Joni Mitchell’s songs: a soundtrack of many lives

by Russell Leadbetter
Herald (Scotland)
October 5, 2025

BACK in April 2024, a special concert took place at the London venue the Roundhouse. Billed as The Songs of Joni Mitchell, it celebrated the Canadianborn singer-songwriter's 80th birthday. The intimate evening featured the contributions of such artists as its curator Lail Arad and Vashti Bunyan, Emile Sandé, Jesca Hoop and Kate Stables of This Is the Kit. It was rapturously received by fans and critics alike.

The Songs of Joni Mitchell subsequently hit the road, to further acclaim, and the show is to embark on a 2025 tour, opening at Glasgow's Old Fruitmarket on Monday, October 13. On stage will be Hoop,

Stables and Arad, and Richard Sears on piano. An EP, The Songs of Joni Mitchell Vol 1, has been released, containing Raised On Robbery, Morning Morgantown, Big Yellow Taxi and A Case Of You.

In an interview with Uncut magazine in January 2024, Arad said she had absorbed Mitchell's distinctive music while she was still in the womb. "Ladies Of The Canyon," she said, referring to Mitchell's third album, released in 1970, "is the first album that I absolutely devoured. The rest of my class were listening to the

A measure of the striking impact that Mitchell can have on her fellow musicians came from Bunyan herself.

"I can remember exactly where I was when I first heard Joni Mitchell," she told Uncut. "I was living in a very damp cottage in the Lake District in 1968. There was a black-and-white television in one of the rooms and I would put on a big coat and watch it. I saw her sitting at a piano and playing - it was probably Both Sides Now - and for me it was hugely affecting.

"I thought, 'I can never do that'. It had a huge effect on me, because from that moment on I never ever believed in myself.

"For about 30 years, I gave up on music altogether. No record player or radio, I didn't even sing to my children. I felt like such a failure, it's awful. I don't like to admit it, but that's what happened. Of course," she added - laughing - "I think I was an idiot now."

The run of albums that Mitchell made at the tail end of the sixties and throughout the seventies remains a formidable achievement. The earliest albums - Song To A Seagull (1968), Clouds (1969), Ladies Of The Canyon (1970), Blue (1971), For The Roses (1972) - remind you just how gifted she is: that high, clear, expressive voice, her distinctive acoustic guitar style and inventive tunings, and those songs - confessional, poetic, utterly bewitching. Heartbreaking and vulnerable too, sometimes. Together, the albums contain some of Mitchell's most memorable songs: I Had A King, Marcie, Chelsea Morning, Both Sides Now, Morning Morgantown,

For Free, Big Yellow Taxi, Woodstock, The Circle Game, Cary, Blue, California, This Flight Tonight, River, A Case Of You, For The Roses, You Turn Me On, I'm A Radio. Blue, in particular, is a classic, adored by Mitchell's fans and fellow musicians alike. Celebrating its 50th anniversary in 2021, the New York Times noted: "Half a century later, Mitchell's 'Blue' exists in that rarefied space beyond the influential or even the canonical. It is archetypal: the heroine's journey that Joseph Campbell forgot to map out. It is the story of a restless young woman questioning everything - love, sex, happiness, independence, drugs, America, idealism, motherhood, rock 'n' roll - accompanied by the rootless and idiosyncratically tuned sounds she so aptly called her 'chords of inquiry'."

Among those who have gone on record with their lasting appreciation of Blue are Mitchell's former partner James Taylor, who played guitar on four of its tracks, Judy Collins, the Haim sisters, Elvis Costello, David Crosby, Stephen Stills, Graham Nash (another former boyfriend), Laura Marling, Guy Garvey, St Vincent, Rufus Wainwright, Jimmy Webb, and Kim Wilde. "Her lyrics were deeply personal revelations, shocking sometimes," Webb has said. "She changed how people write songs."

Crosby himself told the Guardian, that same year: "Bob Dylan's as good a poet as Joni, but nowhere near as good a musician. Paul Simon and James Taylor made some stunners - but for me, Blue is the best singer-songwriter album. Picking a song from it is like choosing between your children. Can you imagine a better song than A Case Of You? She was so brilliant as a songwriter, it crushed me. But she gives us all something to strive for."

Mitchell wasn't finished yet, not by a long way. In 1974 came Court And Spark, its jazz-fusion and soft-rock stylings framing such classic songs as Free Man In Paris, Help Me, Court And Spark and Raised On Robbery, as well as a cover of Twisted, a song which had been co-written years earlier by the jazz singer Annie Ross. The album's roster of musicians included, on electric guitar, Larry Carlton, Wayne Perkins, Robbie Robertson of The Band, and Jose Feliciano. The album enjoyed considerable critical and commercial success.

After that came The Hissing Of Summer Lawns (1975) a jazz fusion, more experimental work and then, the following year, the album that may well be her masterpiece: the wondrous Hejira.

Mitchell had, in 1976, made a 10,000mile journey by car across the US, returning with the songs that would make up her eighth studio album. "I was looking for a word to describe running away from something honourably," she once said. "'Hejira' comes from when Mohammed had to leave Mecca - it means leaving the dream, no blame."

"The title is appropriate for this album, since this is probably the ultimate 'road' record so far," enthused the New York Times's reviewer. "Rock stars have turned with boring insistence to the image of themselves on tour as a metaphor for loneliness and alienation. But the poetry in Hejira freshens the familiar into something meaningful once again.

"For Miss Mitchell, her incessant touring of the past two years has crystallized into a superb series of songs in which the road becomes a metaphor not only for loneliness, but for growth and for life itself."

In the years to come there would be many other notable Mitchell studio albums, from Don Juan's Reckless Daughter (1977) all the way up to Shine (2007). In 2015, however, she was taken to hospital after suffering a brain aneurysm, which left her unable to walk or speak. There was a painstaking road to recovery, but, in July 2022, her good friend, the singer-songwriter, brand i Carlile, sprang a major surprise on the audience at the Newport Jazz Festival when she announced that Mitchell would be appearing.

Joni performed a dozen of her finest songs, supported by such musicians as Carlile, Marcus Mumford and Wynonna Judd. The concert, a remarkably affecting event that was subsequently released on CD, had come about as a result of intimate 'Joni Jams' she had been hosting in the living room of her Bel Air home with musician friends.

Mitchell's website lists dozens of awards she has received, going all the way back to a Grammy award for Best Folk Performance in 1970 for Clouds. Just the other week she received her latest, from SOCAN, the Society of Composers, Authors and Music Publishers of Canada, for her song Both Sides Now.

Receiving the award on Mitchell's behalf, singer Allison Russell performed the song and read from a poem she had written about Joni. "When something's lost, something's won. Love, hope, truth abide," she said. "When Joni sings, when Joni writes, we cry."