Words and Pictures: The Arts of Joni Mitchell

by Robert Enright
Border Crossings
February 2001

Joni Mitchell's art - whether in song or picture - is an aspect of self-portraiture. You could be forgiven if you assumed this means she is self-obsessed, but what is most compelling about Mitchell's art is how it turns away from the convolutions of self-gazing and becomes an inquiry into the world around her. If what she's doing is looking in a mirror, then it's a surface on which a crowd of people and incidents are reflected with intensity equal to her own.

Throughout her amazing career as a songwriter, she has displayed a special skill in creating individuals who wear their hearts on sleeves often frayed at the edges. I'm thinking of a whole cast of characters - real and imagined- that includes Cherokee Louise, the waitresses in "Bar and Grill"; the fallen girls in "The Magdalene Laundries"; the "Ladies of the Canyon," who are enthralled by filigree and festooned with their paints and threads and songs, and Yvette, insinuating to her inflected English "a little bit of instant bliss." And then, of course, there are the male coyotes, their progress snapped out on the same psychic and sexual highway Mitchell herself has been traveling all these lyric years. No female singer/songwriter has charted so intimate a course across popular music: in this regard her peers are Bob Dylan, Leonard Cohen and Van Morrison himself, the laureate of the composing poetic champions. Mitchell has her own distinct pedigree, she may be the reigning Queen of LA but she comes across in her songs as an experiential pragmatist with a heavy lean on the Romantic. It's clear that she will lean that way forever.

What has been evident from the beginning is her special skill condensing, often in a single song, a whole range of personal and aesthetic references. "The Only Joy in Town," included in a Night Ride Home in 1991, is one of those lyrics. It's a travel fragment in which desire is both acknowledged and resisted in Spain she sees "a Botticelli and black boy, with fuchsias in his hair" and recognizes that in her youth she "would have followed him/ All through this terra-cotta town." Instead, she uses the encounter as a point of inspiration and composes from it a sort of artful mini-epic, in which Botticelli and Fellini and even Sylvia Plath gambol about in the sensually aromatic atmosphere. Plath eats men like air, while the beautiful boy "is breathing in women like oxygen." The difference between them gets covered in the shift the song makes as it negotiates a delicate space somewhere between regret and celebration.

I mention these references only to point out how easily Mitchell inhabits the worlds of high art and popular culture. She is essentially a collagist and whenever she explains how her art gets made, she gravitates toward a borderless commingling of art forms. "I see music very graphically in my head," she said in 1979. "I evaluate it in terms of a visual abstraction inside my mind's eye." In 1996 she put on her producer hat and described what it was like to work with bass players. "For the first eight albums I was annoying them to death. I wanted them to stop putting polka dots all over the bottom and instead to treat it like a symphony." In that same year she told the Los Angeles Times she saw herself as "a singing playwright and an actress and I try to make plays that are pertinent to our times." She has even moved into poetry: in "Slouching Towards Bethlehem" she reconfigures "Leda and the Swan" by combining, with song lyrics of her own, lines and images from a number of Yeats's poems. What grows out of this grafting is a remarkable musical hybrid.

In "Talk to Me," a song included on Don Juan's Reckless Daughter from 1977, Mitchell wrote that the best of her mind "goes down on the strings and the page." The page, for her, is not only a sheet for musical notation, but also a surface for a mind that "picks up pictures." You can't miss the flirtatious - even carnal - suggestions in the lyrics, any more than you can overlook the omnivorous nature of her imagination; she is always composing on both sides of her sensibility. In July of last year, the Mendel Gallery in Saskatoon opened "Voices," an exhibition of 87 works in the various media - painting, drawing and photography - that have been at the centre of Mitchell's visual expression since she began her singing career in the mid-1960's. The exhibition underlines her essential eclecticism. There are paintings that quote the highwater marks of modernist abstraction or the edginess of geometric abstraction; Middle Point mimics the storybook Fantasy of Maxfield Parrish, while Canadian Bacon plays with the realist muscularities of Group of Seven landscape painting. There are portraits of Georgia O'Keefe and Charles Mingos and drawings of Neil Young.

There are also a number of self-portraits including the indelible title piece for Turbulent Indigo, in 1994, in which Mitchell pays homage to Van Gogh, one of her artistic heroes. Any time she paints herself, Mitchell creates an image of genuine fascination. In one sense, she casts herself in roles - as a flower child who dominates a South Saskatchewan River radiant with yellow-red light and accented by the Bessborough Hotel (Clouds, 1969), and as a daughter of post-Impressionism who enjoys making her tactile mark on a complicit and anthropornorphized cat (Taming the Tiger, 1997). But it's in her double self-portrait for the re-issue of Both Sides Now that she captures the smoky seductive appeal of her present being. Mitchell has conceived her life inside the broad dialectical framework of the eagle and the serpent: "the serpent (fighting for blind desire/ the eagle for clarity," as she so economically puts it in "Don Juan's Reckless Daughter." In "Jericho," she formulates the problem as reckoning with the "wild and the gentle dogs/ Kenneled in me." But an unmistakable maturity has emerged in Mitchell, who sings, three decades after the words were first written, that she "really doesn't know love at all." In 1999, the artist who looks out from her signature painting does so through eyes heavy-lidden with wisdom. It is an earned gaze, defiant (the back view shows swirls of smoke from her cigarette drifting over to the obscure No Smoking sign) and revelatory. Because if you look again at the frontal portrait, and if you look closely at her right sleeve, the sleeve next to her glass of ruby-red wine, you'll notice that the folds of the cloth delineate the shape of a heart, a heart green with envy at the composure and self-knowledge of its wearer.

