs on the guitar till I might get these chords that I heard inside that suited me – they really feel like my emotions.”
Speaking to Cameron Crowe for Rolling Stone in 1979, Mitchell stated: “I felt like a cellophane wrapper on a pack of cigarettes.” It was this radical transparency – uncommon on the time – that made individuals really feel such an intense connection to her music. She has stated: “I’ve, every now and then, sacrificed myself and my very own emotional make-up… singing ‘I am egocentric and I am unhappy’, as an illustration. All of us undergo for our loneliness, however on the time of Blue, our pop stars by no means admitted these items.”
Mitchell continued to write down intensely private songs, whereas additionally experimenting with completely different musical kinds – jazz, world music and, within the 80s, synth-rock. A recurrent theme in her music was her battle between two needs: love and independence. Her 1974 album Court docket and Spark finds her adrift at Hollywood soirees, “dwelling on nerves and emotions, with a weak and a lazy thoughts” (Folks’s Events). On the album’s All the way down to You, she grapples with the flip aspect of freedom, the place “Every thing comes and goes, marked by lovers and kinds of garments.”
On Amelia, a track from 1976 fan favorite Hejira, Mitchell finds widespread floor with aviation pioneer Amelia Earhart, expressing how lonely it could really feel chasing your desires. “Perhaps I’ve by no means actually cherished, I assume that’s the fact, I’ve spent my entire life in clouds at icy altitudes.”
Not everybody appreciated her emotional honesty. On first listening to Blue, Kris Kristofferson famously advised her: “Joni! Hold one thing for your self!”. In a 2022 interview with Elton John, Mitchell stated her lyrics made individuals nervous. “Folks thought that it was too intimate,” she stated. “I believe it upset the male singer-songwriters. They’d go, ‘Oh no. Do now we have to reveal our souls like this now?'”
Revealing lyrics
Whereas disconcerting to some, Mitchell’s radically trustworthy lyrics modified how individuals wrote songs, encouraging others to dig deeper. Stevie Nicks, Jimi Hendrix, Prince, Carly Simon and Elvis Costello have all cited her as an inspiration. Morrissey, interviewing her for Rolling Stone in 1997 stated: “I believe you are the best lyricist that ever lived.” Björk credited her as the primary who “had the center to arrange a world pushed by excessive feminine emotion“.
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![Getty Images According to Bjork, Mitchell 'created an all-female universe with intuition, wisdom, intelligence, craftsmanship, and courage' (Credit: Getty Images)](https://ichef.bbci.co.uk/images/ic/480xn/p0h8v083.jpg.webp)
Greater than 50 years on from Blue, as we speak’s greatest musical stars routinely lay themselves naked of their songs – however girls are nonetheless typically judged for revealing an excessive amount of. Taylor Swift, Olivia Rodrigo and Lana Del Ray are labelled “confessional” – an outline that Joni herself hated, believing it gave the impression of she was being pressured to confess one thing towards her will.
Swift, particularly, is aware of one thing about having her music dismissed for being too private. Final 12 months, in a written prologue to the re-released 1989, she known as out “the trivialisation of my songwriting as if it have been a predatory act of a boy-crazy psychopath”.
The singer was as soon as rumoured to be taking part in Joni in a biopic of the singer’s life. Mitchell apparently “squelched” the concept, saying: “All you have obtained is a lady with excessive cheekbones.” However the two share extra than simply nice bone construction – with Swift clearly influenced by the specificity of Mitchell’s lyrics.
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![Getty Images Swift has picked out Mitchell's song River, 'which is just about her regrets and doubts of herself' (Credit: Getty Images)](https://ichef.bbci.co.uk/images/ic/480xn/p0h8v0cj.jpg.webp)
Swift says Blue is her favorite Mitchell album as a result of “it explores any individual’s soul so deeply” together with “her deepest pains and most haunting demons.” Cross-reference that with Swift speaking about her personal album, Pink: “Musically and lyrically [it] resembled a heartbroken particular person… a fractured mosaic of emotions that in some way all match collectively ultimately.”
For Swift and others, Mitchell left one other vital blueprint: that of a feminine artist completely answerable for her profession; whether or not by proudly owning the publishing rights to her music from the beginning, portray her personal album covers, switching musical kinds, or standing as much as streaming providers like Spotify (in 2022 Mitchell pulled her music from the platform in protest at Joe Rogan’s podcast), Joni has at all times carried out issues her personal approach.
By singing at this 12 months’s Grammys, she’s once more proving her doubters flawed, and delighting the many individuals there who owe her a inventive debt. Whether or not, like her, they’re going to nonetheless be enrapturing audiences in 50 years’ time, is much less sure.
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