Joni: The Creative Odyssey of Joni Mitchell (29 page)

Compare this “certainty” with a review of a 1966 show at Toronto's Riverboat coffee house:
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“This wide-eyed girl with long, soft, blond on blond hair is playing a very conscientious acoustic guitar and sometimes missing a note. And it doesn't bother you,” wrote Paul Ennis. He went on to say her “soprano is... growing less breathy every day” and “[her voice is] so pure, it is almost a distillate, so clear, so exalted and so simple that somewhere along its enchanting, wondering journey, it approaches the magical.”

His language is somewhat fawning, and just a little condescending—describing her work as “childlike”—but he also senses the burgeoning independence and power of the woman before him. He says her voice is “strong and powerful” and has “broken through all the clouds that slow or trap most singers.”

We can only assume the writer was referring to clouds seeded by self-doubt, because self-doubt is what gets caught in your throat, and makes it impossible to express yourself. Mitchell not only pushed out the sounds with her diaphragm, but she also kicked out the jams of musical genre to explore character. Whether it's the heartsick lover stripped to the bone in “Blue” or the sage's cool observations spoken in “If I Had a Heart,” a song from
Shine
that features Mitchell singing in her lowest register to date, they are accurate reflections of who Mitchell was—at that moment. Her voice is always honest, even if she is in character, which is the central reason why every album feels so whole and thematically unified.

Mitchell is highly aware of her vocal evolution, as well as its symbolic implications. In a 1986 interview, Pete Fornatale of WNEW asks her about her first record, wondering if she'd be capable of making another one in a similar vein. “Well, my voice has changed considerably since then, so—and my sense—I couldn't do it exactly like that because I've assimilated the blues, I've assimilated—I mean this is pretty much British Isles–influenced music,” she says. “The blues haven't entered into the picture. It's very—under the rule of Queen Lizzy, you know what I mean?”
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In other words, Mitchell says her voice is still that of “the colonized”—she hasn't explored the world, assimilated its sounds, and belted out a new chorus in her unique style. By the time she spoke with Fornatale, shortly after the release of
Dog Eat Dog
, she was already well versed in jazz and African beats. “My rhythmic sense has changed, my voice has deepened. I've lost off the top and gained on the bottom. I have a different sense of expression,” she says. “The first two records, I had nearly all of the songs that compose those first two before I started recording. But the second album, the
Clouds
album, my voice changes radically.”

Mitchell says this second shift (if we take the first to be from imitative folkie to soul-searching troubadour) took place in the wake of hanging out with Crosby, Stills, and Nash—who started singing together in Mitchell's Laurel Canyon living room one day. Apparently Graham Nash, Mitchell's lover at the time, came downstairs while David Crosby and Stephen Stills were visiting—and when Nash decided to sing a little harmony, the boys realized they had a band. “CSN was just forming at that time and we used to sit around and sing a lot, and in order to blend with them you had to adopt a kind of a vocal affectation to get the blend,” says Mitchell, who would go on to draw album artwork for the new band. “They had to develop a common singing style even though their timbre and everything was different. And from singing with them I picked up some of that. So suddenly I have kind of an overt American accent, to my ear anyway, being Canadian, on the second album which kind of dies down by the time you get to the third.”

