Recommendations of the Editorial team
In May 2021, Joni Mitchell reflected on the negative reviews she has received over the years in an interview with Clive Davis. “I thought, Why are people so hard on this stuff? Well, I guess it’s because it’s different,” she said. “It doesn’t fit into one genre. You can’t say it’s folk or jazz. It’s somewhere in between.”
Categories do not apply to Joni Mitchell. And it has always been that way. She rose to fame in the early 1970s as the ultimate self-confessed singer-songwriter. But she will probably go down in history as the greatest formal innovator in modern pop music.
While so many of her contemporaries built on familiar folk or rock’n’roll models, Mitchell invented her own musical language. One that includes songs as intimate and simple as “River” as well as imaginative, epic pieces like “Paprika Plains.”
Joni Mitchell’s distinctive musical language
She began writing songs in the early ’60s after growing tired of Toronto’s territorial folk scene, in which artists essentially claimed traditional songs as their own and forbade others to play them. Her early triumphs – poetic, almost eerily wise pieces like “The Circle Game” and “Both Sides, Now” – became famous with covers of Judy Collins, Buffy Sainte-Marie and others before she entered the spotlight herself. But with her first album, “Song to a Seagull” (1968), Mitchell showed that her plaintive, startlingly clear vocals were as unique as her songwriting.
What followed in the ’70s was a dizzying series of masterpieces that initially seemed spartan – like on the epochal “Blue”, home to unforgettable songs like the upbeat “All I Want” and the dark title track – and continued to condense over albums like “Court and Spark”. Their biggest hit was found there with the crazy-loving anthem “Help Me”.
Until “Hejira” with spacious, formally daring songs like “Amelia” and “Song for Sharon” she had long been on her own territory. And stayed that way through the ’80s and ’90s, modernizing their sound without ever giving up their signature complexity and razor-sharp eye for detail. Her later socially critical pieces like “Sex Kills” were just as accurate as her earlier, more autobiographical material.
From confessional folk to political chronicler
Over the past two decades, Mitchell’s output has declined significantly. She has only released one album of new original songs since 1998. Her influence, however, has only grown: From Taylor Swift to Herbie Hancock (whose 2007 Grammy-winning album of 2007, River: The Joni Letters, featured mostly her songs) to Björk and Phoebe Bridgers, countless artists have cited her as a beacon of radical honesty and fearless originality. Here we look back at 50 of their greatest songs.