Joni Mitchell
Joni Mitchell
Roberta Joan "Joni" Mitchell, CCis a Canadian singer-songwriter and painter. Mitchell's work is highly respected by critics, and she has deeply influenced fellow musicians in a diverse range of genres. Rolling Stone has called her "one of the greatest songwriters ever", and AllMusic has stated, "When the dust settles, Joni Mitchell may stand as the most important and influential female recording artist of the late 20th century". Her lyrics are noted for their developed poetics, addressing social and environmental ideals...
NationalityCanadian
ProfessionMusician
Date of Birth7 November 1943
CountryCanada
I don't like being too looked up at or too looked down on. I prefer meeting in the middle to being worshipped or spat out.
Sorrow is so easy to express and yet so hard to tell.
Won't you stay We'll put on the day And we'll talk in present tenses
I never loved a man as far as I could pitch my shoe.
The only thing I have to give to make you smile, to win you with, are all the mornings still to live.
Because I'm so busy and because I think of myself as a painter, I desperately guard the time that I have to paint. And sometimes I'm irresponsible to my career in order to paint. Because painting is obsessive. I forget to eat. I forget to sleep.
I'm a little young for retirement.
To enjoy my music, you need depth and emotionality.
I wrote 'Big Yellow Taxi' on my first trip to Hawaii. I took a taxi to the hotel and when I woke up the next morning, I threw back the curtains and saw these beautiful green mountains in the distance. Then, I looked down and there was a parking lot as far as the eye could see, and it broke my heart this blight on paradise. That's when I sat down and wrote the song.
Americans have decided to be stupid and shallow since 1980.
I see music as fluid architecture.
You could write a song about some kind of emotional problem you are having, but it would not be a good song, in my eyes, until it went through a period of sensitivity to a moment of clarity. Without that moment of clarity to contribute to the song, it's just complaining.
Once I got the open tunings for some reason, I began to get the harmonic sophistication that I heard that my musical fountain inside was excited by. Once I got some interesting chords to play with, my writing began to come.
I don't understand why Europeans and South Americans can take more sophistication. Why is it that Americans need to hear their happiness major and their tragedy minor, and as jazzy as they can handle is a seventh chord? Are they not experiencing complex emotions?