Joni Mitchell was interviewed by Robert Enright in July 2000, in Saskatoon where Ms. Mitchell was staying at the Bessborough Hotel. "Voices," curated by Gilles Hebert, was on exhibition at the Mendel Gallery from June 30 to September 17, 2000.

BORDER CROSSINGS: Were you constantly drawing as a kid?

JONI MITCHELL: I was but my first major catalyst was Bambi and the fire scene in particular. I made copious drawings of the deer and the fire and the animals. It was very disturbing, so there comes the theory that much art comes out of emotional disturbances.

BC: But at the Mendel opening you thanked your parents for giving you a set of crayons when you were about seven. Did they encourage you to make images?

JM: I think all parents encourage their children; it keeps them busy and it keeps them out of their hair. In a certain way, I think Mom probably appreciated that I was self-entertaining.

BC: Were you one of those fanciful kids who created a world that didn't have to correspond to the one in which you actually lived?

JM: I was a nature lover more than a fantasy-head. I think I had a more realistic sense of the world, maybe. I did daydream all through the school system but I can't be hypnotized. I went to get hypnotized for smoking. He was a very intelligent man and he'd hypnotized a lot of people, but he couldn't get me to go under. His explanation for it was that the channel to my subconscious was still wide open. I asked him if that was normal and he said it was fairly uncommon. And I asked him how a thin like that could occur and he said that most children are allowed to daydream up to the age of seven. Then it's no longer cute and everything conspires to snap them out of it. Somehow or other I had managed to daydream all through school classes, and basically drew and wrote through all my subjects.

BC: So you weren't a great student but you were a good thinker?

JM: I wasn't academically equipped. Part of my computer, I think, has been annexed to store other information. I have the same handicap as my father - I can't store proper nouns - and it accelerates as I get older. Anything with a capital, names of people, names of places, names of streets. It's difficult in conversation or if you have to play charades because I can't even remember the names of my favourite movie stars. Also, I meet a lot of people and they are frequently insulted if you've met them a few times and haven't committed their name to memory.

BC: To return briefly to hypnosis, do you mean to tell me that you didn't try to be hypnotized by Raveen like every other person in Saskatoon?

JM: I remember the times that he used to come, but I never saw a Raveen show.

BC: I was too afraid to give over, so I didn't go up on stage. But I also remember hoping hoping that some young girl would lift her blouse and show her bra when Raveen told people they were travelling in an unbearably hot jungle. That was what the audience was waiting for.

JM: I can remember that. That was a desire embraced by the whole repressed town. Looking back at old health books in the '50s, you realize it was the tail end of the Victorian era.

BC: You went to Aden Bowen High School. It was regarded as a powerhouse.

JM: What it had to offer at that particular time was wasted on me. It had no arts program, for instance. The arts program and the music program came after me and so I didn't benefit from them.

BC: Did you want to be a cheerleader and do all the things that so many girls wanted to do in high school?

JM: I had friends who were cheerleaders but I was always an artist and a rock 'n roll dancer. I lived for the dances. Owing to the Depression and the war, a lot of parents missed a higher education. So they all had ambitions to send their kids to college to give them what they didn't have. But I had the distinct impression that if you went to college, it wasn't going to mean anything and people with diplomas were going to end up driving cabs, which is what happened.

BC: Winnipeg was a pretty musical city at that time. Was Saskatoon a place where DJs made the music, or were there actually live bands?

JM: There were a couple of musicians in town: Gordie Brandt ran the music store and there was Barney Kutz. But there were no real local rock n' roll bands that I knew of at that time. Even at the dances, it was all records. In the Red Barn in Sutherland - which featured live music - I don't believe the bands were local.

BC: I read somewhere you heard Rachmaninov when you were seven and you were completely enthralled. Was music as necessary a part of your life as was the making of images?

JM: Well, when I heard Rachmaninov I was in North Battleford and my best playmates at that time were Frankie McKitrick and Peter Armstrong. The girls were basically going the route of their mothers, and they played dolly and competitive housekeeping games. I found their play very difficult and I found most of the boys' play quite unimaginative. They played war and Roy Rogers and I got to be a part of the posse or else the German and I died in the first act. I had to lie on the ground while they ran around. I also had a cap pistol so they'd let me play with them. But I did find a couple of kids with some imagination. Frankie was a young classical pianist. He could play the church organ even though his feet barely touched the pedals. Peter Armstrong joined some opera company in Italy when he grew up. He was studying voice and Frankie was studying piano. So my playmates were young musical students and I danced around the room while Frankie played the piano and we all did the hula on the lawn in the sprinklers, because there were a lot of Hawaiian hula movies when we were children. There was no rock n' roll but there were the Andrews and the McGuire Sisters.

