She has fans as diverse as Gene Simmons and
Morrissey. Roberta Joan Anderson was born in Alberta, Canada, and raised in Saskatoon, Saskatchewan, where she began studying piano at the age of seven. She credits her
convalescence from a childhood bout with polio for early
artistic sensitivity. Her artistic talent was obvious from an early age and she found support from teachers who encouraged both her painting and her poetry. As a teenager she taught herself
ukulele and guitar. After a year in the Alberta College of Art, she made her way to Toronto to become a folksinger. Her early repertoire consisted
mainly of folk standards until she began writing her own songs. In '65 Joni married fellow folksinger Chuck Mitchell, who had promised to take on the responsibility of Joni and her newborn daughter, fathered by her college ex-boyfriend. It was not destined to be. Mitchell put up her daughter for adoption shortly after the
marriage and moved with Chuck to Detroit. In less than two years the
marriage was over. Mitchell then relocated to New York and performed up and down the East Coast, building a considerable following. covered by Buffy Saint-Marie and Judy Collins (her idol), Mitchell began to impact other artists. Other musicians recognized her talent and did what they could to bring her to the attention of record companies. By March 1968, David Crosby had convinced Reprise to release Joni's first acoustic album, for which he received a producer's credit. In December of '68, Judy Collins' version of "Both Sides Now" peaked in the Top 10 and brought a great deal of anticipation for Joni's second album, Clouds. More than thirty years and twenty award-winning and critically acclaimed albums later, Mitchell is still growing as an artist, challenging the expectations of fans and the industry with her latest album,
Both Sides Now. If we had list all of her important contributions to contemporary music, we'd have no room left for the interview. Mitchell proved to be as thoughtful and interesting to speak with as her music has always proven to be. We can't think of a single individual that would be a more stimulating and welcome guest for our next dinner party.
What high points in your career stand out?I've never contemplated this, I can't really think of anything singularly. I don't really think of this as a career, it's more like a journey. But, the most satisfying element is the creative process, the satisfactory solution of a problem. The making of this album was a thrilling experience. Four songs are with a seventy-one piece orchestra, four with forty-two, and four with a twenty-two. It was thrilling to work with a really big orchestra with seventy-one people playing harmony - playing with such emotional engagement. They weren't reading the Wall Street Journal behind their sheet music. They crowded into the playback room - they wept through "Both Sides…" They jumped to their feet at the end of the first take of "A Case Of You." Those Color moments, in what could have been a purely hired-gun situation, were wonderful. The feeling of having seventy-two, people engaged in the musical experience, just the
largess of the tribe, definitely was one of the thrills of my musical journey. That was an interesting project. Don Juan's Reckless Daughter was probably my favorite album in the studio, for many reasons. There was so much innovation going on and high-
spiritedness. The joy of the Latino element on that project, that kind of radiant equatorial energy, makes that album stand out.
You've recorded twenty albums. Which of them are your favorites?
They're all so different. Each one has such a different spirit.
Hejira was written and conceived pretty much in solitude driving across America, so it had a kind of Buddhist melancholy.
Don Juan... was Latino, so it was Brazilian and boisterous. There's the writing period and then there's the recording period. Each project is schematically quite different from the others, so it's kind of hard to pick which spirit you prefer. To prefer is to limit. They all have their own individual characters. I have four cats and sometimes
Nietzsche, who's my most romantic cat -he gives me the deepest kind of feelings - is my favorite. And then, along comes
Mojo, who's a delightful cat. He makes me giggle. He's so audacious. I can't prefer one spirit to the other. Variety is the spice of life. In order to make a choice like that I'd have to pick out a favorite feeling, and they're all valid. I prefer fun, all in all. But the light without the dark, and even negative situations, is not as valuable. And great beauty can come out of the negative. If you go through a bad space in your life and you're able to turn it into something - that's a wonderful thrill. You've turned it around in the yin yang of it all; you've made the best of a bad situation.
