Joni Mitchell: 10 of the best

Not simply a confessional singer-songwriter, Joni Mitchell skewers others – and herself – by exploiting the tension between cynicism and romanticism

by Alex Macpherson
Guardian
April 30, 2014

1. Rainy Night House

Joni Mitchell's fascination with the wealthy and privileged recurs throughout her work; she's particularly drawn to those who choose to slum it among the hippy or bohemian sets, whom she views with a blend of sympathy and contempt. "You are a refugee from a wealthy family," she sings on Rainy Night House. The note of tenderness and the eye-roll of the metaphor don't cancel each other out, but coexist uneasily as the song drifts to its unresolved conclusion. This is a setup that allows Mitchell to cast herself as the outsider - here both an innocent and a saviour. It's a pose that is sometimes disingenuous, though she's always a step ahead in self-awareness of this as well.

2. A Case of You

For a song that became a standard of confessional songwriting, A Case of You is curiously hard to pin down. Its most straightforward, self-analytical lines - "I'm frightened by the devil, and I'm drawn to those ones that ain't afraid" - seem more like deliberate misdirection than soul-baring; Mitchell's delivery is moving only insofar as it is a performance of honesty that belies the contradictory smoke and mirrors of the actual words she sings. Her voice rings with apparently deeply felt emotion - "Oh you are / in my blood / like holy wine" - only to double back with the obfuscatory central metaphor. Is she still on her feet because her ex-lover was weaker than she thought? Because he has no real effect on her? Because she can't get enough of him? By its close, only an air of vague, inscrutable regret hangs over the song.

3. The Last Time I Saw Richard

If anything was really in Mitchell's blood like holy wine, it was the tension between romanticism and cynicism that recurred again and again throughout her career - a tension she seemed to revel in rather than show any real interest in resolving. She was too smart for either position, but also too smart to remove herself entirely from each: able to be cynical about her cynicism but also to romanticise it in the next breath. The Last Time I Saw Richard is her ultimate stalemate. Its narrator and the titular Richard are as correct in their assessments of each other as they are delusional about themselves and their own motivations; there's a sneaking suspicion that both are manifestations of Mitchell's own ego, which makes it all the more fitting that she enjoys tying them up in knots.

4. Help Me

In later years, Mitchell would opine loftily about a new generation of female singer-songwriters: "When it comes to knowing where to put the chords, how to tell a story and how to build to a chorus, most of them can't touch me." She wasn't wrong, but as musically gifted as Mitchell was, her willingness to subsume her narrative voice into her music was rather more limited. This is no criticism, but this tendency does make the occasional cut where she gives herself completely over to pure sound stand out. Court and Spark was her most lushly arranged album to date, and Help Me one of the rare moments where the message played second fiddle to the medium. It retells Mitchell's obsession with wanting to fall in love but actually, on second thoughts, not wanting to fall in love, and against this familiar backdrop it's perhaps just as well that there are so many musical joys: the fluttery backing vocals, the trumpet descending like a car that's just bumped clumsily over a bridge - both of them (for once) articulating Mitchell's ambivalence better than she herself could.

5. The Hissing of Summer Lawns

On Mitchell's seventh album, all her qualities seem to peak simultaneously. It's where her gifts for melody, songcraft, arrangements and innovation all coalesce, and as such the perfect intersection between the accessibility of the first half of her career and the distanced admiration her subsequent albums would elicit. The darkness beneath the decadence would become a well-trodden theme in popular culture in the decades following this song, but few conveyed so well its signature sense of vacant ambivalence. The Hissing of Summer Lawns seeks to capture a mood - listless and with no motivation to be otherwise - rather than skewer it. It's as inviting as it is powerful.

6. The Boho Dance

The decadence of the upper classes, the middle-class aspiration to an idealised normality, the pretensions of artistic subcultures that ostensibly duck under both: no set is safe from Mitchell's paintstripper lens. The Boho Dance cuts the deepest, perhaps because it's as much self-indictment (and self-justification) as calling out a naked emperor. It's Didionesque in its incisive concision: the line "the virtue of your style inscribed on your contempt for mine" rings as true as a read on hipster culture now as it did then, and Mitchell's framing of the artistic demi-monde as a rut of its own rather than an escape from social norms is wondefully astute. You've got to love Mitchell's display of sly humour at the song's close, too, as it slides straight into the nine-to-five emptiness of Harry's House/Centerpiece.

7. Hejira

Where was there for Mitchell to go after The Hissing of Summer Lawns, having cast a dissatisfied eye over every kind of lifestyle available to her and found them wanting? Out to the open road, it turned out. If the life of the restless wanderer was one she'd condemned herself to (or freed herself to pursue), it was also where she appeared to ascend to a higher state of being: languid and unstructured, Hejira unravels at its own pace. But even though Mitchell sounds like she has all the time in the world, and no song feels seems to have a particular reason to end, not a moment is wasted - neither on the muffled clarinet underpinning the title track, nor lines such as: "I'm porous with travel fever, but you know I'm so glad to be on my own."

8. Song for Sharon

Hejira's centrepiece is an eight-and-a-half minute meander in which nothing much happens, little changes, no concessions are made to musical accessibility and nothing is resolved - and yet it's hypnotically compelling for every second of its running time. Mitchell's old themes of love and outsiderdom are viewed as though through a telescope: without losing any of her keenness of vision, she seems to be in retreat from her emotional attachment to them. The sparse details rustle around like clues otherwise: backing vocals that peal ominously, then keen, then peal again; the barely perceptible quickening of the pace on certain verses; the way Mitchell leans suddenly on the lines she wants to bite the listener hardest.

9. Refuge of the Roads

Hejira could only end like this: a paean to the life of self-exile that ends with a dizzying zoom out and in again as a service station provides Mitchell with the opportunity to casually, momentarily widen her scope to the cosmic before splashing water on her face and setting off.

10. Both Sides Now

This self-cover is nominally a reprise in celebration of Mitchell's career, but there's little joyous about it. In a voice now fag-ravaged and unrecognisable from her peak years, Mitchell is relentless in making her younger self seem callow and stupid. Where the 26-year-old Joni had seemed so confident that she was trilling precious wisdom, smug in her bubble of precocity, the 56-year-old Joni turns the words back on her without sympathy. "I really don't know life at all," she rasps, and the subtext is: of course you didn't, silly girl.