Aired on BBC-2, February 20, 1999. Hosted by Mary Black. (Transcribed from the audio by Lindsay Moon).

MARY BLACK: Hello, I'm Mary Black, and welcome to Both Sides Now, our program on one of my favorite singer-songwriters, Joni Mitchell.

(Music up: Excerpt from "Both Sides Now.")

MB: Joni Mitchell's career is now over 30 years old. During that time she has written and sung mainly her own songs. She's also continuously experimented with various musical genres, such as folk, jazz, rock, and world music, integrating them into a unique vision of popular music.

An only child, Roberta Joan Anderson's unusual gifts first developed in her native Canada.

JONI MITCHELL: I moved in the sixth grade from a small town, North Battleford, to a larger -- what would be called a city, at least by local standards, Saskatoon, and by that time I was the school artist. I'd established myself with this drive to draw. And I was hanging up pictures for a parent/teacher day in the hallway when a good-looking Australian came up to me and said, "You like to paint?" I said, "Yes." He said to me, "If you can paint with a brush, you can paint with words. I'll see you next year." His name was Kratzman. He'd come to Canada with his teaching credentials kind of out of whack, and so they'd punished him by sending him to teach on Indian reservations which he loved. You know, it was kind of -- to send a teacher to the Indian reservations in Saskatchewan was like being banished to Siberia. But he took to it with a relish and he was a very, very soulful man. He'd been a racing partner to the great gold-medal-winning racer, Johnny somebody-or-other in Australia at that time so he was a really good runner. And he was a teacher-maker and a writer-maker and an athlete-maker.

He said, you know, "I'm not going to teach it to you. I'm going to cram you in the last two weeks. You'll all pass with flying colors. I'm going to teach you what I know."

(Music up: Excerpt from "Paprika Plains.")

JM: Poetry came into play basically because we were given assignments to write poetry. I chose to write a rather ambitious poem about a stallion and, you know, I used words from Reader's Digest page to improve your word power and I stretched vocabulary for an 11-year-old, and it was quite a precocious poem. But he circled it all over 'cliche, cliche,' you know, 'good adjective,' you know, 'you've used this adjective,' 'cliche,' and he marked me harder than I think American college professors mark at this point. At 11. He said to me, "How many times did you see "Black Beauty"? he said to me. I said, "Once." "What do you know about horses?" I said, "Well, I go riding at Rib Stockyard (phonetic) on the weekends, you know, whenever I can. I like horses." And he said, "Well, the things that you've told me that you've done on other weekends are more interesting than this." You know, like "write in your own blood," he told me. Write in your own blood, which is Nietzschze I found out later.

(Music up: Excerpt from "Paprika Plains.")

JM: My early interest in music stemmed from the fact that in the community a lot of European tradition had been carried over and so there were adjudicated music festivals annually. They lasted two weeks at the United Church and all churches and all schools competed and I had friends who were studying to be classical boys, studying to be musicians, little baby musicians. Frankie McKitrick, in particular, who grew up to be a church choirmaster at a big church in Montreal at one point. I don't know where he is now. Frankie and I went to a movie called "The Story of Three Loves," which had as its theme Rachmaninoff's Variations on a Theme by Pagnini, which came out as a 78 called "The Story of Three Loves," which was the name of the movie. And I used to go down to this department store and take it out of its brown sleeve and play it in the music box, you know, the listening boxes that they had available at that time. There was -- I don't know why but there was no money to buy it. I'm sure I asked for it although I don't recall, but anyway, that was how I listened to it. And I would just go into raptures over it. So I began to dream that I could play beautiful melodies on the piano. It was the melody. It killed me. It just killed me.

(Music up: Excerpt from Rachmaninoff's Theme by Pagnini.)

JM: That piece in particular caused me to ask my parents if we could have a piano and I could take lessons. So I was impatient to get through all of this bunk-bunk-bunk-bunk, you know, one-finger stuff to get to the point where I got the two hands so I could start to get this music down that I was hearing in my head, but my knuckles were rapped by this teacher which was a traditional way of teaching piano at that time, especially if you were playing by ear because I could learn it faster by listening to her than reading it so my reading was slipping and she -- the rapping, that pain associated with the music killed it for quite a while and I stopped going and taking lessons. And so my parents viewed me as a quitter.