Tell me about the songs on Both Sides Now. Two of them are yours, how did you pick the others?"Stormy Weather" was the first one that I learned and that's when I got a taste of singing with a big orchestra. I sang that in a benefit here in Los Angeles to save Walden Pond. The thrill 0f standing up and singing with a big orchestra- just singing because I'm always singing and playing - the liberty of just being a singer was incredible I told the Musical Director - my ex-husband, Larry Klein, and the arranger - that I'd like to do it again. We decided that we would take on this project. "Stormy Weather" was the first one. Then, having heard me sing that, a friend of mine, suggested a couple of Billie Holiday's songs that were relatively unknown. "You're My Thrill" and "Comes Love" - and, I worked up "Comes Love" and sang it in the second leg of my tour last year with Bob Dylan. Bobby came to the room and said, "That new voice, that new voice,
where'd you get that new voice? I like that new voice."
That song even sounded like it was one of your compositions to me.
Well, I re-wrote it quite a bit. If you go back and check Billie's version, I've changed some of the words, and I've restructured them chronologically. I put all of the diseases in the second half and all the weather elements in the first so I could memorize it because it was all over the place. I re-wrote a couple of lines because they were dated. So, I did a little re-writing and I changed the melody quite a bit. Somewhere along the line I got the idea of making the record the arc of a romantic relationship. Within that context I picked songs that I felt fleshed out that story, and I included two of my own. "Both Sides Now" is technically one of the last of the standards. People don't re-record songs much any more, but I used it because I thought it was a good synopsis; that it would make a good ending. I used "A Case Of You" because it dealt with the ability to take it. I'm sure there are other songs that deal with that, that aren't doormat songs. It's like things aren't going right but I can take it. There are probably hundreds of songs like that, and maybe a couple of great ones, but I couldn't find them so I used my own song. So, you get smitten, you celebrate the love, and the moment that you celebrate it and the relationship is conceived - romantically - the moment the love is secured, which is perfection, the thing becomes unstable and begins to head towards its opposite. That's just the law of human nature, and nature. Speaking personally, that isn't so much my experience, but with every up side there's a down side. For instance, sensitivity - which is not in and of itself a bad thing - has several qualities. The up side of it that it creates depth in a person; the down side of it is that it creates quandary in a person. So, if a person loves your depth but doesn't love your quandary, they almost have to be educated to see that part of the reason they love you does have its down side. You have to be able to defend yourself, because sometimes people attack traits in you that they like the up side of, but they're unwilling to deal with the down side. It would be nice if we had enough self-knowledge to be able to defend ourselves, and our prejudices, by saying, "I don't like that trait of his, but on the other hand, the flip side of that trait is this part, which I like." You almost have to say, "Well, I'm willing to put up with that part because For instance, "I like his snappy banter—which comes from his clarity—but he can also be capricious and cruel."
At the end there is a great deal of acceptance—acceptance that there's going to be change. At least it flowed like that for me.
You get to the Frank Sinatra song "I Wish I Were In Love Again," which is a climax before the climax. It's gone now but I wish I were in love again, in spite of how horrible it turned out to be. I'd do it again in a minute. I like that song as coming near the end, and that could have even been the ending. "Both Sides Now" is an ending with a lot of clarity and depth. The sum is greater than the parts.
Everybody's been through romantic love, although there are facets of it, of course, that aren't depicted because you have to do it in twelve steps. I would have liked to really taken it to the bottom with "Gloomy Monday," and there are so many songs like "Sophisticated Lady." "Dining, smoking, drinking never thinking of tomorrow." There are a lot of aspects that I didn't deal with because most of the songwriting of this century deals with one aspect or another of romantic love to varying degrees of insight and beauty. But those are the ones I chose and that's why.
Was it a conscious decision to make it so lush? You worked with members of the London Symphony Orchestra.
