Joni Mitchell

Biography

She was first paid to sing on 31 October 1962, at a club in Saskatoon that booked folk and jazz performers. A year later she was studying at the Alberta College of Art in Calgary, but she left without finishing.

Roberta Joan Anderson was born on 7 November 1943 in Fort Macleod, Alberta. Her father was a flight lieutenant who instructed pilots in the Royal Canadian Air Force, and her mother was a teacher. Her childhood was spent on military bases in western Canada and then in Saskatchewan; from the age of eleven the family lived in Saskatoon, which she considers her hometown. At school she was uninterested; painting mattered most to her. She taught herself guitar from a Pete Seeger songbook. She devised alternative tunings for herself; later these tunings shaped the unusual harmony and structure of her songs. At art college she was disillusioned that technique was valued over free creativity, while fashion pulled toward pure abstraction and commercial art. After a year she left.

In 1964 she travelled by train to Toronto and wrote her first song, “Day After Day”, on the way. In Toronto she lacked the money for musicians’ union fees, so she played in church basements and on the street, and earned her living in the women’s wear section of a department store. In spring 1965 she met an American folk singer, Chuck Mitchell; in June she married him, took his surname and moved to Detroit. They divorced in 1967, and she moved to New York.

Her songs were made famous first by other singers. Tom Rush recorded “Urge for Going”, Judy Collins made “Both Sides, Now” a top-ten hit in 1968, and “Woodstock” was performed with great success by Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young. In Coconut Grove, Florida, David Crosby heard her, took her to Los Angeles and introduced her to his friends. Elliot Roberts became her manager, Reprise Records signed her, and Crosby persuaded the label to release an acoustic album without the folk-rock overdubs then in fashion. The debut, “Song to a Seagull”, came out in March 1968 and “Clouds” in April 1969. She painted the covers of both herself. For “Clouds” she won her first Grammy in 1970.

“Ladies of the Canyon” (1970) brought “Big Yellow Taxi” and her first gold record; many of its songs were composed at the piano. After a year without touring, spent travelling, writing and painting, “Blue” appeared in 1971. Later she said that at the time she felt like the cellophane wrapper on a pack of cigarettes. “Court and Spark” (1974) was recorded with the jazz-fusion band the L.A. Express and rose to number two on the Billboard 200, while “Help Me” remained her only single in the top ten, at number seven.

In the second half of the decade she moved ever further into jazz. She worked with the bassist Jaco Pastorius, Wayne Shorter, Herbie Hancock and Pat Metheny. Most of the songs on “Hejira” (1976) were composed on the road, at the wheel, which is why there are no piano songs on it. Charles Mingus himself proposed that they work together; he died before the project was finished, and she completed the album “Mingus” (1979), which the critics received coolly. Then came the synthesizers and dance rhythms of her marriage to the bassist Larry Klein, and after that “Turbulent Indigo” (1994). On its cover she portrayed herself as Van Gogh; the album won two Grammys, one of them for best pop album.

In later years her voice grew noticeably rougher. In 2000 and 2002 came “Both Sides Now”, with an orchestra, and “Travelogue”; by her own account she made these records to fulfil contractual obligations. Her last album of new songs, “Shine”, came out in September 2007. In 2011 she said that she was working mainly on painting, which she does not sell and shows only rarely.

Music evenings, the “Joni Jams”, were held at her home in Laurel Canyon, organised by the singer-songwriter Brandi Carlile. On 24 July 2022 Mitchell appeared unannounced on the stage of the Newport Folk Festival, for the first time in many years, and sang thirteen songs. A recording of that concert was released in 2023. Today she has eleven Grammys, the first received in 1970 and the last in 2024, and the Kennedy Center Honors of 2021.