BC: Would this kind of music be played at home by your parents?

JM: The radio played at home. People didn't have that many records back then. I think my father and my mother each had three records. My mother had mostly classical nocturnes and rhapsodies. Very melodic, so I'm sure that influenced my taste. And my father had trumpet records - Harry James and Leroy Harris. We're talking about 78s. I think he had Flight of the Bumblebee, Ciriciribin and Cherry Pink and Apple Blossom White. And my mother had Moonlight Sonata, Claire de Lune and some romantic nocturnes. I probably had Tubby the Tuba and Alice in Wonderland. Not everyone had players, so records were kind of a novelty. It wasn't so much a part of the culture. The radio was basically what you listened to and rock 'n roll wasn't on it yet. But to answer your question, Frankie and I went to a Kirk Douglas movie called The Story of Three Loves and "Variations on a Theme" by Paganini was the theme song, only it was called "The Story of Three Loves." It was the most beautiful melody I'd ever heard, and in North Battleford there was a department store that had a record section and a listening booth where I'd go to listen. When I heard that song, I really wanted to play the piano. I began to dream that I could play it beautifully. We bought one and I started lessons, but at a rudimentary level. I wanted to jump immediately into playing the piano beautifully and you had to go through a lot of practising. I tried to make the jump and the teacher rapped my knuckles with a ruler. I took it personally but it turns out it was something nearly every piano player I spoke to had experienced. It was part of the old system. She said, why would you want to play by ear when you could have the masters at your fingertips? So creativity was not imagined in that culture. If you took piano lessons you were going to learn to play European classics.

BC: Did that sour you to the process?

JM: I quit.

BC: How long did it take you to formally pick up music again?

JM: I became a waitress, to get money to go to art school at a club called The Louis Riel, which had folksingers coming and going. That's where I met Shawn Phillips, who was the first person I'd ever known who had written a song. For some reason that was really intriguing to me; it was really exotic.

BC: Did it make you realize that you could also write a song?

JM: No, it didn't have that effect because at that point I wanted to be a painter. But I did want to learn how to play a guitar and rekindle my interest in music. And I borrowed a guitar from somebody. The strings were rusty, and the action was so high it was like running your fingers across a grater. My fingers bled and I couldn't get any music out of it. I eventually bought a four-string ukulele and learned a few simple chordal movements and went off to art school. Basically I earned smoking money on it, singing folk songs. But I had no ambition or any sense of my ability to create. That had been repressed at a young age.

BC: How did you find it again?

Well, the gods in their wisdom had to put me through some travail, so at 20 in art school I lost my virginity and got pregnant all in the same act. I had to protect my parents from the disgrace, so I said I had given up my desire to paint and I was going east to pursue a career as a musician, which wasn't all the truth. My talent had not arrived as a musician; I was simply good at singing old folk songs locally for pin money. I had no ambition. I hadn't begun to create anything. I went east and when my girl was born I tried to keep her, but I couldn't get enough money together to join the Musicians Union to get the work. I was offered work in the States and the man who found it for me knew of my difficult situation and offered to marry me to give my child a home. She was in a foster home and I was just waiting to get enough money to get her out of hock. So I married him and he betrayed me. Once inside the marriage, he said he didn't want to raise another man's child. As they say, "make a good marriage, God bless you; make a bad marriage, become a philosopher." So I began to write.

BC: You began writing out of adversity, in the same way you make art as a way to deal with pain.

JM: Right. It was out of the frying pan into the fire. Looking back, I'm not sure painting is where my strongest gifts lie, so it took travail to germinate. A lot of people, especially contemporary women, think I gave up my child in order to further my career as a musician. But there was no such thing in those days. The singer/songwriter phenomenon had just begun. There were only a few people really doing it and nearly all of them were men. Laura Nyro and Buffy Sainte-Marie were the only women I knew of who wrote songs.

BC: I want to backtrack a little bit. What made you decide to go to art school in Alberta? There was an art school her in Saskatoon, wasn't there?

JM: No there wasn't. There were art classes at Tech. You could take them after the age of 13. When I turned 13, Ernie Lindner, whom I had been waiting to study with, took a sabbatical and I got Henry Bonli. I wasn't ready for him. Not to criticize Henry, but he was a Barnett Newman proponent. Basically, all e did was to prejudice me towards abstraction, particularly towards Barnett Newman, who was his hero. He was trying to teach me the various shades of putty and beige, which are wonderful for upholstery, but at 13 I craved colour. So whatever it was that he had to teach was wasted, and basically, it developed in me a contempt for modern art, which I ran into again at art school. I found it very disappointing.

BC: When you went to Alberta?

