This text is an article from the ROLLING STONE archive (2015)
The Joni Mitchell universe has many entrances. At the main entrance are the fans of the first hour who discovered her between her debut in 1968 and her masterpiece “Blue” from 1971. Anyone who later discovered Joni through a reference in a musician’s biography, through a randomly recommended video on YouTube, or in a concert recording in the late program took the side entrance. And then there are those who googled Joni Mitchell “love actually” in 2003. They all have one thing in common: they saw young Joni and fell under her spell. This creature spoke like a schoolgirl and sang with an authority that took your breath away. She stood a little awkwardly at the microphone, but when she played the strings you realized that she knew things that you only suspected.
But above all, she sang words that suddenly made her own vague feelings understandable and yet seemed to only be about her. After such an awakening experience, you remain interested in her forever, even if that is not always easy. Not every one of their 20 albums is brilliant, not every song is moving, not every musical change is as exciting as their turn to jazz in the 70s. In the noughties, the elf with the exotic dulcimer zither had become a still beautiful, but now quite bitter older lady. At 71, Joni Mitchell is now releasing a four-CD box set in which she has rearranged pieces from 40 years – and almost certainly not the pieces that fans would have chosen for such a collection. This collection is called “Love Has Many Faces”, subtitle: “A Quartet, A Ballet, Waiting To Be Danced”. A ballet in four acts that is still waiting to be performed. Joni Mitchell likes to serve with a large ladle.
Joni Mitchell: “My songs are very visual”
“I am a painter who writes songs,” she explains in the detailed text accompanying the box, which is somewhat pompously advertised by her record company as a “novelette”. “My songs are very visual. The words create scenes – in cafes and bars – in dim little rooms – on moonlit shores – in kitchens – in hospitals and fairgrounds. They occur in vehicles – planes and trains and automobiles.”
From the outside, Mitchell is of course more of a songwriter who now paints almost exclusively than a painter who writes songs. The walls of her home in Bel Air are covered with her own works. Public appearances have become rare. “In recent years I have been a total couch potato. I’ve developed a secretary’s butt and need to do something for my waistline,” she says. “But I still enjoy dressing up every now and then and going out among people.” She recently had Hedi Slimane photograph her dressed up for the “Music Project” of the fashion house Saint Laurent.
Five years ago in April, Mitchell gave the infamous interview to the Los Angeles Times in which she revealed that she had Morgellons disease. This controversial syndrome emerged in California around the turn of the millennium. Those affected say that nanoparticles and parasites are crawling around under their skin. They are also tormented by weeping wounds, and their skin is said to produce inexplicable colorful fibers.
The US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention concluded that it is a mental disorder that primarily affects older women, about half of whom are addicted to medication. In the same conversation, Joni Mitchell also declared her old companion Bob Dylan a “plagiarist” and announced that she would now completely withdraw from the music business and dedicate herself to the Morgellons victims.
She must have had a very bad day. She has since refused questions on both topics. It’s best not to mention Dylan at all, the record company writes before the interview. Neither does David Crosby.
Joni Mitchell and the artists she respects
In return you get a list of artists that Mitchell respects: Jaco Pastorius, Herbie Hancock, Miles Davis, Wayne Shorter, Duke Ellington. You are also encouraged to read the liner notes mentioned above and memorize them – “this is very important to Joni and she will ask you about it”.
Mitchell also writes there, among other things, that “Love Has Many Faces” emerged “like a phoenix from the ashes of two dead projects.” The first wasn’t their idea: a double CD with previously unreleased pieces or, as Mitchell rails: “discarded and damaged works” – “they hired a thief to break into my archive.”
Mitchell stopped the project and instead went to work on another one: a collection of songs that would serve as the libretto for a love-themed ballet. But Mitchell struggled to boil down her large catalog of songs into a short, danceable hour. The ballet premiere was scheduled for February 2014. But Joni Mitchell hadn’t been able to distill the music for a ballet evening in a year and a half.
“75 minutes are simply not enough to develop a musical narrative,” she says. “It would have just been a best of. I couldn’t have presented that with pride.” She quickly canceled the entire project and the money for tickets that had already been sold had to be refunded. The ensemble was upset and a lot of money was lost. Only the choreographer Jean Grand-Maître, artistic director of the Alberta Ballet, got through the crisis with her. The Canadian, a generation younger than Mitchell, shares her fighting spirit.