Canadians tend to make good chameleons. It's a survival mechanism for us, since we don't have the biggest teeth in the zoo, and we're too small (population wise) to start a stampede. Mitchell's Canadian accent is evident when she speaks, though somewhere along the line she seems to have restrained herself from using “eh?” as verbal punctuation. She has camouflaged herself and taken on different roles through her vocal performance. Because her songs are like “little plays” that she directs, she has a habit of “casting” the vocals—sometimes as a one-man show, sometimes as an ensemble piece. Check out her nasal-voiced diner waitress in the
Miles of Aisles
version of “The Last Time I Saw Richard”—you can hear Mitchell's inner Bette Davis scratching to get out. She told Jody Denberg, “I never wanted to be a human jukebox. I think more like a film or a dramatic actress and a playwright. These plays are more suitable to me. I feel miscast in my early songs. They're ingénue roles.”
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When she was interviewed about those early songs in 1969 by the
Globe and Mail
, she noted how much she loved hearing a man sing them: “After a song's been written, it becomes a whole different thing: You don't own it anymore. I love to hear men sing my songs, because they're written from a feminine point of view, and men bring totally different things to them.”
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Eventually, Mitchell hired men to perform on the records so she could realize the whole
mise en scène.
The first notable stunt casting was on
Court and Spark
in 1974, when she hired Grammy Award–winning comedy-album kings Cheech & Chong as the babbling rabble. Mitchell had them talking about her in the background when she came to the line, “no [bus] driver on the top”: “Man, the chick is twisted, crazy, poop-shoobie, y'hear? Flip city.” There's no doubt it added a “je-ne-sais-wha?” to the Lambert, Hendricks & Ross number “Twisted.” It was playful and, given the earnestness of what had come before on
Blue
,
For the Roses
,
Clouds
, and
Song to a Seagull
, it might even be said to be “out of character.”

Her search for the right external voices to fill out the aural canvas she created in her head began in earnest after her stint with Rolling Thunder. Dylan's gypsy caravan was a bit of a lab agar for the artistic spirit: the musicians were getting into the myriad manifestations of being “a player,” performing onstage before a live audience one minute, acting for a movie camera the next, and shagging up a hormonal storm in all the moments in between. Mitchell's refusal to release the footage she shot for
Renaldo and Clara
is an interesting paradox, given she has frequently spoken about her desire to bring her talents to the film world. She's called herself a “frustrated filmmaker,”
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and she clearly has a talent for performance. So why she decided to pull a Garbo on this occasion really is a mystery. She told Cameron Crowe that Rolling Thunder “was a trial of sorts for me... What was in it for me hadn't anything to do with applause or the performing aspect. It was simply to be allowed to remain an observer and a witness to an incredible spectacle. As a result, the parts of the film that I was in... for all I know, it was powerful and interesting footage. But I preferred to be invisible,” she added with a nervous laugh. “I've got my own reasons why.”
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Either Mitchell was serving her ego because she was afraid of what people might say (not in character) or she was seeking to detach from ego, as she described to Crowe. She wanted to be “invisible,” and she certainly gets the singer's equivalent of that by the end of the tour: “My voice is gone... I sound like an old spade. I lost like ten notes on this tour. They are just gone forever. I'm just a prisoner of notes. I guess I'll have to do more with the four I have left.”
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Rolling Thunder coincided with the release of
The Hissing of Summer Lawns
, the album that pushed Mitchell to find a new “voice” for her music by introducing new instrumentation and new beats, thanks in large part to the startling, bone-shaking, sense-tingling warrior drummers of Burundi on “The Jungle Line.” The evolution continued with
Hejira
, which pretty much rewrote Mitchell's whole production language—and seems entirely contemporary more than three decades later, predating the same sonic landscapes now equated with Daniel Lanois.