JM: First of all, I couldn't understand why it was being treated like a trade. I'm reading a biography now on da Vinci and I realized that it always was. Especially for da Vinci, being a bastard in the middle class, there were about three jobs available for bastards and that was one.

BC: Was this deeply disappointing to you because your approach to making paintings was much more aesthetic and poetic?

JM: Well, it was before Warhol broke down the line between fine art and commercial art. I was there at t time when they were saying there's no point in teaching classical rendering because the age of the camera has come and abstraction is where it's at, and I was in conflict with my profs. I basically saw the whole thing as the 'emperor's new clothing' and wanted debate and they were touch about it. Either they weren't intelligent or generous enough or I was too offensive. I'm not sure, but they wouldn't give me a good rebuttal. Their arguments seemed to be self-justifying. There were about 150 new students and there seemed to be only four or five of us who had drawn all our lives. The rest of them were creating an artistic lifestyle, and the profs seemed to like the virgins better, the ones who knew nothing in that they were more open for indoctrination. So I was disenchanted and they were channeling me into commercial art, which was looking pretty boring - Dunlop Tire ads and restaurant menu design and so on. Anyway, when my musical career did develop and I became a recording artist, I though I may was well use this training somehow, so I designed all my album covers except for one.

BC: Was there any thing of virtue in that year you spent in Alberta in art school?

JM: No, I learned nothing of use there. The way I learn is through admiration. If I admire something I become very alert and I soak up the knowledge almost by osmosis. I don't learn well by instruction and especially conflicted instruction. So it was pretty much a waste.

BC: In a curious way, getting pregnant liberated you from that. Or would you have left anyway?

JM: No, I would have stuck it out. I don't believe the musical gift would have germinated if I hadn't had to use it as a ruse.

BC: You seem to have been instantly successful.

JM: Yeah, I won a Grammy the first year out. But I had done years and years of travelling as a livelihood in coffee houses, and I turned down numerous bad contracts. I didn't really want to be a public person. I wanted to be a painter by some river somewhere. I entered, reluctantly, onto the big stage. I enjoyed playing the coffee houses because it was casual but there was a formality on the big stage. It had the potential to be a blood sport.

BC: Did it take you awhile to acclimatize to the idea that you were becoming "a pop icon"? Could you have imagined how successful you were going to be in the music business?

JM: People talk so much about success. Success to me is whether the work of art is finished to my satisfaction.

BC: Had you accepted that you were a gifted singer/songwriter and that it was going to be the main thing in your life instead of painting?

JM: Well, once you sign a contract you're so busy that you know you're not going to have much time to paint. And besides, the obsession had shifted. Once I started writing songs I began to have ideas. I began to have personal criticisms - this isn't a very good song and what could I do better. Once I got into the process, I realized that the game was wide open. There were new kinds of songs to be made. We pioneered a whole new area. In a way, the singer/songwriter was to us what the Impressionists were to European painting.

BC: It was new territory.

JM: We flattened Sinatra. Do you know what I mean? They resented us for it. I was on Sinatra's label. They called us the bums, they owned us and they resented us. We made them into instant dinosaurs.

BC: Who else are you talking about at this time?

JM: Dylan, in particular, but also the lesser players. It depends on whether you look at it artistically or commercially, because frequently the lesser talents had the greater sales. You know what I'm saying? But in terms of artistry, the songwriters were Bob and myself.

BC: Were you conscious at the time that you were breaking new ground?

JM: When I wrote Court and Spark I knew there'd never been music like this.

BC: That was in 1974, when you were already five albums into your musical career?

JM: Right. Up until that point I still looked and sounded like a folksinger because I hadn't a band that could play my music. Folk rock was what was happening. I came in seeming like a folksinger but really what I was doing was more like Schubert. I was developing the art song. The music was much more classically sounding than folk music, much more sophisticated, but it was a girl with a guitar and because the level of knowledge in the pop area is very low, that's when I got located. I looked like a girl folksinger so they lumped me in with Judy Collins.

BC: And Joan Baez?

JM: And Joan Baez. Judy had a classical background but wasn't very creative, but she was more of an interpreter. She wrote some songs but that wasn't her main thrust.

BC: Could you have talked then they way you are talking now? Would you have been able to say what I'm trying to do is work through song cycles in a contemporary mode?

JM: First of all, the pop and rock critics at this time - and at any other time - aren't very intelligent. So you're always misunderstood. Also, the criteria are different. They're based on sales and newness. I've always been articulate and I've always been outspoken. You'd have to go to my old reviews to see what the questions were. I just answered the questions I was asked. There was one reviewer in New York, one of the rare ones, knew music and musical history and he wrote a piece that I carried in my wallet until it was stolen. He wrote that I was one of the most gifted composers that America had produced yet, and that the fact that I wrote in small song cycles was immaterial. I found it very inspiring and humbling, as high praise should be. I thought, I hope I don't let him down. Today's rock critics don't really know much pas their generation. They're incompetent and adjudicating because they have no sense of history.

