by Picking the greatest song by any artist is a tall order, let alone the iconic Joni Mitchell.
According to some sources, Mitchell has just below 900 songs in her discography. I challenge you to land on a single track that perfectly sums up the complex attachment you might have garnered after crying, alone in a dark room, to her soaring acoustic ballads. Can’t do it? Neither can I.
The first time I listened to Mitchell, I felt like I was floating. Her voice strikes the delicate balance between sweet delight and crushing pain so gracefully, with such clever intent. And yet, the way she sings feels like the most natural thing in the world, like it belongs with the bird-song echoing in the trees lit a ruddy, violent pink by a beautiful sunrise.
Whether the avid Mitchell-heads like it or not, a huge amount of fans will have first engaged with her work through Love Actually. In one of Emma Thompson’s more devastating performances, she comes to realise that her husband is cheating on her, through the vessel of a Mitchell CD. The song that plays as she mourns her marriage is ‘Both Sides Now’. Among other things, it represents the complexities of love and other abstracts, exploring how our shifting human perspectives can never truly lead us to full understanding. Ironic, because if anyone can understand the depths of love, it’s Joni.
Thematically, there are echoes of this in Elvis Costello‘s favourite Joni Mitchell song. The English singer, songwriter, record producer, author, and television host had no issue sticking his name next to what he considers Mitchell’s “greatest” of all songs. He chose ‘For the Roses’, the titular track from her 1972 album.
Explaining his unmatched adoration of the song, Costello shared: “There are tiny details of a lover’s infidelity: ‘I get these notes on butterflies and lilac sprays from girls who just have to tell me they saw you somewhere,’ but the musical tone is also confidential and it sets up a bold and unflinching look at an artist trying to detach from the deceits of fame.”
Mitchell famously hated the idea of being famous. When obsessed fans might find her in aisle seven of the supermarket, or trying to fill her car with petrol on a languid weekday morning, Mitchell cowered from the advances. She used travelling names, or wore a wig, anything to hide herself from prying eyes. ‘For the Roses’ is a meaningful exploration of this response coming to the surface. Forget flight or fight: How about hide?
The song touches on much more than that, too. In it, we have the lost figure of the poet, writing his way through pain. A pain he profits from. “In some office sits a poet / And he trembles as he sings / And he asks some guy / To circulate his soul around.” This Allen Ginsberg quote, in which he details that the figure of the writer “abandoning the glory of poetry and just settling down in the muck of your own mind,” comes to mind. Somehow, with Joni, we get both the muck and the glory.
