Like her prime compatriots Bob Dylan and Leonard Cohen and her favorite protégé, Prince, no one can adequately echo her even great singers, taking on her songbook, admit they can only hope to achieve proximity. Recordings preserve that voice, of course, but only live performance makes it immediate. Her diminished presence has raised anxiety in fans who can't imagine a world without Mitchell's voice. In 2015 she suffered a brain aneurysm, and although she has made several recent public appearances as she recovers, according to some reports she is still learning to walk again, and she has not spoken in public. In recent years, trouble has been part of Mitchell's story in a less poetic way. Her songs ask us to live within trouble, to see the mirrors embedded in its cracks: the trouble we make, the trouble that waylays us, that makes a nest that we then fill with more trouble because we are made of it, too.
To become preoccupied with Joni Mitchell's music, whether as a fellow musician or as a serious fan, is to welcome trouble as a friend, as the challenge that animates life.
It's in the impossible careening of her young soprano and the cracked resonance of the lower tones that came later. It rings through her famous open guitar tunings and surfaces in the way her foot worries a piano pedal. Trouble is Mitchell's jazz, the blasted-open space that can feel like a void but is also the real ground of possibility. But trouble, in all its manifestations, is also Mitchell's muse.Ĭall it her craving for innovation, or her refusal to rest in comforting clichés call it the essence that makes her a secret sharer for millions of listeners' and most musicians' daunting standard-bearer. Those events solidified the drive that pushed Mitchell forward from small-potatoes rural Canada toward the American meccas where she would prove to be the magnet shifting the needle of pop.
Mitchell was referring to real problems - her childhood time spent bedridden with polio and the life-shaping loss she experienced after giving her daughter up for adoption in 1965. "I wouldn't have pursued music but for trouble," Joni Mitchell once said. 7 at the conclusion of Joni 75, a benefit performance in honor of her birthday. Joni Mitchell (seated) took the stage on Nov.