BC: Were you aware of raising the bar for yourself each time you released an album? Was that the expectation you set for yourself?

JM: I just needed growth. I'd say, well, that ain't much. Where do we go from here? I mean, you've got a short lifetime and if you can perceive what greatness is, you wonder if you have it in yourself and how far you can take it. The challenge is to develop yourself as fully as you can within your lifetime to keep yourself interested.

BC: Have you always read a lot, and has reading fed your poetic sensibility?

JM: I can't say I read a lot, and most of what I read has been non-fiction. I'm more of a doer; reading's too passive.

BC: On the basis of the exhibition, it appears as if you were able to sustain a consistent approach to artmaking even throughout those periods when you were doing a lot of recording.

JM: When I finish an album I go straight into the graphics for the album cover. Sometimes I'm working on them simultaneously because a lot of the albums have a theme. In the midst of recording I paint too, but that can wear my health down because when I paint I forget to eat and sleep. I put in 20-hour days, so I run my health down by being overly creative.

BC: Do you think of the albums as concept albums?

JM: The first one definitely was a concept album because I had so much material that I could sort it into a piece. You know, the first side is I Came to the City and the second side is titled Out of the City and Down to the Seaside, right, so it had a continuity. Dog Eat Dog is a political awakening album. Hejira is a travel album. Court and Spark is self-evident. They all have a schematic continuity. Mingus was Charles's epitaph.

BC: One of the amazing things that's happened with the release of the most recent version of "Both Sides Now" is that all the critics are talking about your earned maturity. That seems to me to be the tenor of what's being said.

JM: Well, that's a strange take that the public has about the era. I remember writing "Both Sides Now" - because it was one of my first songs - and I was still thinking like an art student, like a painter. You have to remember I'm a painter first so I approach music in a very different way than musicians generally do. I have the drive to be innovative, which is my birthright - where I was born, what time and what day. I was born on the day of the discoverer, so I have a need to plant a flag. You couple that with an art education - not that they did this in Calgary, but it was instilled that to be a painter of any worth you must find an original voice. In order to play the music game now you have to join a school and adhere to very strict rules. Music has always had very strict rules and so has painting. But I've watched all the laws of painting being broken within my time. Warhol broke down the last two: the barrier between fine art and pop art; and the other one, which was still standing when I was in art school, was never use colours of the same intensity because they cause a vibration in the eye. That rule was broken down my psychedelic art. So those two laws were broken a few years after I left art school. Whereas, within music, Wayne Shorter, a giant as I know, still finds my music peculiar. We played together for years and he's very cryptic. He quotes things that he was taught at Berkeley School of Music, like "never go from a sus chord to a sus chord, never stay on a sus chord too long."

BC: He would say these things to you?

JM: Yeah, because I go from a sus chord to a sus chord to a sus chord. I think he finds it odd but he knows how to play inside it, even though his training tells him I'm doing something wrong. Some jazz musicians just say to me, that's wrong, but when Wayne jumps on it, it's not wrong. It's just like "never use colours." To my amazement there were laws still standing in music. It's not that I did things to break the rules, because I didn't even know the rules existed. I'd just say, that sounds fresh. It's very hard to find anything fresh as a painter, especially when it comes to colour juxtaposition.

BC: In one way knowledge would have been loss for you because if you'd known what the rules were, you might not have gone there.

JM: I think it held some men in check. I think it's an easier law for a woman to break, first of all because it has to do with male temperament. If a woman has a problem and she tells it to a woman, the woman sympathizes. If a woman has a problem and she tells it to a man, he wants to resolve it. Sus chords are unresolved chords. If you go from an unresolved chord to an unresolved chord to an unresolved chord, I think it bugs men. But my life has been unresolved, so these chords suited my disposition emotionally; they depicted my life. I've lived an emotionally complex life with dramatic changes and my music reflects that. When I wrote "Both Sides Now" I loved the melodic movement of the standards of the previous era, which still had one foot in classical composition. The chords were quite sophisticated, whereas now you have any old Joe picking up a guitar who doesn't have that knowledge. I felt the music was degenerating in a certain way. So the idea was to keep some of the classicism and the sophistication going in my music without the degeneration that I felt was coming out of folk music. However, with that sophisticated melodic movement, you were limited to short phrases, whereas the folk-music influence the singer/songwriters were coming out of had longer lines. You could get into descriptive passages, but you couldn't move a lot of melody through those things.

BC: You mean lyrically as opposed to melodically?

JM: I'm talking about both. The standards had a lot of melodic movement and a very simple statement broken up into short phrases. Whereas the folk music of the singer/songwriter movement was losing the sophistication of melody and harmony, but it was gaining longer, lyrical lines.

BC: And packing content in it?

JM: And packing content in. My problem as a young songwriter was being at the cusp of hybridizing these two things. I wanted longer lines so that I could say more, but I wanted to keep some of the melody and the chordal movement that went before. Also, lingering in everything from dancing to black rock 'n roll was this hybrid with African music. You know, African rhythm and blues meets Ireland with its rhythms. I was trying to hybrid so many things and keep them all going.