Vince Mendoza is the arranger and we worked here with an orchestra called The El
Nino Orchestra, which was a hand-picked group from the L.A. Symphony. Generally, when he records, he does so with the London Symphony Orchestra, the best classical orchestra in the world right now, and also because of union expenses. It was actually cheaper to go over there. Some of the other players happened to be there as well. Herbie [Hancock] was there, and Peter Erskine and the bass player [Chuck
Berghofer], they were all there so we didn't have to pay for their tickets. The record company loans you the money and then you have to pay it back. This could have been a very expensive project.
Did you record it at George Martin's studio?
It is one of the best rooms in the world to record strings, so even if they hadn't been so invested in the project it was going to sound great. But it was an unexpected delight that they got emotionally engaged in the music. You can hear it. You can feel it. In "Both Sides Now" in particular, sometimes when the strings swell up, they were crying while they were playing, with a lot of nose-blowing at the end of it. You can feel the fire. It hits you up under your ribs. It's quite powerful.
How do you think radio's going to react to the sound of the record?
Well, it's a problem demographically. What's happened to music, the tragedy of turning it into a poker game, makes it really difficult. It's a poker game controlled by sponsorship and bean counters. It doesn't have much to do with music or quality any more. It's more like jingles for the sponsors. It's all carefully researched, and the people that form radio's ratings are shut-ins. People that answer the phone and fill out a diary are not the most intelligent portion of the populace. You know that people answering these polls are generally very young... Only people that are twelve to eighteen or weirdos will actually answer the phone and take a radio survey, so that's who forms the ratings. We wouldn't even let these people vote, but they vote on our music and it's dying. Music is icky. It's not
musey, it's icky.
Shawn Colvin recorded Fat City in your house?
That whole album was recorded in the house, yes.
She's just one artist that cites you as an influence. What do you say to younger artists coming up that want to stay true to their art while dealing with the industry?
Don't give them your publishing. Don't give them more than ten songs on an album unless your contract has been extended to include twelve. Young kids are giving sixteen and eighteen songs and they're only being paid for ten. Stay true to yourself. That's very difficult to do because they sic a producer on you who interior decorates your music into a demographic, and guarantees that it will be dated within a decade so they can kiss you off and get another young artist, so that they never have to pay you well. The whole thing's a racket. It thrives on mediocrity. It thinks of people and artists as disposable. It doesn't really care much for talent. It can't recognize talent. Most of the people signed are not signed because people think the artists are great, but because they might sell. The music business does not love music any more. Do I sound cynical?
Not entirely, but I do talk to people that still truly love music.
In the music business? In what position? Where are they?
Who influences you?
Anything that I admire, which can be a moment, or anyone who has influenced me in the past. Rachmaninoff; Debussy; Chopin; Chuck Berry; Edith Piaf; Billie Holiday; Bob Dylan; Leonard Cohen.
Over the years you've become pretty famous for your guitar tunings, how did you develop the odd tunings? Did someone show you?
In the beginning a standard for tuning a guitar was established in Spain, which we call standard tuning or Spanish tuning. that's the normal way that a guitar is tuned. In the south a lot of the black guitar players came from banjo to guitar and tuned the guitar in banjo tuning, open G tuning, which is what Keith Richards plays in. Banjos are five-string as opposed to
six string. So Keith takes one string off and plays in banjo tuning, which is what Robert Johnson did. The black guitar tradition in America chose to tune the guitar like a banjo, and that tuning floated to the coffee houses and to people who played in the style of the black Blues players. There was another tuning called D module, which was simply dropping the bottom string down from a 7E to a D. There were three or four tunings. The Hawaiian guitarists, not knowing Spanish tuning, tuned to a open chord, - I don't know whether an open C, but very sunny - because their culture was so kind of bright. Their environment created a modality of joy, so there's the slack key tradition. So I didn't really invent different tunings. I couldn't get the harmony that I heard inside of me into the music with standard tuning. I could get it on the piano but I couldn't get it on the guitar. Eric Anderson showed me some different tunings in '65 and I immediately abandoned standard tuning for open tunings. I loved a certain period of Miles Davis' music and the harmony was more module and wide open and I began to tune the guitar to eleventh chords; wider chords which were more emotionally complex. The equivalent in painting would be a mix of two complimentary colors. You gray the colors and get a stony color that's a hybrid. Hybrid chords were more like my life, neither tragic nor completely happy. They were more suspenseful chords. That's why they're called suspended chords, they leave you unresolved; not resolved like a major, or resolved purely into tragedy like a minor. I developed an appetite for these chords and I would tune the guitar to a chord that felt like I felt, or sounded like the place where I was when I played. Sometimes I'd tune to the sounds I heard in the environment. Over a period of time, every time I would write a new song I'd go to the old tunings and none of them coughed up the music that suited the words, so I'd invent another tuning and they began to accumulate. It is very hard on guitars to be tuning them like that all the time. I painted myself into a corner where I was destroying instruments, because they are not designed by the
luthier to hold different tensions. The necks would warp and caused performance problems. Then along came the VG8, which digitally can be programmed for different tunings. I can press a button and, boom, another tuning; boom, and another tuning. The VG8 technically remains in standard tuning with the correct tension on the neck, and is being told digitally that it's in another tuning, so it never really goes out of standard tuning.