In 2004, he had planned a production called “Dancing Joni” and visited Mitchell to get her permission for it. “At that time I was preparing an art exhibition with 64 triptychs. All the warmongers were represented there: Stalin, Hitler… and Bush. It was his second term and I was really angry. I had a miniature model of the exhibit set up on my pool table. ‘What do you think of my idea?’ Jean wanted to know, and I said, ‘I think it’s a bit flabby considering the times we live in.’ He looked at my pictures and said I should write a ballet for him. ‘Sure I’ll write you a war ballet,’ I said. ‘But it will be one of my least popular works, and you will lose Texas Oil as a major sponsor.’ I listed to him one by one all the problems that would come our way. And then I asked him, ‘Are you willing to take this risk?’ And he just looked at me and said, ‘But yeah!'”
Mitchell had found a new ally. In 2007, unexpectedly for the public, their new album “Shine” was released on the label of the coffee house chain Starbucks, and in the same year the joint ballet “Joni Mitchell’s The Fiddle And The Drum” premiered. When Mitchell received the new collaboration from Grand-Maître, she was feeling very ill. She had cramps that paralyzed her legs like polio had once caused, and often could only crawl. “It was a terrible time,” she says. “But I still wanted to stay creative.” She thought she could “do the ballet thing from home.” It then went wrong, but she still continued to pick out song after song, scene after scene. Simply to be able to continue working creatively. “I didn’t want to let everything collapse. That would have been so depressing.”
“Love Has Many Faces” is not depressing. Rather, the very personal extract shimmers in unexpected facets: the selection very emphatically invites you to appreciate Joni Mitchell’s further development, even in the less loved years. On the contrary, listening to the trials and tribulations and the words and chords that she found for love over the decades is a pretty exciting trip. After all, who would be a better chronicler of romantic love than Mitchell?
Love and affairs
As early as 1971, the American ROLLING STONE had printed a mocking illustration that called her “Girlfriend of the Year” – and, in a pun that alluded to her then new place of residence, Los Angeles, and the English word for “get laid”: “Queen of El Lay”. Mitchell had several husbands, numerous companions and countless lovers in her life. Because the young musician was at the center of the folk rock circus in the USA in the mid-1960s, the most famous songwriters of the time were among her companions: Neil Young, Leonard Cohen, David Crosby, Graham Nash.
James Taylor treated her roughly, and when Jackson Browne left her, she wanted to kill herself. From the beginning, not only the fans but also the journalists watched over her love life with jealous pedantry and the question of who which piece was about. However, “Love Has Many Faces” contains almost none of these love songs. Because the box is not an oldies festival, but a ballet libretto that tells of its era. Joni Mitchell values this.
She titled the first act “Birth Of Rock’n’Roll Days”. It begins with the airy jazz-rock song “In France They Kiss On Main Street” from Mitchell’s seventh album, “The Hissing Of Summer Lawns” from 1975. In terms of content, it begins in the years of childhood. “In the 1950s the country was very conservative. People were afraid of communism, and men and women were suddenly no longer allowed to sleep in the same bed. Pictures only showed bedrooms with single beds,” she says. “Our generation was as wild as the generation of the 1930s. During Prohibition, we drank illegally, we smoked pot illegally. It was a resurgence of casual interaction, a wildness that broke out again. But it was also completely innocent. At least until they started shooting presidential candidates.”
Roberta Joan Anderson was born in 1943 in the Canadian provinces, the only child of a small shop owner and a village school teacher. Canada’s last polio epidemic landed her in hospital at the age of nine in 1952, where they didn’t know for months whether she would ever be able to walk again. What she was left with was a weakened left hand, which is responsible for the special timbre of her music: Because she couldn’t perform certain fingerings on the guitar neck, Mitchell developed her own tunings from the start. The strangely open atmosphere in her pieces, which remains vague despite all the intensity, is a constant in Mitchell’s music.
In Calgary, young Joni studied painting and bought a ukulele. On Halloween 1962 she made her first paid appearance at a cafe in Saskatoon. She was aware of its impact from the start and used it. But she left no doubt that she wanted to be taken seriously, admired for her talent, not her looks. Her colleagues took her seriously as a competitor – and almost despaired of her beauty. “Life is difficult when you are beautiful,” she says today, as a 71-year-old. “You’re better off if you look average. And you have a better chance of finding true love.”