Translation to English by Olivia Frison De Angelis.
She celebrated her 70 years on November 7th. An occasion to celebrate Joni Mitchell, singer, songwriter, splendid pioneer… A free and independent woman, a musician with a naked guitar and stormy emotions. Also a provocateur who spares nobody, not even Bob Dylan.
In 2002, she announced to the world that she was retiring: Joni Mitchell would never make another recording. She said that she was sickened by the music industry, defining it as “repugnant,” “pornographic.” She admitted that this field had succeeded in making her “hate music.”
In 2006, Shine arrived like an unexpected gift: an album full of grace, strong, crowned by a breathtaking ballad, “If I Had a Heart.” In her image. Since then, she has made a few rare onstage appearances. A poignant one, on the 18th of June, in Toronto: she sings “Furry Sings the Blues,” from her album Hejira (1976). And, as always, she hides nothing. Each wrinkle is a triumph, each cigarette one more scar in her voice.
For a long time, she has distilled her very rare interviews, but when she speaks, Joni Mitchell doesn’t mince her words, as in the marvelous interview she gave to the British magazine Uncut (December 2013). In it, she displays an intelligence and a finesse out of the ordinary.
Always armed with her sense of humor and a laser-like precision of self-irony, with a slight taste for provocation, the outstanding poet of American popular music has lived since 1974 in her house in Beverly Hills, California. Not very bohemian, for someone who was nicknamed the “hippie folk goddess.” But was that ever who she was? “We always have a need for goddesses, but I am not one,” she says to the pages of Uncut. “The only thing that I like about hippies is their dress code.”
Years after Woodstock, Joni Mitchell admits that she considers most of these “moral values” nonsense, coming from an absurd idiocy… Free Love is not at all free: it’s a stratagem invented “for the guys,” and she considers herself one of its victims. The writer of the song “Woodstock,” the anthem of a generation, has had enough of this myth: she remembers that she was not able to be present during the festival, and she wrote “Woodstock” only after… through empathy, because she wanted desperately to be there. But, she explains today too, knowing the backstage of the festival and with her hindsight on this time period, her vision is much less “flower power.”
So, not a hippie. Artist, yes. And painter before anything else. “Drawing is my first form of expression,” she confides to Uncut. Joni Mitchell, whose magnificent oil paintings we’ve been able to admire on her album, Both Sides Now, surrounds herself at home with her own paintings: landscapes of countries she has visited, a portrait of Oshun the Nigerian water goddess, some self-portraits… She loves seeing what she’s painted, while she hates listening to her own records. Incidentally, she never does it, for fear of wanting to redo everything each time: add in a bass line, take out a guitar solo…
Listening to her vibrato, her incantatory fashion of declaiming a word on “Hejira” or in her reprise of “You’re My Thrill,” you have the impression of having already heard this reflective suffering, this marvelous difficulty of holding the note. Of course, it was Billie Holiday.
Joni… who has never aspired to celebrity – she even wrote a very beautiful poem on the subject, “The Fishbowl,” on Hollywood and its follies – who in 1965 considered herself nothing more than a folk singer, without any special talent… “I played the guitar, it wasn’t bad. And I must have had a pretty voice…” That’s all she concedes to the 18-year-old woman she once was.
Joni admits wanting to not resemble anyone, but to be in the avant-garde, totally unique. At the same time, she boycotts her early successes – “Big Yellow Taxi” and “Woodstock” (which would later become a hit for Crosby, Stills and Nash) – in publishing Blue, an album she sincerely thought was destined to fail, because it was too different from her habitual style. Unfortunately for her, this marvel climbed to the top of the charts. She is nicknamed “the woman who rocks” by Rolling Stone magazine.
On Blue, Joni Mitchell approached the painful abandonment of her daughter at birth (she found her again in the 1990s) and sings about the different faces of love like nobody’s business. “A Case of You,” one of the more beautiful pieces on the album, possesses at the same time the raw truth of Lucien Freud’s pictures and the blurry softness of pointillist painting. Her way of being so direct in her texts and her capacity to put the deepest emotions into play on a big virtual screen has disturbed some people. The actor and country singer Kris Kristofferson would tell her: “Keep something for yourself.”
Joni… who prefers to be compared to an arrogant woman over a pseudo-humble one, and throws into the interview with Uncut that the only artists she would define as her contemporaries are Leonard (Cohen) and Bob (Dylan). Not friends, but creators: too much competition separates these songwriters at the time. She explains: “I was too skilled for a girl.” We believe her. She was only 21 when she wrote “Both Sides Now,” one of the most beautiful songs of all time (of which she much later made a record by the same title, which came out in 2000). Even if her most beautiful version is doubtless the one that she sang with indescribable intensity as she was approaching her 55th year.
Not always understood, Joni Mitchell has regrets, of which the disastrous welcome reserved for Mingus, a magnificent album that appeared in 1979 and was recorded with jazz stars – bassist Jaco Pastorius, saxophonist Wayne Shorter, and pianist Herbie Hancock. “It’s as if, while recording this album, considered too far from country music, I had betrayed my art,” she said. But Joni Mitchell has always surpassed labels. Friend of Marvin Gaye, passionate about all music, composer and arranger extraordinaire, she is much more than a troubadour.
In Uncut, the singer wants to dot the i’s, especially in her remarks about Bob Dylan. She gets back to some of the vitriolic phrases she would have said during an interview given to The Los Angeles Times in 2010.
Joni Mitchell described Dylan as an “inauthentic” artist. Before continuing: “His name and his voice are false. Everything about Bob is a deception. He and I are like day and night…” Today, she swears that she never said these things. But she still treats Dylan as a plagiarist who had “stolen verses from the Japanese writer Junichi Saga. Joni Mitchell isn’t the first to bring up this story. She also asserts that Bob Dylan had confided in her one day: “I haven’t written a single song in years.” So for his compositions, “He was inspired by ancient hillbillies [traditional American folk music]” and like many artists, he had lost his inspiration. If she admits to liking a number of his songs, she considers Dylan neither a talented musician nor an extraordinary guitarist. “He created himself a character… a mask.” Despite these harsh words, we feel that Dylan, whom she met in 1969, and with whom she has toured many times, most recently in 1998, does not leave her indifferent. On the contrary. Her bow is well strung, but her arrows are not poisonous. And finally, with her stories on Dylan, she makes us smile, once more.
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Added to Library on December 27, 2014. (3567)
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