The Useful Human Truth: Nine Lessons from Joni Mitchell
Joel Bernstein www.joelbernstein.com
‘In order to get the right spirit into the music, there’s got to be more than a working relationship. There has to be a sense of passion. There has to be something there for the heart, there has to be something there for the intellect, there has to be something for sensuality and sensation.’
Joni Mitchell
I recently watched a documentary about the singer-songwriter Joni Mitchell (2003’s ‘A Woman of Heart and Mind,’ directed by Susan Lacy).
Since the late 1960s Joni has woven a musical tapestry of tuneful melodies, complex chords and conversational lyrics. She has related her own personal narratives in elegant streams of consciousness. Her songs have been rooted in particular times and places, embellished with rich, imaginative imagery. In crystal clear tones, she has sung about love and independence, the spiritual and the sensual; about illusion and heartbreak, isolation and social justice. She has been honest, articulate and wise; fragile and strong; confessional and allusive. She has been ‘unfettered and alive.’
'I've looked at love from both sides now,
From give and take, and still somehow
It's love's illusions I recall.
I really don't know love at all.’
'Both Sides, Now'
There’s a good deal that we can learn from Joni’s life and work about the craft of creativity.
1. Don’t End Up Kicking the Door Off the Hinges
Roberta Joan ’Joni’ Anderson was born in 1943 in Fort Macleod, Alberta, Canada. Her mother was a teacher, her father an officer in the Royal Canadian Air Force. On leaving the service, her dad became a grocer and the family settled in Saskatoon.
‘When the war ended my father found us a little house by the highway with a picture window. And I think that set up a permanent longing in me to take off and go somewhere. Things coming and going past that window left an impression upon me. Here they come. Where are they going?’
At age 9 Joni contracted polio, was hospitalized for weeks and spent a lot of time recuperating alone. She struggled academically and her main interest was painting. When she finished high school, she enrolled at the Alberta College of Art.
Joni also taught herself guitar and played folk gigs at her college and local coffeehouses. She determined that music would be her career.
‘My grandmother was a frustrated poet musician and she kicked the door off of the hinges on the farm. I thought of my paternal grandmother who wept for the last time in her life at 14 behind some barn because she wanted a piano… And I thought: maybe I’m the one that got the gene that has to make it happen for these two women…I just thought: I’m gonna end up like my grandmother, kicking the door off the hinges…I better not.’
Jack Robinson/Hulton Archive, via Getty Images
2. Be Grateful for Your Troubles
‘Depression can be the sand that makes the pearl. Most of my best work came out of it… There is a possibility in that mire of an epiphany.’
In 1964 Joni discovered that she was pregnant. Unable to provide for her baby girl, she placed her for adoption. She met American singer Chuck Mitchell, toured the United States with him and soon the couple were married. Joni, 21 and penniless, thought the union would offer a way out of her problems.
‘I was emotionally weak with a lot of things pulling me in all sorts of unattractive directions. And this was a strong pull in a certain direction and somewhat of a solution. So we married each other for all the wrong reasons.’
The marriage didn’t work out. Chuck wasn’t prepared to raise another man’s child. He insisted on Joni performing with him as a duo and on controlling their finances. She felt betrayed. The couple divorced in 1967, and Joni moved to New York, a solo artist once more.
‘I feel every bit of trouble I’m grateful for. Bad fortune changed the course of my destiny. I became a musician.’
'I can't go back there anymore.
You know my keys won't fit the door.
You know my thoughts don't fit the man.
They never can.’
'I Had a King'
3. Develop Your Own ‘Chords of Enquiry’
Joni took to performing in the small clubs and bars of Greenwich Village and touring up and down the East Coast. She also dedicated herself to composing her own songs.
‘I started writing just to develop my own private world.’
Being self-taught, Joni had a distinctive way of playing the guitar. Polio had weakened her left hand, so she devised alternative open tunings to compensate. Some observers remarked on her ‘weird chords.’
‘How can there be weird chords? Chords are depictions of emotions…They feel like my feelings. I call them chords of enquiry. They have a question mark in them. There were so many unresolved things in me that these chords suited me.’
4. Personalise Your Work
While in New York, Joni was greatly impressed by the storytelling quality of Bob Dylan’s songs.
‘His influence was to personalise my work: I feel this - for you, from you, or because of you.’
But Joni also admired old-fashioned crooners, and wanted her songs to be tuneful too.
‘It was my job to distil a hybrid that allowed for a certain amount of melodic movement and harmonic movement, but with a certain amount of plateau in order to make the longer statement – to be able to say more.’
5. Be Open to Encounter
In 1967 David Crosby of the Byrds saw Joni perform in a club in Florida. Thoroughly impressed, he introduced her to the LA music scene, and she was signed to the Reprise label. Crosby went on to produce her debut album, ‘Song to a Seagull,’ which was released in 1968.
‘How does a person write a song? A lot of it is being open to encounter and in a way in touch with the miraculous.’