Then in my teens along came rock and roll. First of all there was a precursor to rock and roll. There was rhythm and blues and Louis Jordan, "Saturday Night Fish Fry" and somebody's brother had these records, black -- they were called race records -- but it was the music that I can't really see much difference between it and rock and roll except that it was much more ethnic. You know, it was very black cultural in its text.

(Music up: "Saturday Night Fish Fry.")

JM: All through high school I was an avid Lindy Hop dancer which is something that's coming back now, there's a resurgence in America of swing dancing so I came to be pretty much preoccupied with dancing.

(Music up: "Why Do Fools Fall In Love?")

JM: As the 50s segued into the 60s, the beer drinking, you know, cars in the country like dancing in the middle of a dirt field and kicking up dust with all the car radios blaring, that kind of an atmosphere died down to this more intellectual civil rights oriented pensive college mentality. And at first I kind of dismissed it all as some kind of pseudo intellectualism, but I did like the singing part and so I started singing folk songs at these deals. Then Lambert Hendricks and Ross came into my life. I heard it at a college party and fell in love with it and I was also paid -- I did a Christmas card for UNICEF and they paid me in Miles Davis records, and I did a mural on my friends' wall after they came back from New York of a bebop trio and he paid me also in jazz records. So in my teens while I was a rock and roll dancer, I'd left my love of classical music behind, that was preteen, for rock and roll dancing, and jazz began to kind of leak into my life and the Lambert, Hendricks and Ross album was the only album that I listened to enough to learn all the words. So they were like my Beatles, you know.

(Music up: Excerpt from Lambert, Hendricks and Ross, "Twisted" and Billie Holliday "Good Morning Heartache.")

MARY BLACK: Joni has also been influenced by other singers who share a similar quality of emotional intensity.

JM: Edith Piaf and Billie Holliday are my favorite female vocalists. They both made the hair stand up on my arms, you know? Not that many people have made the hair stand up on my arms. You know, like emotional honesty. Piaf is very dramatic. When you think that everybody came from her, Judy Garland, Barbra Streisand, you know, she's the source. I'm sure she had a source too and that I'm not aware of. As far as I know I'm getting along with her. Who came before I'm unaware of it but of all -- everything seems to water down emotionally as it comes out of her. You know, even though Judy was great and Streisand was great in a way they never touched me.

(Music up: Excerpt from Edith Piaf, "Je Ne Regret Rien.")

JM: Ella. Perfect pitch, perfect time. Never touched me, you know. It's like the same with all of the divas now. Like, they don't -- great facility, you know, but it's not really their soul somehow. It's mimicry. I don't know.

I love Dietrich. You know, I got approached by the Montreal Symphony -- an orchestra in Quebec -- I'm not sure which one. Anyway, this guy had done -- they wanted me to come there and sing with the orchestra. He'd taken my first album and he'd written some beautiful orchestral arrangements for the whole first album in the key of the first album which I can't sing anymore. My voice has deepened over time. And so when it came -- and very DeBussy in its style -- and I love him but I'd rather not borrow so much from -- I'd rather that it was more original. But, anyway, when the tape came and it was kind of like a medley in a different sequence than the album, some friends of mine were over and because I couldn't sing it in the key, I sang it in Dietrich's voice. Like I talked it just like and you know it was so fun. I thought the only way I could possibly do this is -- (in deep German accent) "Marcie in a coat of flowers..." Kind of speak it (laughs) in a deep-throated way with a German accent.

(Music up: Dietrich, "Where Have All the Flowers Gone?" in French.)

MARY BLACK: Joni went to art school in Calgary but didn't finish her course.

