(Credits: Far Out / Tidal)
Sat 10 January 2026 2:30, UK
Fresh off the stark, romantic confessionals that haunt 1971’s Blue, singer-songwriter Joni Mitchell leaned into her cynical side for the follow-up LP For the Roses.
A fatigue with the music industry was slapped all over its initial front cover. Later used for the billboard poster promotion, Mitchell drew an ink and felt pen, psychedelic doodle of a horse’s backside with roses shoved in its arse and a goldfish bowl for a knee on the right leg, a likely reference to her high school poem ‘The Fishbowl’ she dreamed up as an exploration of fame and celebrity.
While nicely anchored to For the Roses’ show business-bashing title track, Mitchell’s Asylum record label wasn’t keen, however, eager for her face to feature somewhere on the cover. In response, Mitchell submitted a nude landscape shot from behind by photographer Joel Bernstein, gazing out across Canada’s Sunshine Coast shoreline in British Columbia near her Halfmoon Bay cottage. Label boss David Geffen still wasn’t convinced, pointing out she was unlikely to appreciate “Only $4.99″ stickered across her arse.
Around the time of Mitchell’s fifth album, the sexual revolution that exploded across the counterculture soon became co-opted by the commercial world into the 1970s, Mitchell presaging such a shift with her wry yet natural embrace of nudity away from the leering gaze of male ogling.
“I remember when [this sexualisation] was kind of starting,” Mitchell remembered in a 2022 Apple Music interview with Elton John, before citing various photos Linda Ronstadt and Carly Simon had taken part in, revealing a more sexual side than had been seen yet at the time. “I thought, ‘Oh God, do we gotta do this?’ So I just decided to be naked on my record and get it over with.”
The photos referenced are, in fact, after For the Roses’ photo shoot. Both handled by Norman Seeff, Ronstadt posed for several images in a more intimate and vulnerable guise before her underwear shoots for Rolling Stone magazine in 1978, and Seeff’s snaps of Simon would adorn the cover of Playing Possum, released in 1975. But while the distances of time may have blurred exact chronologies, Mitchell’s antenna back well over 50 years ago keenly picked up on the shifting sexual mores at play in the business, for good or ill.
Eventually, a neutral shot of Mitchell fully clothed ahead of British Columbia’s natural beauty was opted for instead, slipping the nude landscape in For the Roses’ gatefold.
A fairly staid cover considering the inspired illustrations that graced Song to a Seagull or Ladies of the Canyon, but For the Roses’ jump into the world of objectified sex was poked fun at in a way completely in keeping with the album’s lambast of music’s pull away from the previous decade’s utopian promise and into the crasser ends of music commercialism.
As ever during her classic era, Mitchell had struck gold once again, offering the folk music world another much-loved record that’s continued to rank highly among critical and fan rankings, enthralled with For the Roses’ jazzy resistance to the era’s shallow excesses.
Related Topics