I enjoyed the paintings on both Turbulent Indigo and Taming The Tiger. Have you been painting lately? Are any exhibits planned for the future?
I had a show in L.A. in December at Lace on Hollywood Boulevard. I'm supposedly - although I've got so much on my plate I don't know how I'm going to pull this off - going to launch a retrospective which goes around the world for a couple of years, starring in my hometown at the
Mendle Museum. That was scheduled for June, but now there's some talk of television in April; like a tribute show with a cast of people interpreting my songs. In May I'm supposed to tour, do an orchestral tour like the Three Tenors. Come to town and pick up a local symphony. That is pending. With all of that, how I'm going to find the time to prepare for an exhibition, I don't know. Things are going to have to be weeded out.
Is there anything you'd like to do?
I'm going to do another project like this because the appetite still remains. I want to go back to this restaurant one more time. We've already begun Mendoza and Klein and I - to do another album. Klein picked the repertoire, but it's too dark. He's Russian. It's all my songs rather than standards; revisited but in this kind of Classical/Jazz setting. It needs a little levity, frankly, it's all of the soul-searching tunes with no release. It's slit-your-wrist-time.
Is there anybody you'd like to work with that you haven't, yet?
I always wanted to work with Miles, but that never happened. That's been the only regret of mine. He's the only person I can think of that I wanted to work with that I haven't. I've worked with such great people. There's always bound to be something that will inspire a desire to collaborate. I wouldn't say that I've done everything that I wanted. I like to approach each record as if it was my first. I thought about doing an album of Country songs. I like a couple of artists in every genre, I don't belong to one orthodoxy. There's so much to do that would be interesting. I can tell you what the next project will be because we've already begun, with the intention of recording again in England in August. Because the chemistry was so good it warrants two projects at least, and maybe even three. I would like to do a Christmas album, using some of my dark little Christmas songs. A concept like 'Have Yourself A Dreary Little Christmas," with a mixture of secular and Christian hymns. So, that's something for the future.
You're well aware of the jonimitchell.com Web site, aren't you? I don't have a computer. I met Wally [
Breese]. He's a lovely man. I love what he's done there, and the people who have congregated around it are really an interesting group of people. They sent me a cookbook for my birthday; all these Web people, the regulars. They've met and gathered there, and formed a kind of a circle of friends. They're very bright, and oddly, humorous people. For the cookbook each person contributed a favorite recipe, and they gave it some name that referred to one of my songs. I haven't had a chance to cook anything from it, but I've read some of it, and it is quite delicious-sounding. At the back of book there were individual bios that referred to philosophical and other musical interests, so you get a kind of portrait of the fans that you wouldn't otherwise. I was impressed with their humor and their individuality. They're really some special people.
Dedicated to Wally
Breese, Webmaster of
JoniMitchell.com, who succumbed to cancer on February 4, 2000, two days before his 48th birthday and two days after this Interview.
