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While some of Mitchell's most popular songs were written on the piano, almost every song she composed on the guitar uses an open, or non-standard, tuning; she has written songs in some 50 tunings, playing what she has called "Joni's weird chords". The use of alternative tunings allows guitarists to produce accompaniment with more varied and ...
- Overview
- Early life and career
- Clouds, Blue, “Big Yellow Taxi,” and “Woodstock”
- Hejira, Mingus, and visual art pursuits
- Later albums
- Legacy and honors
Joni Mitchell (born November 7, 1943, Fort McLeod, Alberta, Canada) is a Canadian experimental singer-songwriter and one of the foremost folk music artists of the late 20th century. Her music reached its greatest popularity in the 1970s but has continued to be influential among 21st-century musicians. Once described as the “Yang to Bob Dylan’s Yin,...
Mitchell studied commercial art in her native Alberta before moving to Toronto in 1964 and performing at local folk clubs and coffeehouses. After a brief marriage to folksinger Chuck Mitchell, she relocated to New York City, where in 1967 she made her eponymous debut album (also known as Songs to a Seagull). Produced by David Crosby, this concept album was acclaimed for the maturity of its lyrics.
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With each successive release, Mitchell gained a larger following, from Clouds (which in 1969 won a Grammy Award for best folk performance) to the mischievous euphoria of Ladies of the Canyon (1970) to Blue (1971), which was her first million-selling album. By the early 1970s Mitchell had branched out from her acoustic base to experiment with pop, r...
With Hejira (1976) and Don Juan’s Reckless Daughter (1977), she continued to disregard commercial considerations, while Mingus (1979) was considered by many as beyond the pale. An album that began as a collaboration with the jazz bassist Charles Mingus ended up as a treatment of his themes after his death. Mitchell moved ever further beyond her own experience, delving not only deeper into jazz but also into Black history; the album was as much a voice for the dispossessed as it was a biography of Mingus. Though fans were confused, Mingus remains a brave homage that does not fit neatly into either the rock or jazz genre.
Having proved that she could make commercially successful albums and win critical acclaim, Mitchell became a prestige artist. Moreover, because her songs had become hits for others, she was a source of considerable publishing revenue for her record companies. As a result, they went along with her musical experiments. After Mingus, however, Mitchell stood back a little from the pop world. From the beginning of her career she had illustrated her own album covers, so it was not surprising that in the 1980s she began to develop her visual art, undecided about whether to concentrate more on painting or music.
Although not as prolific as in the 1960s and ’70s, Mitchell continued to create penetrating imaginative music, from the Thomas Dolby-produced Dog Eat Dog (1985) to the more reflective Night Ride Home (1991) and the Grammy Award-winning Turbulent Indigo (1994). Having dealt with international political and social issues such as Ethiopian famine on Dog Eat Dog, she returned by the early 1990s to more personal subject matter—singing about true love, for instance, on Turbulent Indigo. Though unworried about pop chart trends, in 1997 she enjoyed major success with a new, younger audience when Janet Jackson sampled from Mitchell’s “Big Yellow Taxi” for the massive hit “Got ’Til It’s Gone.” In 1997 she published a new collection of her work, Joni Mitchell: The Complete Poems and Lyrics.
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Taming the Tiger (1998) further mined her personal life for inspiration, notably on the track “Stay in Touch,” a nod to the daughter she gave up for adoption in 1965 and with whom she reunited in 1997. She covered standards on Both Sides Now (2000) and reworked a wide-ranging selection of her oeuvre on Travelogue (2002). On Shine (2007), her first album recorded for the Starbucks coffee chain’s music label, she returned to themes of environmental and social justice. Mitchell also issued several retrospective compilations, including The Beginning of Survival (2004), Dreamland (2004), Songs of a Prairie Girl (2005), and the 53-song omnibus Love Has Many Faces: A Quartet, A Ballet, Waiting to Be Danced (2014). Her continuing influence was shown by the release of the tribute album Joni 75: A Birthday Celebration (2019), on which such artists as Chaka Khan, Diana Krall, Rufus Wainwright, Norah Jones, James Taylor, and Emmylou Harris performed Mitchell’s songs.
One of the first women in modern rock to achieve enviable longevity and critical recognition, Mitchell was a major inspiration to everyone from Bob Dylan and Prince to a later generation of female artists such as Suzanne Vega and Alanis Morissette. Although she regularly collaborated with producers and arrangers—such as Jaco Pastorius, Mike Gibbs, ...
Oct 28, 2020 · With a work ethic like no other, Joni Mitchell managed to find the words for almost an album a year from the late 60s and throughout the 70s, her songwriting flourishing across 1969’s Clouds and 1970’s Ladies Of The Canyon – the latter of which brought about some of Mitchell’s first great songs, including Rainy Night House, Ladies Of ...
- “Day After Day” (1965) In her early days, Mitchell bristled at being labeled a folk singer, but she came around in 2020 with the launch of her Archives series, the first installment of which focused on the period leading up to her 1968 debut.
- “Urge for Going” (1965) “Urge for Going” keens with a sense of longing, capturing the yearning desire to be somewhere, anywhere different from where you are.
- “Night in the City” (1968) Written in the mid-Sixties and performed during some of Mitchell’s earliest TV appearances, “Night in the City” is a sweet, anticipatory ode to Yorkville Avenue in Toronto, the hub of the local folk scene.
- “Michael From Mountains” (1968) Mitchell’s relationship with a Colorado musician, Michael Durbin, inspired this enchanting reverie about a couple taking a morning walk in the rain.
Feb 5, 2024 · Singer-songwriter Joni Mitchell, responsible for hit songs such as “Both Sides, Now” and “Big Yellow Taxi,” is widely considered 1960s and ’70s folk royalty.
Joni Mitchell's songs, frequently confessional, sometimes obscure, always literate and musically adventurous, form one of the most striking bodies of work in the popular music of the last three decades.
May 6, 2019 · Since releasing her first album in 1968, Joni Mitchell has been a singularly influential force in popular music, offering a blueprint for both enlightenment and rebellion.
