Joni Mitchell is a celebrity, of course, but she is also an artist, still an artist. She looks at life from her own peculiar angle, decides what is important and what isn't, and pretty well discards the rest.
"I don't care about hip," she said in an interview on the weekend. "Hip is a herd mentality. I got it out of my system when I was in my 20s. I'm not a joiner; if it gets too clannish, it doesn't interest me."
It is remarkable that this independence of mind has survived in a music business that demands conformity, but Mitchell, 53, has taken many risks, large and small, over the course of a storied career.
She remembers making her jazz album in 1979 with Charles Mingus who insisted that she stay true to his original melody. "I really wanted to please him," says Mitchell, but one of his lines ended on what she calls a blue note, like "an unresolved statement, suggesting melancholy, doubt." Her lyric demanded another, higher note so she sang it that way until Mingus interjected, accusing her of betraying his text and singing "a square note."
"I said, `Charles, that note's been square so long it's hip again,'" says Mitchell, with a laugh. Her version prevailed and so has she in an industry that increasingly treats stars as if they were disposable.
She was in Ottawa on the weekend to receive a Governor General's performing arts award for lifetime achievement, an honor she described as a "highlight" in a year marked by tributes.
Looking out a window at the Westin Hotel on a bleak, November afternoon, Mitchell recalled playing the Le Hibou coffee house in the '60s on the same weekend that Jimi Hendrix was playing the long-gone Capitol Theatre.
After his show finished, Hendrix and his drummer came to Le Hibou to tape Mitchell's show. Later, the three returned to the Chateau Laurier, where they were all staying, to listen to the tape. But, says Mitchell, "all the hotel saw was three hippies. They probably thought we were having sex and doing drugs. They couldn't imagine we were just listening to music -- and we had it on so low, you could barely hear it."
"Eventually we were told, `You have to go back to your individual rooms,' " she recalls, smiling at the memory.
During the interview, Mitchell smoked steadily and was talkative, friendly and generous in spirit and tone. She has an appealing innocence (another mark of an artist), although she is not naive about the music industry, or her own career.
"Is it fogeydom? I think the music is degenerating," she says, citing rap songs that exhibit good writing but hackneyed themes or the remote (to her) complaints of "disempowered white males" of the angst-rock genre.
The problem, she says, is that contemporary popular music is produced to fit the rigid formulas of private radio and, at the same time, too much is expected of today's performers. The music of the '40s, she says, was the product of three people: singer, composer and lyricist. These days "everyone does all three parts and not everyone is equipped to do them well."
She describes herself as a long-distance runner, rather than a sprinter, adding that, "In a career as long as mine, it undulates. Basically, you're lucky to have three seasons at the top."
For some 20 years, radio stations didn't play her music, with the result that the general public in Canada "is only exposed to two or three of my songs and they are played ad nauseam, and they are not my best work."
To find a wider audience for some of her more obscure compositions -- and to keep the albums from being remaindered -- she recently released a CD set entitled Hits, Misses. She allowed her record company to release the hits album, provided she could select "my least popular songs" for the misses collection.
The fierce independence that has allowed her to withstand the homogenizing influence of Big Music, has also led to a certain ambiguity about her nationality: as she says, she's not a joiner. Although she was born in Alberta, raised in Saskatchewan and lived in Toronto, Mitchell has spent much of her adult life in California and is often mistakenly believed to be an American.
It drives her crazy to be "treated as an expatriate" in what she still considers her own country. While she spends a lot of time in Los Angeles taking care of business, she also has owned a home in British Columbia since 1970, her parents and her current boyfriend live in Saskatchewan, and she retains her Canadian citizenship.
"I'm without political affiliation, without religious affiliation. I'm a mutt, so I'm without national affiliation, in a way, and I tend to empathize with a lot of people. I have a lot of different bloods running through me," she explains."I don't really have any chauvinism, or national pride, which can be a terrible thing sometimes."
But at the weekend awards ceremony, "I did feel a national pride, and I thought that it's OK to indulge it for one evening," she says, with a self-deprecating laugh.
What could be more Canadian?
Printed from the official Joni Mitchell website. Permanent link: https://jonimitchell.com/library/view.cfm?id=629
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