Warner Brothers Music Show #143

Geffen Records
September 1985

Thanks to Lindsay Moon for transcribing this from the audio recording.

(Music up: "Good Friends" from "Dog Eat Dog.")

Joni Mitchell: In order for a song to be a song that I figure I could sing for a long time, certain words that you write on a Monday, sing 'em on a Tuesday and they don't feel right, you know, and you say, well, you know, I'll be out somewhere on the road, I'll come to this line and I won't want to sing it. So there's constant revisal.

For instance, in Good Friends you and me, there was a verse that goes, "sometimes change comes at you / like a broadside accident." That was the original line. But the lines that followed it were as different as -- one draft was "sometimes change comes at you / like a broadside accident / you get minor cuts and bruises, that's all / you could hammer out the dents."

Starting with that first line, there were a lot of second and third lines, and the way it finally ended up being was "sometimes change comes at you / like a broadside accident / there is chaos to the order / random things you can't prevent." And the irony of the whole thing was that about a month ago, Larry and I got hit by a drunk. Our car was totaled, and we walked away from a devastating accident with very minor injuries. And I kept thinking, you know, I've got to be careful what I write.

Announcer: How did Michael McDonald get involved?

JM: We had -- the point where the vocal went on which wasn't necessarily like when the track was finished. Often the vocal is one of the early components. I don't know, just something about the way my voice sounded on that particular track, that's the voice that I kept hearing that -- to play the part of the other character. I just thought it would be a good blend on that particular song. It turns out it worked out nice.

(Music up: End of "Good Friends." "Fiction.")

Announcer: "Fiction." What inspired that song?

JM: That's Larry's music. That's my husband's music. The two songs that he wrote the music on the album are very short lines. I'm used to -- coming out of folk music -- to almost like Iambic pentameter or a variation of it, so this is all like ba-dum, ba-dum, real short phrases. Even at the demo stage, it was like highly mechral(?), you know, like high-tech kind of architecture, minimalism, of a blast, short phrases, repetition, and truth/fiction, truth/fiction was one of the first gems of direction on what the lyrics would contain. And after that it was just a matter of editing because you could sing that song for days and find counterpoint. And I had pages and pages of ideas. And that was just a general sampling, you know, I had to edit it way down because the pages went on forever because there's so much conflict. This is a time of terrific conflict.

(Music up: End of "Fiction." "Three Great Stimulants.")

Announcer: How did innocence become one of the three great stimulants?

JM: Well, artifice is everything which is unnatural. Brutality is an obvious adrenalin-getter. But innocence, when a country enters into its decadence, there's a youth culting, envious of youth, you know, want them for your own or you can want to twist them. There's a lot of that now. Everybody is fascinated by innocence. Husbands divorce and marry younger women. They find a refreshingness in that lack of experience.

(Music up: End of "Three Great Stimulants." "Tax Free.")

JM: I look at Jimmy Swaggart, you know, to me, he's just this God-awful evil looking as any guys prancing around in spider webs and studs (laughs). You know, he's supposed to be playing out, you know, Mr. Theater of good, right? You've got Mr. Theater of evil. I don't see them looking that much different except for costume.

You take any kind of primitive culture and they always have their demons dressed up and bouncing around, you know, like, as part of their culture. I think that these demons are a part of our culture and that they are important. They represent all things lurking and dark, you know, and if an evangelist can get up there and go 'and then the devil ...' and he does it, you know, with words, he's telling stories about evil and the devil and these terrible things, you know, with words. And what's the difference, you know, whether these guys get off and they personify evil? You know, it's just all theater, it's show biz.

(Music up: End of "Tax Free.")

Announcer: How did you get Rod Steiger to deliver his sermon on "Tax Free"?

JM: We had just seen "The Pawnbroker," and we knew that we had to get somebody to play this preacher. Up until then, we had the actual transcription, and we couldn't put it out that way. And so we thought Rod Steiger is a great actor. He's a neighbor of ours. He only lives about four or five doors up. So we met at the Colony Drug Store, it's in our neighborhood. So we met him over there, played him the tape, and he said he would do it ... (Inaudible.)

(Music up: End of "Tax Free." "Empty, Try Another." "Dog Eat Dog.")

JM: It takes me now about three years to do an album because -- if I tour -- it takes me two if I don't. It takes a year of living and wandering. I do some things that I didn't do when I was a kid, but pretty much I live the same life. Like I go anywhere I want to. I go by myself. It's not cool for a star to be seen especially in this era of bodyguards, but I like to just kind of free-agent it. I always was a loner. I like walking around in cities by myself. I can see things better. I mean, I've had some companions that I'm comfortable enough or compatible enough that I enjoy that, but often I just see better. I observe better when I'm on my own. If I spend more time in New York, there'll be more New York songs.

(Music up: End of "Dog Eat Dog." "Shiny Toys.")

Announcer: A lot of the album, especially in "Shiny Toys" and stuff, there is an idea of money really being the root of all evil. Now, I think over your albums, it's been kind of an ambiguous relationship with money and glamour and stuff so if you can see nice things, you can see bad. This is the first time that I've really gotten a sense of you saying, no, it just brings out the worst in people.

JM: It does, yeah. I can't say that I don't like money, but I don't like what it does to people. You know, I know that I could live with so much less, but once you've had something and you're going to come down to less, you're really in danger of embitterment. Sometimes I think it's better off to have nothing. Maybe you should keep artists starving. It keeps them honest.

(Music up: End of "Shiny Toys." "Ethiopa.")

Announcer: By any chance was "Ethiopa" written for the "We Are the World" album?

JM: No. No, it was written after the fact. It was written after I did the Canadian Band Aid thing, and I just felt in singing the words that the general overtone of these anthems was self-congratulatory and that the cause, you know, we -- there's another way to look at We Are the World, which is a good idea. It can narrow down to simply 'we'. You know, all of this heroism, in view of all of these big charity events of the past, the Bangladesh, the No Nukes, you know, there was a lot of self-congratulation went on and everybody that appeared in these things, you know, was the new consciousness and inevitably it did their careers some good and everything, and the money never got to the people. Never. It got stripped off by the government, you know, it got stripped off by the inevitable expense of presenting such a thing. It never got there.

(Music up: End of "Ethiopa." "Impossible Dreamer.")

Announcer: Is "Impossible Dreamer" about John Lennon?

JM: It's a more general song than, you know, it's not specifically him, it's Martin Luther King, you know, all the voices of idealism. It's addressed to them singularly, but when I was writing it, all of the public voices and some private voices, I mean everything that I ever heard along that line, death of that whole idea, you know. I guess it came about because of its rebirth now.

(Music up: End of "Impossible Dreamer." "Lucky Girl.")

JM: There is one love song, "Lucky Girl," and that is a different attitude from other love songs, that's for sure.

(Music up: "Lucky Girl.")

JM: I've been out here in no man's land, you know, like with jazz a dirty word, you know, to the record company. The thing that killed me when we played this record at playback, one of the executives, like, heard "Lucky Girl" and he said, 'Oh, I really, really like this one. I really like this one. It's good. It's jazzy.' I thought I'd die. Suddenly jazz is hip and they're thinking about putting this thing out as a single because Sting with all his personal power from being a huge pop star and craving virtuosity has now made the possibility of playing with virtuosos and being -- still being popular, kind of hip. So, go figure. (Laughs).

(Music up: "Lucky Girl.")

(End of interview.)