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
Lazy reviewers look up other people's reviews and they write the same thing, so you get people writing crap based on crap.
Musically, I would never run dry. Any time I sit down to an instrument, I could write a song.
Ira Gershwin, shame on him. I mean, some of the writing.
In some ways, my gift for music and writing was born out of tragedy, really, and loss.
I hang my laundry on the line when I write.
The most important thing is to write in your own blood. I bare intimate feelings because people should know how other people feel.
I had made all these rules for myself: I'm not writing social commentary, I'm not writing love songs.
At the point where I'm trying to force something and it's not happening, and I'm getting frustrated with, say, writing a poem, I can go and pick up the brushes and start painting. At the point where the painting seems to not be going anywhere, I go and pick up the guitar.
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.
And the seasons, they go round and round,/ And the painted ponies go up and down./ We're captive on the carousel of time.
Say, won't you stay; we'll put on the day and we'll talk in present tenses
People think it's being remodeled, ... I tell them, and they say, 'What? What do you mean they're tearing down the old high-school building?'
I've looked at life from both sides now/ From win and lose and still somehow/ It's life's illusions I recall/ I really don't know life at all.