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Amanda Seyfried said she felt like a ‘real musician’ after learning Joni Mitchell’s masterpiece ‘Blue’ in its entirety – in preparation for a project about the icon of singer-songwriterdom that ultimately never came to fruition.
Seyfried was set to play Mitchell in a biopic about the singer and Elliot Roberts, Mitchell’s manager and co-founder of Asylum Records. (Roberts died in 2019.) During the pandemic, Seyfried learned the 1971 album on guitar, dulcimer and piano.
“The day I learned the last song on the album,'[The Last Time I Saw] “Richard, I fucking cried,” Seyfried told GQ magazine in a new interview. “I felt like a real musician, like I belonged here. Like I planted my own flag on the top of the mountain. Because it was a fucking mountain, I tell you that.”
Visiting Joni Mitchell
While preparing for the role, Seyfried met Mitchell at her home in Los Angeles and absorbed the folk icon’s stories. “She was like, ‘We’re going to put the album on and light a fire,'” Seyfried recalled. “After we heard the album, she was like, ‘Bare, right?’ …It’s perfect!”
Last year, Seyfried showed off a taste of what he’d learned on The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon and performed “California” on the Dulcimer. “The reason it went so viral was because it wasn’t planned that way,” Seyfried told GQ. “And because it was happy.”
Although the Mitchell biopic that Seyfried was involved in has been shelved, director Cameron Crowe is working on another project in which Meryl Streep will portray Mitchell in the later years of her life.
Crowe’s new Mitchell project
Details about the film are being kept tightly under wraps, but Seyfried said she knows people have approached Crowe asking, “‘What the hell are you doing, dude?'” “I don’t know what his answer was, but as I understand it, his version is: She’s very young, and then she’s older,” Seyfried said.