Joni Mitchell - Front Woman

by Matt Resnicoff
Musician Magazine
March 1991

In "Real Good For Free," the star in a limousine confronted his roots in a street musician - these days, the guy in the limo can't even play!

Yeah, but that's nothing new. Everybody's so shocked at this Milli Vanilli thing - the second wave of rock 'n' roll was like that! That's why the Beatles seemed so fresh; they were the third. The pure first wave was Chuck Berry and Little Richard. The second wave was doo-wop, and New York got hold of it. Fabian, that's Milli Vanilli: They just groomed a pretty face who couldn't sing or play. That wave of superficiality was followed by the more earnest sound of the folk boom, like the Weavers, Kingston Trio, Dylan. Dylan kicked a lot of people into gear. I never thought to be critical of a pop lyric, because it wasn't poetry. After Dylan I thought, "You mean, you can put poetry to music? Great!"

That approach can get you into trouble.

I'm used to being a woman without a country, you know? All my life I've been that way. People don't like it when you switch camps. I've got paintings in Europe on exhibition, and one of the curators was nervous at first, because there's four different styles. Some of the people's written comments were funny: "Don't quit your night job." "Nice frames." But mostly they liked it. I guess it was brought on by the pop thing, but the woman who ran it said it was kind of a phenomenon; people would buy a poster and want to sit and talk about which paintings they liked, and why.

Success gives you freedom as a painter that you don't enjoy as a musician. When you put an ambitious experiment out as a record, you run the risk of people just not getting it.

Yeah, I had the blessing to record as I saw fit in spite of trends. I never was produced. I work with my husband now, but I always had the luxury of making my music when it wasn't in sync with its time. As it became less familiar, I ended up an outcast, from the jazz and rock communities. And I never really even fit into folk. I dressed too colorfully! [laughs]

On your new album Night Ride Home, you rhapsodize a black boy in a Botticellian dream, it's as though you're resigned that the perfect lover is really just a power child after all.

You're thinking about what I'm thinking instead of what the song is saying. The people who will enjoy the record won't think about what I meant; they'll hold it up and it'll be like a mirror.

Any time a singer sings - any singer in the world - they're acting. And sometimes in the course of performance something strikes against the actor's life, and it becomes vital. But art is artifice no matter how much of your life you put in. When I sang "Cherokee Louise" I felt like I was nine. I had to punch in in one place and I couldn't get the feeling back; I was an adult pretending to be young. I went to hear the Joni Mitchell Project, this revue that does some of my songs. They called me up and I did "Cherokee Louise" a cappella, dancing to keep the groove. I'm coming up on the rape scene and I'm, like, highly mirthful. But it came off because people got feelings from it. Every time you sing it you don't relive it. An old song can die on you.

The point is, do you see yourself in it? Does the mirror show you screwing up, and perhaps set you on a course to changing that? Or do you see another person suffering like you did and it brings a comfort to your sorrow?

The mirror can be scary; some of your songs are quite tragic.

It's a tragic world we live in! Every second two species become extinct. People say, "We need a cure for cancer"; there is no cure. We are cancer. What man has done to this environment for economics. And what's happening now? The world is accelerating economically! Communism breaking down is no victory. That's what getting back to the garden means in "Woodstock": Some hippies tried it but fell into a rural decadence because there was no culture around it. The novelty wore off and they went back to the real world, which since its beginning has been set upon a course of destiny - man moving away from nature.

Pop music marketing plays into that commercial unification, especially radio; it puts artists like you in a precarious place.

And lot of critics are prejudiced against great musicians, who they call slick. Somebody said to me, "This sounds like Sting," because Wayne Shorter was on it. That's ignorance. And that's a rock journalist saying that. You talk about the more creative era I grew up in? When I was in my 20's, deejays had the freedom to play world music, folk, jazz, rock, all in the same show. That was an education and a thrill. Now we're in a decadent, commerce-dictated state. Those bits of music are available, but how does a young artist gain access to all of this wonderful knowledge that would make a richer, brighter talent? So rich and bright [laughs] that people wouldn't get it?