Joni settled in Laurel Canyon in LA, embracing the camaraderie, collaboration and counterculture; the spirit of peace and love, art and poetry. With her long, straight, centre-parted, flaxen hair, her fresh face, high cheekbones and toothy smile; with her flowing dresses, knitted shawls and crocheted berets, she was the community’s spiritual leader.
Joni’s subsequent albums, ‘Clouds’ and ‘Ladies of the Canyon,’ earned her increasing critical and commercial success. The latter included the definitive Woodstock anthem, despite the fact that she missed out on the festival.
'We are stardust,
We are golden,
And we've got to get ourselves
Back to the garden.’
'Woodstock'
6. Engage in Crop Rotation
‘Any time I make a record, it’s followed by a painting period. It’s good crop rotation.’
Exhausted by relentless performing and the pressures of fame, depressed by her break-up with singer-songwriter Graham Nash, Joni decided to stop touring for a year and focus on writing and painting.
‘My individual psychological descent coincided ironically with my ascent in the public eye. They were putting me on a pedestal and I was wobbling.’
The songs she wrote at this time appeared on her essential album, ‘Blue.’ Released in 1971, it was an intensely personal work.
‘I was demanding of myself a deeper and greater honesty: more and more revelation in my work in order to give it back to the people.’
'I remember that time you told me,
You said, "Love is touching souls."
Surely you touched mine,
'Cause part of you pours out of me
In these lines from time to time.
Oh, you're in my blood like holy wine.
You taste so bitter and so sweet.
Oh, I could drink a case of you, darling.
And still I'd be on my feet.
I would still be on my feet.’
‘I Could Drink a Case of You'
People were shocked by ‘Blue’. Was Joni revealing too much of herself? Was she being too candid?
'At that period of my life, I had no personal defences. I felt like a cellophane wrapper on a pack of cigarettes.’
Joni had already established that her creativity needed rest and recuperation. She retreated once again, this time to Canada, immersing herself in nature, solitude and reflection. This regeneration led to 1972’s ‘For the Roses.’
‘I isolated myself and made my attempt to get back to the garden.’
7. Stay in Control
Although Joni’s work exposed her vulnerability, she had to be strong willed to succeed and survive in the music business. Throughout her career she demonstrated a steely determination to impose her own independent vision. She wrote her own songs, produced most of her own albums, designed most of her own sleeves. In the early days she even booked her own tours.
‘Creatively she knew where she wanted it to go and what she wanted it to be. She had a vision. She wasn’t looking for input.’
Elliot Roberts, Manager
‘She would not be marketed and she would not let the marketing effect what she was going to do.’
Tom Manoff, Critic
8. Ignore the Lines
As the 1970s progressed, Joni demonstrated a thirst to evolve her sound.
‘The need to innovate, or to be fresh, or to be original is very strong in me.’
To support her 1974 ‘Court and Spark’ album, she embarked on her first tour with backing musicians, enlisting the jazz-fusion band LA Express.
‘I shouldn’t be stereotyped as a magic princess as I got earlier in my career – the sort of ‘twinkle, twinkle, little star’ kind of attitude. I didn’t like that feeling, and I think that the band will only show that there is another side to the music. I think it’s a good expansion.’
Increasingly Joni embraced the world of jazz. She enjoyed working with other artists, exploring the freedom of creation and breaking down traditional genre definitions. This resulted in 1974’s ‘The Hissing of Summer Lawns’ and 1976’s ‘Hejira.’
‘I never really liked lines. Class lines, social structure lines. And I ignored them always.’
'There's no comprehending
Just how close to the bone and the skin and the eyes
And the lips you can get,
And still feel so alone,
And still feel related.’
‘Coyote'
9. Locate Your Useful Human Truth
Through the ‘80s and ‘90s Joni continued collaborating with other musicians and experimenting - with synthesizers, drum machines and sequencers. She had made allusions to her daughter in some of her past compositions (such as 1971’s ‘Little Green’). At last in 1997 they were reunited.
In recent years Joni has suffered from ill health. We are blessed that she is still with us. She recently celebrated her 78th birthday (7 November).
‘It’s been a very subjective journey, but hopefully universal. That was always my optimism: that if I described my own changes through whatever the decade was throwing at us, that there were others like me. And it turns out that there were.’
We cannot learn to write songs like Joni Mitchell. She is unique, a genius. However we can learn a good deal about the process of creativity. In particular we can better understand the imperative of clarity and honesty, the quest to find ‘the useful human truth.’
'The writing has been an exercise – trying to work my way towards clarity. Get out the pen and face the beast yourself... What’s bothering you? Well, that’s not exactly it... OK, let’s go a little deeper. That’s not exactly it... It’s very hard peeling back the layers of your own onion…This is now useful, because we’ve hit upon a human truth.’
'Everything comes and goes,
Marked by lovers and styles of clothes.
Things that you held high
And told yourself were true
Lost or changing as the days come down to you.
No. 345