Don Juan's Reckless Daughter
featured Mitchell in drag, suggesting the importance of assuming alternative characters in order to fully express yourself. On
Wild
Things Run Fast
, she asked Don Henley to sing on “You Dream Flat Tires”—but was “dissatisfied” with the result. It wasn't Henley's vocal performance she had a problem with, per se, it was the register he sang in. “I wanted a female/male contrast,” Mitchell explained, “but because of the register I had Henley sing it in, I didn't get any contrast. We were both singing lower than usual, and you'd be a long way into it before you realized the voice had changed.” Mitchell recruited Lionel Richie, who was recording across the hall, to fill in. She never told Henley why she'd cut him out. When she called him again to guest-star on
Chalk Mark in a Rainstorm
's “Snakes and Ladders,” he said (according to Mitchell, as quoted by Bill Flanagan): “You're not gonna take me off and replace me with a Negro this time, are you?”
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(Zoinks!) Mitchell was happy with the Henley results this time, but
Chalk Mark
also featured some other guests, including Billy Idol, Willie Nelson, Peter Gabriel, and Tom Petty. Nelson was cast as “Old Dan” in the Bob Nolan tune, “Cool Water,” and Petty and Idol were cast as street thugs on “Dancin' Clown.” “She said she had a song about two street toughs and she wanted me to play one of them... Then she told me Billy Idol was the other one... There's a trio for ya!” said Petty.
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As Mitchell tried on different personae, she found the right voices to match. “There are showy, fun songs that will accommodate a certain amount of winky-wink, nod-nod from the stage, but on these intimate things you almost have to sing with a method acting kind of way—you have to find your sincerity like an actor does. Like Meryl Streep. You have to sing from the heart.”
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In 1994, Mitchell's voice gave out during a video shoot. When the specialists threw a fiber optic camera down her throat, they told her she had a bleeding throat lesion. It didn't look good, and if the doctors were right, it was the same condition that killed Sammy Davis Jr. She would have about five years, they said. Not being one to take the word of any god seriously—even the ones in white lab coats—Mitchell sought a second opinion and consulted Oleta, the Hawaiian mystic: “I said, ‘Look in my throat, Oleta. Do you see death there?' ‘No,' she said. This sounds so crackpot: she sent me water. The water was electrically charged and commanded to sluice and slowly restore. She fixed me. It's healed up. My voice is fragile, but I do believe I'm singing better than ever in my life. I'm on the brink of being a great singer. I've lost my high end but I don't miss it—you don't need it. I had three and a half octaves, all of that stratospheric stuff was just trying to impress. Billie Holiday had seven notes. And what she did with it.”
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Even amid the dark coils of cigarette smoke, Mitchell found the lightning in the cloud of nicotine: she responded to the challenge and found a new voice.

This new voice is especially audible on
Shine
, her last and perhaps final album, as it finds Mitchell back where she started—with echoing production and a solo voice, only in a lower register and a higher place.
Shine
may be the Joni Mitchell release that surprised me the most, because I want to crank the title track. I can't think of any other Joni Mitchell tune that's ever inspired me to light up the LEDs on my speakers. It's not a cathartic purge thing, like I get listening to Everclear or Patti Smith, but a spiritual gong thing. I don't care that after the first few bars of pinging synth and sonar-inspired guitar the first lyric feels like homage to
E.T
., kids' music, and Neil Diamond in the same breath: “Let your little light shine.”

The song goes on for another seven minutes, making it by far the longest song on the album, and as the orchestration builds behind Brian Blade's drums, the textures grow more complex and detailed. The big bongs and brushes of percussion weave with deep symphonics created and arranged entirely by Mitchell. She is one of only three musicians credited on the sleeve. The last (in addition to Blade) is James Taylor, whose guitar can be heard in the gaps and crests, bringing an increasing sense of humanity to an ethereal mix. The airiness of the sonic landscape is a beautiful contrast to the earthiness of Mitchell's voice, which has a fragility that it never possessed in her so-called prime as a pristine soprano. It quakes and fades and scratches, but there is unprecedented power in the delivery.

Mitchell's final voice is certain and declarative as she lists the earth's current ails: Wall Street and Vegas, rising oceans and evaporating seas, Frankenstein technologies, mass destruction in god's name, and lousy leadership licensed to kill. It's a litany of human sin, but the tone is not cruel or angry. Mitchell's voice is full of compassion and understanding.

It's the same dynamic tension on every track, from the opening instrumental: “One Week Last Summer,” which pulls up Mitchell's clearly produced, and heaving, acoustic piano against Bob Sheppard's alto sax. It feels like quiet waves lapping up against the rocks, and in the liner notes, Mitchell explains it was one of those creative moments that kind of just happened: “I stepped outside of my little house [in B.C.] and stood barefoot on a rock. The pacific ocean [
sic
] rolled towards me. Across the bay, a family of seals sprawled on the kelp uncovered by the low tide. A blue heron honked overhead. All around the house the wild roses were blooming. The air smelled sweet and salty and loud with crows and bees. My house was clean. I had food in the fridge for a week. I sat outside 'til the sun went down,” she writes. “That night the piano beckoned for the first time in ten years. My fingers found these patterns which express what words could not. This song poured out while a brown bear rummaged through my garbage cans. The song has seven verses constructed for the days of that happy week. On Thursday, the bear arrives.”