JM: I became pregnant in art school and Kilauren's father and I migrated to Toronto under the pretense of going to see the Mariposa Folk Festival, which was the big folk festival in Canada. We came to the town of Toronto with no money and stayed in a hippie flophouse which was kind of unbearable to me. I couldn't get work in the coffee houses. I did manage to -- there was one scab club and I worked there for peanuts until my condition was about to become apparent and then I had to tell them, and when I quit, the club folded because they didn't really have anybody to replace me with. And I was a folksinger then. I wasn't writing then. I was just singing, you know, child ballads, and -- but we ended up on welfare which was humiliating to me because, you know, my people always lived very -- well, close to the poverty line, you know, but never on welfare, you know. By the time Kilauren was born I was penniless.

MARY BLACK: Joni met her future husband while he was trying to rewrite Bob Dylan's "Tambourine Man."

JM: There came this American, Chuck Mitchell, and somebody said, "That song you've been trying to learn, there's an American upstairs and he's singing it." So I went up to hear him and he'd rewritten some of it and badly too. And so we immediately got kind of into a conflict, like how could you do that to that song, and then a kind of an odd friendship developed and he invited me down -- he said -- I expressed my dilemma to him, you know, that I needed to get work and I didn't tell him immediately that my child was in a foster home and that I was trying to get some work so that I could keep her. Well, finally, you know, I confided in him because I couldn't leave her too long in a foster home. I had to make a decision. Either I had to find a job so that I could support her and take her myself, or I had to give her up for adoption before she got too old. So there was this desperation about me. He brought me down to the States, I got some work, I confided in him, and he said that he would marry me and take us both. So we were married quickly, but the moment that we were married, he said he didn't want to raise another person's child. It was classic. So the door snapped shut.

Chuck insisted that we be a duo. We were totally unsuited to be a duo. But I became kind of a -- he made more money with me than he did without me -- but he wouldn't let me -- he held the purse strings completely. You know. When we married we were both completely broke and we received $500 in wedding presents. He was late for his own wedding because he went out and spent it all on a Porsche Speedster, you know, so this was -- (laughs) everything about the marriage was wrong, and it was only a matter of time till I got the strength to leave, you know, this impossible situation. Even his mother said to me on the eve of our wedding, "The first born" -- he was the first born -- "the first waffle should be used to warm up the pan and then thrown out." (Laughs.)

(Music up: Excerpt from "I Had A King.")

MARY BLACK: It was when she got to the States that Eliot Roberts became her manager.

ELIOT ROBERTS: Joni was playing a gig at a club called the Cafe A Go Go, I think -- I think it was 1966. She was third on the bill. And I went back after the show and I told her how moved I was by her songs. She had all the first two albums of songs written and was playing this incredible set, and I told her that I wanted to work with her that night, and she said, "As coincidence, this is my last night here but I'm about to go to Detroit tomorrow." And I said, "Well, hey, I'll go with you if you don't mind and just hang out with you for the rest of your tour," and she said, "Okay, you can come along." And at the end of that tour, Joan asked me to manage her. And we had a lot of great adventures in this four-week tour that we did, and that's how we started working together. We worked for about 20 years from then.

MARY BLACK: In the 60s during the Vietnam War, Joni performed at military and Naval institutions.

JM: As a hippie, I was playing Fort Bragg. I was playing for soldiers coming and going from the war and also in Charleston to the Navy. So, you know, I wasn't a normal hippie in that -- singing "Universal Soldier." I had sympathy for them. Some of them were Southern boys that were 'going to kill a commie for God,' and then they'd come back all broken up, you know. And I still -- my father was in the Air Force and I guess I was still romantic about being a comfort to the boys coming and going from the war, like Bob Hope. It seemed like a good thing to do.

So while all my friends were taking psychedelics and pretending to be crazy and avoiding the draft, you know, I spent a lot -- that was one of my best audiences was Fort Bragg. The Naval base was another thing because it was in Charleston and Southern women were really difficult to play to because they talked. They didn't like their dates to pay any attention to me and they talked all through my set. You know, there's this expression 'she's from Savannah,' you know, about feminine -- like Savannah is the capital of feminine guile? And I wonder if it isn't Charleston. (Laughs.)

(Music up: Excerpt from "Fiddle and the Drum.")

MARY BLACK: Graham Nash of Crosby, Stills & Nash lived with Joni during this period and also remembers the time somewhat philosophically.