BC: Another thing that strikes me about the content of your lyrics is that they so clearly emerged from a woman's perspective.

JM: That's the other thing. See, all the standards were written by men for women to sing and the basic assumption was that the woman was waiting for a man to come along. You know, some day her prince will come and they will move into this nice little bungalow and everything will be nicey-nicey. If you analyze the content, a lot of the songs were about being dominated. Not so much Billie Holiday's repertoire, because she refused to sing then, but Ella would sing anything. She was just cooperative.

BC: So if your songs were going to reflect your life, invariably they would have to have an edge and be different from what had come before.

JM: Well, so few women wrote lyrics in that time. I found out recently that there were some but they were few and far between. So the ideal was to delve deeper and deeper into myself and express myself to greater and greater degrees of accuracy. Even though it became a legitimate standard, "Both Sides Now" was a failure. In my generation, only a few songs became technical standards; that is to say, they were recorded by many people. One was Paul McCartney's "Yesterday" and the other was "Both Sides Now." At one point they were the most recorded songs ever, which makes them actually two of the most popular standards that were ever written.

BC: What do you mean when you say "Both Sides Now" was a failure?

JM: Because to me it was still too vague. I wanted to tear more layers off the onion than that. I wanted to do something that hadn't been done before. It took a while.

BC: Does "Both Sides Now" seem different to you in its most recent incarnation from when you first recorded it?

JM: It's different every night, depending upon what happens to you just before you go on stage. You bring different things to it, and that's probably the beauty of its being vague rather than specific, in that it remains interpretable and changeable. That's one think I resented about the way poetry was taught in school; this need to pin down its meaning. I never thought I would become a poet but when I did and people would ask me to interpret those things I realized that even when I've written about something specific, it could be reinterpreted 20 years later when you bring another experience to it. If it was only about my experience, how would anybody be able to relate to it? If I tell you more than the poem, than I'm ruining its effectiveness and its value in your life.

BC: In "The Magdalene Laundries" you rage against the murderous authority of "the bloodless brides of Jesus" and in "A Case of You" a religious image informs the whole song. Were you raised in a religious context and was it one of the things you had to resist?

JM: I was raised in Saskatoon with its religious bigotry - you know, the Catholic West and the Protestant East Side. That's what I was getting at in "Cherokee Louise" - "Ever since we turned 13/ It's like a mine field/ Walking to the door." In this town they tried to teach you early on about "them and us" and where to go and where not to go, and "they're like that and we're like that" - you know the lines. I'm ore of a student of comparative religion. I read a lot of religious literature - Buddhism, Catholic - the great thinkers of all religions interest me. A great deal of my work has been because I'm a Rainbow Coalitionist and I'm trying to find universal notes in all the religions. I'm a fan of Joseph Campbell, the comparative mythologist.

BC: So did the Catholics give you a hard time?

JM: Well, in hospitals the nuns were pretty dim. I had polio. We were polio victims in a polio ward at St. Paul's and they had an annex of trailers because it was so contagious. We were like a leper colony. One time I was sitting on the edge of the bed with my legs exposed - I was nine years old - and I was singing a Christmas carol to a six-year-old boy who was pouting and picking his nose. He had also turned toward the wall and was telling me to shut up, when a nun rushed in and practically beat me up for showing my legs. A nine-year-old to a six-year-old! On the other hand, I had a friend, Sister Mary Louise, who went on to become a Mother Superior. I used to sing for her nuns' conventions. She was quite an inspired figure and did a lot of good social work. She conscripted to me to sing to depressed people in Toronto. You're just what I need, she said: she grabbed me by the ear and put me to work. She saw me as a Thomas Merton figure and wanted me to join the order and write my memoirs.

BC: You said earlier that you approached songwriting the way a painter does. Can you articulate the relationship between the painting and the songwriting? It's obviously a very close one for you.

JM: That's a huge question. Let me break it down. For instance, with music. At the time I began, recording artists required a creature called the producer. The producer is hired by the record company to act as a liaison and he oversees your work. Musicians accept this; everybody looks for a hot producer they can laminate themselves to for greater commercial success.

BC: And producers can - and do - radically change the sound of the music.

JM: Absolutely. I refused to use a producer from the beginning. David Crosby pretended to produce my first record but basically that was to keep others away so they wouldn't turn my music into something else. He basically preserved the integrity of the first album.

BC: What about the close relationship you've had with Larry Klein?

JM: That's different; it's private and it's something that happened later. But after the first record, which David pretended to produce, I made 13 albums without a producer. There's not even a producer's credit. That's the thinking of an art student. If you're in art school, nobody would come up and put a mark on your canvas. It is my work, and be damned if anybody is going to put a mark on it. Whatever your reason to make it something else. It isn't my music and if it isn't my music, then I'm being slapped by my piano teacher again. You're going to kill my love of it and it won't go the distance. I knew what a good performance was, so in order to protect my music for the second time I worked with just an engineer. I brought the albums in cheap enough and they sold enough that the company made a profit. The moment they don't make their profits, they're definitely going to sic a producer on you. The idea was to make them fast, make them cheap, but make them the way I wanted. I even had included in my contract that I had the final say on my music. This is unique within the music business and it represents the willfulness of a painter. When I married Larry Klein he was a bass player, but inside our marriage he became a producer. Then he started hanging around in my sessions and that's the main reason why we divorced.

