The glorious Joni Mitchell was born on November 7, 1943 and continues to woo audiences to this day.
Categories don’t apply to Joni Mitchell, and they never have. She became famous in the early Seventies as the ultimate confessional singer-songwriter, but she’ll go down as maybe the greatest formal innovator in modern pop. Where so many of her contemporaries built on familiar folk or rock & roll models, Mitchell devised her own musical language, one that could encompass songs as intimate and plainspoken as “River” or as imaginative and epic as “Paprika Plains.”
She began writing songs in the early Sixties, after growing tired of the territorial Toronto folk scene, in which performers would stake claims on traditional tunes and forbid others to play them. Her early triumphs, poetic and preternaturally wise efforts like “The Circle Game” and “Both Sides, Now,” found fame before she did, via covers by Judy Collins, Buffy Sainte-Marie, and others. But from the time of her first album, 1968’s Song to a Seagull, Mitchell showed that her plaintive, dazzlingly clear delivery was as unique as her writing.
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Mitchell herself recorded it on her second album, 1969’s Clouds, and it remains one of her most enduring songs: a meditation on personal ambition and the distance between illusion and reality, with a melody as thoughtful and heartbreaking as its lyric. —D.W.