GRAHAM NASH: It was a very interesting time in the second half of the 60s. I don't believe that the 60s ended until Nixon was removed from office which was, what, '74 or '75, and, yes, the pendulum swings. Very often in very non- plussing ways and the swing from the idealism of the 60s to the conservatism of the Nixon and later the Reagan years was shocking to us. We thought that we would be able to change -- when I say "we" I mean the singer-songwriter community that I'm a part of -- thought we could change the world instantly. And we were very naive. This planet has a certain mass and it's very difficult to change the trajectory of that mass.

Maybe one is able to do it in millionth of degrees, but we thought it would happen overnight and we were wrong.

MARY BLACK: Having got off to a steady start with her first two albums, Joni's third, "Ladies of the Canyon," achieved chart success both sides of the Atlantic and produced the hit single "Big Yellow Taxi." Joni remembers how the song came to her.

JM: It was a regional hit in Hawaii. It was written about Hawaii and they recognized themselves. They seemed to be the only people that could recognize that they lived in a paradise. There were many paradises but locals don't tend to notice that they live in paradise. You know what I mean?

I went to visit Graham Nash actually. They were on tour there and it was my first time. And I came in at night and went directly to their hotel, and when I woke up in the morning I threw back the curtains -- we were on the 20th floor and I looked and I could see green hills and beautiful white flying birds with long tails and as far as the eye could see below that I saw a parking lot. I was heartbroken. We were in Waikiki which is the most developed, at that time, was really paved over, so I wrote that song then. And also the Hawaiians because of their tradition of slack key, really loved the guitar on that piece and it's kind of leaked into Hawaiian music. If you listen to contemporary Hawaiian music, a lot of it sounds like "Big Yellow Taxi," unfortunately. I think it kind of overinfluenced the genre. I tend to like their music better before they heard "Big Yellow Taxi." (Sings mock Hawaiian words.) Whatever that means! (Laughs.)

(Music up: Excerpt from "Big Yellow Taxi.")

MARY BLACK: The "Blue" album was not only a big hit for Joni but also an important change of direction, producing a starker, leaner, more concentrated sound which was underpinned by intense and intimate lyrics.

JM: At the time that it was written, it seemed like the veils were being pulled off of things. Maybe it was childhood's end, you know, that I was seeing with a clarity, and that was painful, like a painful awakening to who I was and to who the world -- you know, it was not a pretty picture, right? So that's really when I think I began to see -- the Bambi began to fall away from the world, you know. That it was not a safe place. That I was, you know, a public figure which had happened more or less by accident. I hit this pocket, you could call it seven years of bad luck. Maybe I had Epstein-Barr. My liver would get hard as a rock, nobody could diagnose what was wrong with it. There was a lot of involuntary weeping. It seemed to be -- I think I caught a weird virus, I really do, and it went on for a long period of time and it was quite depressing. That, coupled with the loss of my child which really was a wound that didn't heal, you know, and coupled perhaps Kratzman's words ringing in my ear that the vitality of my writing would be to write in my own blood.

But somehow or other that album came out the way it did, and I remember my peer group being stunned by it. You know, saying -- Kris Kristofferson saying, "Oh, Joni, leave something of yourself!" Men in particular because to take that stance in the pop arena was unheard of. You know, to be that honest and to stand there in public. And it was kind of stupid because, you know, well, the press wasn't as hostile then as it is now, but it did leave -- I put myself in a vulnerable position. But it seemed to me that as a writer that all that was left to me was the internal landscape and that I should do as good a job as possible without poetic stances. Because a lot of what I didn't like about poetry, even the masters, was I could always smell a pose. You know, false humility, you know, too much seaweed and one too many chimeras (laughs), you know. There wasn't enough meat on the bone and this was in fact the human condition and that's all I had to work with. I was in pain. You know. And as an artist, my instinct was to depict it as well and yet as palatable, as beautifully as possible -- truth and beauty, that's the essence of art or so it was in my mind.

MARY BLACK: Natalie Merchant, one of the younger generation of singer-songwriters, particularly admires of piano playing in "Blue."