BC: When I asked you at the Mendel press conference when a painting is finished, you said it's never finished. Is it also the case, because songs are performances, that they are never finished? How do you reconcile the fact that you go into a studio and actually make a recording that lasts? Do songs seem more finished than paintings to you?

JM: Well, only that you can't take the record off the record player and add more notes. It's the nature of the form that you just can't get at it. You could re-record it at another time - like I did with "Both Sides Now" - and do something quite different with it.

BC: Earlier on you said that your musical talent hadn't yet arrived, as if I suddenly came to you. Do you see creativity as something that is inherent and that juts has to be released, or is it something that gets worked on and nurtured?

JM: It has to be germinated by something. I think the gifts are frequently generated by adversity. They certainly were in my case.

BC: And polio was the beginning of these adversities?

JM: Yes, because I was equipped to be an athlete, which would have made me popular within the community. My father was a good athlete. But because of my handicap I had no speed, which gave me an inner life. Also, I was paralyzed; I couldn't stand up, let alone walk. And I wanted out of that place for Christmas, so I made a pact with my Christmas tree - I don't know if I addressed the Holy Spirit, but I addressed something. I remember saying "Give me back my legs and I'll make it up to you."

BC: This is a nine-year-old?

JM: Yes. I'd broken with the church early because I liked the stories and I was curious about the loopholes. When I asked too many questions, they treated me as if there was something wrong. I remember I got into hot water over Adam and Eve had two sons, Cain and Abel, and then Abel got married. Who did he marry? Eve? I got into some flak over that.

BC: That's a touchy question. Maternal incest wouldn't be high on the Catholic approval list.

JM: I didn't know about incest but he did marry somebody and she was the only woman around. I didn't like the way they acted when I asked that question, they made me feel like I was bad. When I got out and I was asked to join the church choir in Battleford, I took that as a sign that I was to go back. So I chose to sing because nobody else wanted to. I called it the pretty melody, everybody else called it the hard melody. It had a lot of fifths and fourths, singing over and under things. The leaps were easy for me.

BC: You have decoration and filigree. It's something that seems to appeal to you, either inside a pictorial space or a musical form.

JM: I like complexity. For instance, in Taming the Tiger, I played everything on it without Larry taking on the role of the producer, having opinions I felt he had no right to. Let me make my own mistakes: you may not like it but I do. Don't stop me here because I haven't even gotten to the payoff. It's like when Georgia O'Keefe was painting. If anyone came up to her in the process and made a comment it would really bug her because it would influence the work. The way she put is was once the work was finished, all opinions went down the same bathtub drain. But to give somebody the power in any creative course to change your destiny seemed like cheating on homework to me.

BC: I've often thought that the way you wrote song lyrics - with such intensity and honesty - was similar to what Leonard Cohen was doing. He romanticized his life and in some sense you were doing the same thing.

JM: Leonard was an early influence. I remember thinking when I heard his songs for the first time that I was not worldly. My work seemed very young and naïve in comparison. At the time I met him I was around 24, around the time of my first record. But thematically I wanted to be broader than he was. In many ways Leonard was a boudoir poet.

BC: Was it that you wanted the lyrics to stand for more that just a personal anecdote?

JM: I was scared of the way the world was going. I was disappointed in humanity in general and myself in particular for our lack of evolution, for our pride in technology and our degenerating morality. For example, I wasn't a fan of the Beats. I didn't like to see the underbelly revered. I figured it had its place but I didn't want to be an imitator of it. I'm not a book burner but I longed for something more wholesome. God knows why I longed for the impossible. In high school I did a lot of satire on the Beats and on abstraction. In my show you can still see that attitude. There's a lot of humour, which you're not supposed to take yourself more seriously. I give funny names to a lot of the paintings, like Canadian Bacon, but that's because I'm not in the art game. I paint them, then I hang them in my house and I can say flippant things about them if I want to. I don't have to adapt or adopt any kind of mystical stance. I always think I don't have to play the poet like Leonard Cohen does. You have to watch everything you say. I like to be dumb and ordinary because that's where fun takes place. Leonard doesn't have a lot of fun; he's been studying all his life to try. I still like to and I have blessed friends who are capable of it. It's the spirit of child-play that Picasso was trying to get back. I admire him for his effort, but he said all children are genius painters and he spent his whole life trying to undo the precocious education his father gave him. I've been able to get to that impulsive, joyous place by not having to make a career out of painting. By just doing portraits of friends and animals. This show is curated, so it isn't the whole picture. But the work is very personal. I don't write for an audience. If there is an audience, it's just the divine keeping me honest.

