Joni

I didn't really find Joni Mitchell until I was 19. I had a wonderful roommate who must've sensed something in me that I hadn't noticed before, & after a long conversation about a very disappointing young man, she sat me down & played "My Old Man." My life was changed. (Incidentally, she also introduced me, in an earlier conversation about the same young man, to Bob Dylan's "Buckets of Rain.")

From that point on, I was hooked on Joni. Over the last three years, my appreciation of her music has only grown. Anyone who's ever lived with me can attest to the fact that her voice, along with Dylan's, is a constant in my home.

As my life changes, as chapters begin & end, I relate to different Joni records. That's the beautiful thing about her work: each album is a cohesive exploration of a moment in her life, functioning like a well-written novel. Blue was my 20th year. Now, it's a mix of Clouds & Hejira; what the two albums share is the thematic centrality of wanderlust. Joni writes beautifully about the effects of travel on the human heart, the longing for an absent lover, the impact of place on the perception of circumstance. A really wonderful songwriter makes you feel like she wrote the song about you. That's how I feel about Joni. Take, for example, "Coyote," a track from Hejira.




She creates a character in that song with such complexity, & all of it's revealed through her paradoxically reluctant & exuberant love for him. By animalizing her womanizing lover, she gives us a clear & beautifully poetic story of their relationship. He wakes her from a long sleep, and you can see it in the performance. That smile when she sings "flame" in the last verse? I know that feeling.

& another beautiful exploration of a relationship with a far-traveling lothario, "The Gallery," from Clouds:



The song's reportedly about Joni's affair with another favorite poet-musician of mine, Leonard Cohen. With that in mind, the track becomes much more powerful. Echoes of Cohen's own style are clear in the arrangement of the song, as well as the poetry itself:

"Lady, don't love me now, I am dead
I am a saint, turn down your bed
I have no heart," that's what you said
You said, "I can be cruel,
But let me be gentle with you."

That quotation of the lover has a clearly Cohenesque structure, & his character in this song can be found as an admission of self in a song like "Chelsea Hotel No. 2" It takes a great poet to adopt the voice of another while maintaining her own tone. Joni accomplishes it seamlessly.

What's especially lovely about "The Gallery" is that it exhibits the top of Joni's exquisite soprano range. Even in the early stages of her career, her smokey low register appeared on tracks like "Blonde in the Bleachers," from For the Roses. A close examination of her catalog reveals that, before smoking killed her range, her soaring high soprano was used for very specific emotional evocations. That sweet, songbird tone speaks to her innocence. (On a track like "Chelsea Morning," it's joy & playfulness.) The Joni of "The Gallery" is a virginal victim of a womanizer racking up notches on his bedpost. The point where her voice noticeably dips into the lower register is at the end of the chorus: "...cruel,/ But let me gentle with you." That's such a telling line, and the descent is even more powerful with the turn, when Joni claims the lover's cruelty for herself. Her assertion of power comes with a lower voice. But she still has that sweetness, the gentleness of love, that offers him forgiveness, whether he deserves it or not. For as long as she maintained her range, these subtleties are apparent in her work.

Aside from the fact that she's so much fun to read closely, what draws me back to Joni is the fact that I see myself in her work. To have a musical presence in one's life who accomplishes that with her work is a gift. It makes the world feel smaller, & gives a voice to experiences that would otherwise go unspoken.