NATALIE MERCHANT: It was just very atmospheric. There was no way to pin exactly what style she was playing in. It was just her own style. Had a little bit of jazz, little bit of classical. It was very rolling, especially -- I'm not sure of the title but (sings) "It's comin' on Christmas/they're cutting down trees/puttin' up reindeer and singing songs of love and peace, I wish I had a river ..." -- maybe it's "I Wish I Had a River"? "A River I Could Sail Away On"? I'm not sure what the title is, but I love the piano playing and that's basically what that whole song is, is her and the piano.

(Music up: Excerpt from "River.")

MARY BLACK: I'm Mary Black and you're listening to Both Sides Now, our program about the singer-songwriter Joni Mitchell on BBC Radio 2.

Joni has a particularly visual approach to her music, her talent as a painter having influenced her work as both a musician and producer, a quality singer-songwriter Peter Gabriel admires.

PETER GABRIEL: She's always been attracted to interesting soundscapes, you know, building pictures with sounds, which is obviously something that I've been trying to focus my work in. I guess the tools which she had available when she was first recording were obviously much more limited than what we have open to us now, but I think there was a subtlety in the colors she used. I think it was a very painterly approach, a very visual approach to music which is one of the things that I think I respond to. So I think that she has a really important role in music and rock music, whatever we want to call it, as a genuine innovator.

MARY BLACK: Graham Nash sees no great difference between the two art forms.

GRAHAM NASH: I've been taking photographs and making images longer than I've been making music, and I sculpt and collect, and people say, "Well, you know, how does a musician take great photographs?" And my standard answer which I've thought about carefully is that there is no difference to me in the energy created by expressing yourself. I think that with people like Joan, wherever she directs her energy in a creative process is what she'll do. I mean I'm sure if she started to carve wood, she'd be great at it because she's fearless.

And so I can't say specifically that painting relates this way. It's all part of the same self-expressive energy that artists have, layering, contrast, texture, all the artistic ways of expressing yourself. You know, I just named three words that can totally apply to music or paint.

MARY BLACK: In 1974, Joni, now with Asylum Records, was looking for a new musical palate for her best-selling album, "Court and Spark."

JM: I had tried all along to add other musicians to my music, and especially the bass I was critical of and, you know, bass -- nearly every bass player that I tried to play did the same thing. They would put up a dark picket fence through my music. And I thought, why does it have to go ploddy-ploddy-ploddy? Classical music doesn't go ploddy- ploddy-ploddy, not that I -- you have to understand I love rock and roll, but my music was not rock and roll. There was this imposition that they were placing, trying to make the thing into folk-rock by dropping this back-beat-you-can't- lose-it against that music, and it was a bad hybrid, you know.

So then I would become instructive to the bass player and it would make them mad. "Oh, she's trying to tell me how to play my bass. I've played with so-and-so and so-and-so," and then I'd end up taking it off and it would go out. Five records I made without much added, not that I didn't try, but I'd end up stripping it back off again because it just wouldn't marry. So whereas a producer would have left it on and tried to make a commercial gain on it, I still had control of my art.

Finally, one guy said to me, "Joni, you'd better play with jazz musicians." So I started going to the jazz clubs and looking for a band intact, and I found the L.A. Express and it was quite an exciting relationship; however, almost every counter melody on that album, all the horn arrangements except for one little piece, I sang into place. Even the guitar solos I sang and they were transcribed. On "Car on a Hill," the voice turns into the guitar so I left part of it. You know, still the addition was very controlled in a way.

(Music up: "Help Me.")

MARY BLACK: Despite her criticism of male musicians, Joni was never really an ardent feminist.

JM: I love the company of men, you know, and the best friends that I've had, I've had a difficult time from my mother on, you know, in relationships with women, you know, because I'm strong and -- I don't know why. I can't pinpoint it. You know, all my relationships are kind of improving. My relationship with my daughter is coming along beautifully, and my relationship with my mother is improving probably because of it, so maybe that hole in me was at the root of it. I never trusted women, you know, like generally speaking, we're in a state of evolution and we're coming out of slavery and, you know, we've had to live by guile and, you know, a lot of the traits of slaves. And I'm critical of feminine behavior at this time. You know, sexy is not all there is to being a woman. But I have had my days, you know, I can think of three or four days when I had feminist attacks because certainly if I'd been a man, although I've started to receive some recognition as of late, I was undervalued for a prolonged period of time, and gender was probably part of the reason.