BC: Are you happy with the way this show developed in Saskatoon?

JM: I think it was a really sweet event, but it was overwhelming. Sometimes it was like The Day of the Locust. I haven't seen that movie but I was pinned in and I couldn't get to my parents. There were people there whom I hadn't seen for 20 maybe 40 years, but I couldn't get through the mob. But even the mob had a beauty to it in that they travelled long distances - like a pilgrimage - to see these images. Many of these people's lives were interwoven with my works. Many of the things the songs speak about are so universal that they've lived them too. So even though they are strangers, most of them have a deep and abiding affection for me. It's a peculiar position.

BC: Once you had a chance to actually see the show, were you able to draw any conclusions about what you had achieved?

JM: When we hung the show we had to work fairly quickly and some things that happened were really, really nice. If you looked one way it was all abstract and if you turned around and looked the other way, it was all figurative. The thing about the hang was that it was also a self-creative act with sequencing. I love sequencing things like music and film editing. My memory is generally very sound. I have a really good sequential memory and, as I've said, an awful memory for pronouncing nouns. But there were connections that I didn't notice until I went in last night when it was unpopulated and found some magical things that we had picked up in the hang. It's a necklace; it's stringing a band of beads, right?

BC: What do think it has done to your future relationship to the process of painting?

JM: I really do want to get back to painting but I don't know what's going to happen to my time when I get back. Records take longer and longer to develop, they require more self-promotion, which is the part about my business that I dislike. Generally speaking, you get all chopped up and even if you have put together an intelligent, we-crafted statement, it doesn't always end up in print that way. People print their assumptions. That's my main problem. Journalism has become increasingly irresponsible. We have to do more of it, so it creates a greater and greater public misunderstanding. The truthfulness of the pieces gets crazier and crazier. So much is printed now that is just false and it gets collected into books and publishers claim this is your life. And what you've got is a book that is 99% bullshit.

BC: In your abstract paintings, you said you used rolling pins and fruit jars, a particularly unmale way of painting. Because abstraction has been a male domain for so long, was your way of painting an act of insurrection?

JM: I don't think of myself in terms of gender. I write as a voice. It has been said in some places that I documented both the male and the female ego. I am absolutely not a feminist. I prefer the company of men to women, always have. And I'm constantly lumped in with women with whom I don't belong. It's only in the black magazines that they finally put me on a list with Miles Davis. I don't belong with Carly Simon and Judy Collins. We have an association but we're not the same kind of animal and anyone with any depth or any intelligence can see the difference. I guess time will show that something else was going on. Now more and more, the gender factor has begun to disappear and I'm lumped together with Bob Dylan, which is more accurate.

BC: I want to talk about a few works in the exhibition. I thought The Ice Offering looked like Hans Hoffman. What does the title mean?

JM: That was one of my first abstractions. I did three, and one - called Abundance and Decline - destroyed itself. It was just background. The two remaining paintings from that period were done with latex and house paints and all that Pollock stuff, and that made it fragile and impermanent. I missed things to see what they would do and they split open and revealed the chemistry of the painting, which was very unstable. I jumped in and found it very easy. I always found that stuff easy. In a way it was a parody, but I ended up enjoying it, so it helped break down my prejudice. I'm really a figurative painter at heart and so by turning it around, what I see is an Eskimo with mukluks and an extended hand with a piece of ice that looks like a ship with sails.

BC: You have beautiful pearlized greens and iridescent peacock blues that come to the surface in slits. Round About Midnight looks that way: the painting begins to exfoliate.

JM: Well, Cy Twonbly did the loops, Jackson Pollock did the drips with the latex spinning out like fishing lines. It all comes down to claiming a new surface. One profound revelation did come when I stood on the floor and threw the paint like Pollock. I was drinking fruit juice and some if it went on in a big glob. It was not attractive, so I grabbed the jar and I rolled over the glob and I ended up with a beautiful surface that I hadn't seen before. So I explored in that direction and came to the conclusion that everything - animal, vegetable and mineral - is muck under pressure. If you were to say, what does everything on earth have in common, it's muck under pressure. It sounds irreverent but it was quite a religious discovery. It was like a unification theory.

BC: Do you know John Berger's essay called "Shit and It's Entanglements"? It's actually an essay about cleaning out the outhouse, in which he performs this act of organic transformation in the writing. The excrement gets transformed into the golden tones of a Rembrandt painting. It's a beautiful piece of writing.

JM: That's very Buddhist. The story goes that when Buddha spoke for the last time - he didn't write anything down - there were 12 people present and of course there were 12 misinterpretations. They spread out into all these various sects, but there was a Korean who tried to get back the Buddha's essence and he laid down a number of meditational steps. One of the advanced ones was to go and sit by a rotting corpse. You were to imagine it in a state of decomposition and imagine it happening to you - the worms crawling through you. It could make people go mad if they were at all squeamish or phobic. You really have to be able to face degeneration and get to the point where you appreciate that it's a beautiful thing.