100 Best Albums
- 22 JUN 1971
- 10 Songs
- Joni Mitchell Archives, Vol. 3: The Asylum Years (1972-1975) · 2023
- Clouds · 1969
- Taming the Tiger · 1998
- Joni Mitchell Archives, Vol. 3: The Asylum Years (1972-1975) · 1977
- Joni Mitchell Archives, Vol. 3: The Asylum Years (1972-1975) · 2021
- Joni Mitchell Archives, Vol. 3: The Asylum Years (1972-1975) · 1968
- Ladies of the Canyon · 1970
- Court and Spark · 1974
- Clouds · 1969
- Clouds · 1969
Essential Albums
- There's a windswept quality to Joni Mitchell's Hejira that goes beyond the landscapes depicted in its songs. This 1976 album is a travel diary set to an expansive and evocative jazz-rock score. Coolly luminous, the music frames lyrics at once intimately conversational and meticulously poetic. Love and distance are the two great themes on Mitchell's mind—"Coyote" and "A Strange Boy" recount affairs on the run, while "Amelia" and "Black Crow" examine the high costs of freedom. Extended narratives like "Song for Sharon" and "Refuge of the Roads" have the emotional nuance and detail of fine short stories. The title track rushes by like a cold stream, lit from within by haunting imagery. Hejira's sound is defined by Mitchell's resonant acoustic guitar and Jaco Pastorius' molten fretless bass—together, they create an atmosphere suggestive of rolling clouds and open highways. Miles removed from the genteel folk of her early years, Joni's vocals display the shadings of a seasoned jazz chanteuse.
- 100 Best Albums For most, a greasy skillet is a nuisance in the kitchen sink, an upcoming chore. But for Joni Mitchell, it’s a ripe romantic metaphor in waiting. In “My Old Man”, the second track on her fourth album, 1971’s Blue, the singer-songwriter plays the piano while singing a sunny ode to the life she shared with a “singer in the park” and “dancer in the dark” who keeps her blues at bay. She boasts of their bond, as strong as a marriage without the formality of it (“We don’t need no piece of paper from the city hall”), and pays him one of the highest compliments a musician can bestow (“He’s the warmest chord I ever heard”). But the bridge of “My Old Man” offers a chilly, atonal changeup in the midst of Mitchell’s warm affection that bubbles up from a deeper, darker place than the pleasantries: “But when he’s gone, me and them lonesome blues collide/The bed’s too big, the frying pan’s too wide.” Blue is brimming with moments like this—otherwise pedestrian snapshots that Mitchell renders eternal. It’s not enough for her to say she’s lonely when her lover leaves; her ache is visceral, one that’s felt in the space he leaves behind in a tangle of bedsheets and the skillet that makes one breakfast instead of two. When Mitchell wrote Blue, she had long since moved on from the Saskatchewan stages of her early years and the folk scene of Toronto: Then three albums deep into her career, she had built an international following on the strength of her songwriting, her cloud-grazing voice and the intimacy she conjures when she brings both to the microphone. Her preceding album, 1970’s Ladies of the Canyon, delivered the effervescent “Big Yellow Taxi”, one of her biggest hits, along with the moody “Woodstock” and sing-along classic “The Circle Game”. She became a Laurel Canyon fixture as the ’60s roiled into the ’70s, as well as the favourite singer-songwriter of some of the world’s favourite singer-songwriters—from Graham Nash (her longtime love and likely muse for “My Old Man” and “A Case of You”) and David Crosby (who produced her debut album) to Leonard Cohen (another former flame who’s also rumoured to have been the inspiration for “A Case of You”) and James Taylor, with whom she struck up a romance at the top of the decade. Blue took shape in a moment of personal transition for Mitchell, right after the end of her relationship with Nash and just as she was falling for Taylor: She wrote her way out of an old love and into a new one, all while infusing her lyrics with the nostalgia, pain, joy, excitement and appreciation for all that bubbled to the surface in that period. And while Blue offers a glimpse into the recesses of Mitchell’s heart at the time, it explores all love and loss, not just of the romantic sort (“Little Green” is an ode to the daughter she gave up for adoption, which she wouldn’t reveal until the ’90s). Long hailed as her magnum opus, Blue is as much a testament to her talent as it is the readiness with which she’s willing to share her most intimate truths.
- Joni Mitchell turned her gaze outward for an album sketching the post-hippie landscape at the dawn of the '70s. The title track gently pokes fun at her fellow Los Angeles bohemians, while the wistful "For Free" finds a successful singer-songwriter shown up by a street busker and "Woodstock" celebrates the gathering of her tribe. Singing in a new, slightly lower register that lends warmth to her vocals, Mitchell adds strings, reeds and percussion to her arrangements, giving tracks like "Conversation" and "The Circle Game" a richer, jazz-influenced sound.
- 2021
- 2008
- 2008
Artist Playlists
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- Her quicksilver voice and poetic lyrics spawned many acolytes.
- Folk, jazz and classical fuse to ignite the mercurial songwriter.
- The master songwriter spans introspective folk to nimble jazz.
- The Canadian legend’s onstage recordings rank among her finest work.
Appears On
- Janet Jackson
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About Joni Mitchell
A pioneering figure of the singer-songwriter era, Joni Mitchell charted an interior world that felt bigger and more ambiguous—but every bit as real—as the one outside, rendering relationships and self-exploration with a candour, humour and wisdom unheard of before her and rarely matched since. Canadian by birth, Mitchell (born Roberta Joan Anderson in 1943) spent the mid-’60s breaking into America, being covered by artists like Judy Collins and Tom Rush before settling in Los Angeles’ Laurel Canyon. Despite properly launching her solo career during the late ’60s in a decidedly anti-establishment folk scene, she harboured a vocal scepticism toward the counterculture, an iconoclasm and commitment to her muse that followed her for decades—be it forays into jazz (including collaborations with Charles Mingus and Jaco Pastorius) or occasional retreats into poetry and painting. (“I have always thought of myself as a painter derailed by circumstance,” she once said.) A 2015 brain aneurysm left Mitchell physically debilitated, requiring intensive rehab. She returned to public performance at the 2022 Newport Folk Festival and played her first full concert the following year in Washington. Her first-ever performance at the Grammys in 2024 reminded the wider world of her legacy. Delicate as it is, her work is quietly transgressive, too, crossing freely between folk, pop and jazz without flaunting it, juxtaposing her fluttery voice with tough advice and a sharp, sometimes unsparing wit. But at the heart of Mitchell’s music lies that quest for the inner realm, for personal truth laid as bare as possible without sacrificing its complexity—a “feminine appetite for intimacy” (her words) that has influenced artists such as Prince and Kate Bush, as well as the more diaristic side of Taylor Swift.
- HOMETOWN
- Fort Macleod, Alberta, Canada
- BORN
- 7 de noviembre de 1943
- GENRE
- Pop