MARY BLACK: Although Rolling Stone described the "Hissing of Summer Lawns" as the year's worst album, it was a bold experiment and one of the first pop records to explore African music, in this case Burundi drumming.

JM: Well, I listened to a lot of global music and I had a record called "The Music of Burundi," and there were three tracks on it that fascinated me, and one was this Burundi war dance. So I made a loop out of it which was tricky to do, you know, because you couldn't sample like you can now. You know, we had to cut the tape and repeat it and repeat it and repeat it. And I just thought that that piece of drumming contained every rock and roll figure ever from Bo Diddley on down, that the history of rock and roll was contained in that particular war drumming ceremony. I later saw them play in Liverpool of all places, the Burundi drummers, and a guy turned to me and said, "Have you ever seen them before?" I said, "No, but I've played with them." (Laughs).

(Music up: Excerpt from "Jungle Line.")

MARY BLACK: After being impressed by her work with jazz musicians like Larry Carlton, Wayne Shorter, and Jaco Pastorius on "Don Juan's Reckless Daughter," the legendary jazz bass player, Charlie Mingus asked Joni to collaborate with him. It was her most radical challenge to date.

JM: Charles discovered he was dying and called a friend of his over to the house to talk to him about God. Well, his friend was kind of a corrupt Italian film producer, and he said, "Charles, I think you've come to the wrong guy to talk about God," you know (laughs). So he went out for some reason and got "The Quartet" by T. S. Elliot. So he then envisioned an Englishman with an Oxford accent reading excerpts from T. S. Elliot's poem and, as the way he put it to me, in the tradition of the black Baptist church. So I went and I got "The Quartet" and found it at that time on a few readings, lacking in meat. You know, I thought, well, there's a lot of verbiage here, but it doesn't -- if I was dying I wouldn't be getting any help out of this, you know.

So then he wrote six melodies and he flattered me. He called them Joni 1, Joni 2, Joni 3, and he said, you know, "I've written six melodies, would you set words to them?" So he changed the concept for the project. But I was warned by management that it would cost me, that by doing this that I would have betrayed an orthodoxy and they wouldn't know where to place me. And I thought that's ridiculous, this is an opportunity for musical education, you know, like -- and so it was, but the collaboration came out somewhere in the middle; it was neither his style nor mine, and this was very misunderstood. Also, in certain jazz circles, the old-timers thought that I was an opportunist because they never heard of me, you know, like trying to tailgate on Charles. And in pop circles, well, it was vastly misunderstood, the project. But it was challenging because I had to write from his perspective. Like my favorite melody was "Chair in the Sky," and I said, "What kind of a theme would you like on this one?" and he turned with this wry look on his face and he said, "The things I'm gonna miss."

(Music up: Excerpt from "Chair in the Sky.")

MARY BLACK: In the late 70s leading punk bands had a disdain for the Laurel Canyon, Californian set and singers like Joni, whom they regarded as complacent and indulgent, only writing songs about and for each other. Graham Nash disagrees with the criticism.

GRAHAM NASH: What else can you write about except what happens to you? I think any artist has to have a foundation of their own past personal experiences and what has happened to them and they draw on that constantly. I'm sure the Sex Pistols had their own form of self-indulgence. You know, I saw -- I was watching VH-1 last night and they had the hundred greatest artists of rock and roll on, and I saw the Sex Pistols and I thought they were pretty self-indulgent too. They carefully disguised it as anarchy and rebelliousness, but even that can get self-indulgent. The pendulum swings both ways lots.

MARY BLACK: The 80s was a hard time for Joni. Now with Geffen Records, she recorded "Dog Eat Dog," an angry denunciation of the Reagan years. A more synthesizer- orientated album, it was produced in collaboration with her former husband Larry Klein with whom I worked on my last album "Shine." One of Joni's targets was evangelist preachers.

