(Credits: Far Out / Press)
Wed 22 October 2025 22:02, UK
It never seemed like Joni Mitchell was altogether comfortable with being a massive rock star.
Any artist would be glad to have fans that are willing to take that musical journey with them as they play through one of their records, but is it really worth it for people to get that invested when they’re only listening to the hooks rather than the inner workings of the tune? The song should mean more to people beyond the surface level, and Mitchell knew that all of her idols were the ones that found their voice on their respective instruments.
And compared to the other singer-songwriters of her day, it wasn’t that hard to pick out when Mitchell came on the radio. Outside of her fantastic vocal range, her knowledge of harmony was always far more impactful than any band that was pumping out riffs. She had an acute knowledge of what she could do with any one of her songs, and despite not everything getting mainstream attention, the charts would always look healthy if ‘Help Me’ found its way into the Top 40.
But as soon as Court and Spark came along, it felt like the rest of the world started to leave her behind a little bit. It wasn’t that her music had suddenly become subpar by any means, either. She was simply turning a new corner in her career, and even if the rest of the world wasn’t willing to come along for the ride, Mitchell preferred to have chapters in her discography rather than have to worry about whatever flavour of the month she had to suddenly jump on.
Compared to the other rock legends, though, Mitchell found her salvation going in a jazzier direction. Not everyone was going to love the longer tunes on her late 1970s albums, but being able to work with legends like Larry Carlton helped give her a whole new vocabulary to work with. Fans that came on the bandwagon with tunes like ‘River’ were in for a surprise with ‘Amelia’, but that didn’t make it any less fun to listen to.
In fact, what Mitchell was doing was more or less copying a few career moves from her idols like John Coltrane and Charles Mingus. There were always layers to their sound that needed to be dissected a little more than the traditional jazz tune, but the real model for her career came from listening to the countless styles Miles Davis could inhabit with just a horn in his hand.
Even if not everything Davis played was the most accurate from a musical perspective, Mitchell knew that she would never change a thing about his work, saying, “He’s one of my great heroes. I learned a lot about singing from him. There’s a song called ‘It Never Entered My Mind’ and at the end of it he draws a long, flat note. He holds it all the way through the piece of music to the end and it’s brilliant. [It] just kills me. Every time I hear it I just go ‘Oh! it’s so sad!’ You know, if he’d played it right on pitch it would have been pretty but he flattened it out and you know it just tears your heart apart. It’s so perfect, it’s just touching.”
The same could be said with the biggest names in music as well. There are countless times in rock history where artists are blatantly out of tune on their records, but when you look at those old records are hear those sections, there’s a certain magic that comes out of them that can’t be recreated with using Auto-Tune or punching in a different take.
Because above all else, Mitchell and Davis knew that there was no sense in trying to be perfect at every single juncture. Music is all about the glory of imperfections, and had those tunes been cleaned up a little bit or given that little extra polish in the studio, they would cease to be the classics that they are.
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