JM: America in its greatness was designed to keep church and state apart, but Reagan was cozying up to the born-agains and to the evangelicals, and they'd taken over the IRS basically, you know, and so the church, the Episcopalian church which is the oldest American church was in danger from the IRS because they solicited me to put my name on a letterhead and I was already in enough hot water, you know, I was black-listed by the evangelicals. You know, I'd taken on this battle against the churches. There were pink billboards up on Sunset in black letters that said, "Rock and roll is the devil." And Swaggart was prancing up and down and his fall came shortly afterwards. You know, it was two years before the fall, before the evangelists began to crumble that that was released and it created quite a hubbub in the church community. Then suddenly, Swaggart got caught with his pants down. But he was threatening to make war. He was saying -- on Cuba -- from the podium. You know what I mean? This is a monster gone over the top. The cozying up to government in all of this and the fact that the taxes now were controlled by this. So now, you know, you were going to be taxed differently in terms of religious preference and I received an unjust tax for a lot of money.

(Music up: Excerpt from "Tax Free.")

MARY BLACK: Joni is not only an imaginative producer but also a talented guitarist. Natalie Merchant admires her approach to the instrument.

NATALIE MERCHANT: She seems really involved in experimenting with different tunings, and she's said in the past that's why it's difficult for her to tour because you'd have to have, you know, 12 different guitars all in different tunings. And so I think that she arrives at some very interesting textures because of the tunings that she devises. She's got a great sense of rhythm. She's not so much as a lead player as a rhythm player. I don't know, she's just very original and that's really difficult to do because some of those tunings didn't exist before she came up with them.

MARY BLACK: Joni has a particular word for her guitar playing.

JM: Orchestral. It's an attempt really to play -- you know, a whole orchestra but in a kind of a monk-like way, so that there are blocked chords. You know, I leave plateaus for soloists to come in, you know, I could play it even more detailed but I leave like kind of plateaus where guests can come in and provide the detail. But yeah, orchestral, I think. I think of the top three strings as my horn section and the bottom as my viola, celli or (inaudible) and it's compositional.

(Music up: Excerpt from "Tiger Bones.")

MARY BLACK: The 90s saw a resurgence in Joni's work. After changes in management and record company as well as time off from the music business to paint, she returned to Reprise to produce the critically-acclaimed album "Turbulent Indigo" which won her a Grammy award. Joni got involved in controversy with her song about wife batterers, "Not to Blame."

JM: Well, when I wrote about batterers, of course, that got me into all kinds of hot water. People like to know then who it's about and it turns into shallow gossip and that's not the point. In this country they tended to focus it in on one person who then, you know, Jackson Browne. I never said it was about Jackson Browne. It was about men who batter women. Part of the press, you know, like assumed that it was O.J. and part of the press assumed that it was Jackson, and it devalued the song because it shouldn't be associated with anybody. But every woman -- 65 percent of women polled in British Columbia are battered, you know? On the day in this country of the football games, the hospitals are full of bleeding women, you know. Either they brought the beer too warm -- I'm not exactly sure whether they're just getting over the Christmas blues or what it is, but there is a national wife beating day, a girlfriend beating day in this country that's quite obvious, and the violence against women is monumental in this country at this point.

(Music up: Excerpt from "Not to Blame.")

MARY BLACK: Graham Nash thinks Joni's voice has developed as she's gotten older.

GRAHAM NASH: Initially, Joan's voice was like a pure bell, and now around the very outside rim of the bell there's a little rust gathering, as normally happens with age and with use. And with habits. And she still can sing. I'd heard a lot of people say, well, she doesn't sing, you know, she's been smoking too much, she's damaged her vocal cords, you know, all the fears that people try and pin on something that they've loved. And maybe her range is not the same but neither is mine. You know, I think with age comes decay, it's a natural part of the process. But the emotional content of her voice has deepened and been refined, and in a way I think she sings better now than she did.

MARY BLACK: In her latest album "Taming the Tiger," Joni returns to more personal themes. Her moving song "Stay in Touch" was inspired by her reconciliation with her daughter and also some Chinese wisdom.

JM: When I met my boyfriend Donald who was a co- writer on "Love's Cries," and we went immediately into conflict with my mother who introduced us, and the first night that we came together -- I carry the I Ching in my pocketbook, an abbreviated version in my purse, and we threw it and from our two throws I paraphrased it and wrote a poem which I wrote out on parchment and for Christmas I gave it to Donald with a note to remember the beginning, right? Because it seemed to me quite profound. I don't think I ever read or heard of anything that guided you through the smitten, goofy part of the beginning where you're all agitated and don't, you know, like there's whoever heard of wisdom, you know, like entering into that aspect of life, right?

I remember getting a letter from a fan at one point begging me, said, "I'm writing all my favorite writers and I'm saying to them there are no songs out here now for people who are in the early throes of love. Will you write a song?" Well, I wrote it five years later, the inspiration came five years later, some of it is based on the I Ching. Anyway, I managed to set it to music and when Kilauren came, her boyfriend heard it and said, "Kilauren, that's about you and your mum." And it is. So that's a song that applies whenever you're strongly attracted to somebody, to an excitable degree, you know, by pheromones or whatever, it kind of lays out proper conduct through that very peculiar emotional situation which is usually described as foolish (laughs.)

(Music up: Excerpt from "Stay in Touch.")

MARY BLACK: For over three decades, Joni Mitchell has produced a wide ranging body of innovative work which has certainly inspired me. Sometimes it may have seemed unfocused and wayward, but in fact it's been a restless search for artistic growth, a brave and honest realization of her constantly evolving musical vision. Winner of the prestigious Billboard Century Award and inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1997, she is one of the most important and influential singer-songwriters still producing popular music.

Natalie Merchant sees Joni as having led the way for many female singer-songwriters.

NATALIE MERCHANT: The way that Joni influenced me was that I have never written very confessional or personal music and not very feminine music as far as lyrics were concerned. And I think listening to "Blue" and "Court and Spark" and a lot of the other albums just convinced me that you could use the first person pronouns and talk about yourself and your experiences and that people find something universal in that. Artists like Suzanne Vega or Sarah McLaughlin or myself have all been influenced by her strength and her perseverance in the industry and her stubbornness to just keep doing her music regardless of whether it's commercially acceptable or whatever.

Her legacy would probably involve the longevity. The fact that she was a woman in an industry that was completely dominated by men in every corner and she blazed a trail definitely. She wasn't just somebody that was a vocalist, that's what a lot of women were. She was a writer, musician, and eventually self-produced her albums. I can speak for Americans and for my generation. Poetry is not something that a lot of us have studied but we know our pop lyrics. And I think Joni and someone like Bob Dylan have earned the reputations of being poets in addition to just being pop lyricists, they really are poets. So I think that's another one of her legacies is just bringing poetry to music again.

MARY BLACK: Joni has a somewhat more mischievous idea of how she'll be remembered.

JM: There's two great graveyards here in L.A. and just for something to do, we decided to go to the one that's closer to here where Marilyn Monroe and Dean Martin and Natalie Wood are buried, and we'd heard a rumor that David Geffen had bought the coffin on top of Marilyn Monroe, right? We went all around the graveyard. It was kind of touching. Dean Martin had fan mail on his, we read a couple of touching little letters because it was just stuck in, you know, like by people who missed him. Then we came to the new part of the graveyard which had regular grassy plots with a regular tombstone at the end and a little bench. And there was a couple that was buried in this one and their name was the Hymans. I forget their first names but like Sam and Liz, let's say, and the bench had an inscription on it that said, "Sit and chat with Sam and Liz," or whatever their names were, and there was an empty plot next to it. So I said, "Look, if I snuff, you know, I'm going to buy this plot here. There's a bench on it and I want you to put up a statue of Bugs Bunny and like go (in a Bugs Bunny voice,) "Hey! Don't talk to those blowhards, come and chat with Joni!" (Laughs) Something -- anyway, I don't know, but I hope it's something light. I'll have to think of it.

(Music up: Excerpt from "Here's To You.")

MARY BLACK: I'm Mary Black. I hope you've enjoyed listening to Both Sides Now, our program about the singer-songwriter Joni Mitchell. Both Sides Now was written and produced in Belfast by Roland Jacarello.