Way back around 1972, while an undergrad at the University of Texas, I bought myself a ticket to a Joni Mitchell concert at one of the major venues in Austin. From up in the nosebleed seats I saw her, in a floor-length outfit that I remember having Native American adornments, her blonde hair hanging long and straight, swaying as she played those bewildering chords. (This was before I knew there was such a thing as alternative tunings.) The voice was unmistakable: angular, with odd breaks between registers that somehow evoked the way Monk played the piano. Yet her timbre was golden, her delivery often inflected with a teasing touch of mirth.
Inspired, after her last encore I headed straight to the stage door, where I rather brashly announced myself as a reporter from the UT student newspaper and asked if I could just slip back to her dressing room for an interview. The security guy, probably pitying my clueless bravado, declared that “Ms. Mitchell is not doing press.” “And how do you know?” I retorted. “Why don’t you send someone back to ask her?”
Our dialog ended rather decisively a second or two after that. For me, it was disappointing but also an important hint into the way things worked in this business. One had to contact publicists weeks in advance, maybe provide clippings, probably schedule something not just seconds after the artist gets offstage. This insight would serve me well even just in the months to come.
Still, I wanted to speak with Joni. After all, she was the feminine hippie archetype — the hair, the smile, the irregular but endlessly intriguing face and of course the guitar, an instrument of seduction as much as music. To be honest, some of that lingered in my mind 26 years later as I set up my trip to L.A. for our cover story interview.
We met in a restaurant in Brentwood, a short walk from the notorious OJ Simpson house. Our table was on the patio. She rose to greet me, her hand extended. The years left their mark, though not dimmed her unique allure. She smoked throughout our lunch. I think I remember that Joni ordered a steak. Her voice was husky; she spoke candidly, often with a sly wit.
We conversed beyond my allotted time, this time about visual art. After twenty minutes or so, taking note of two journalists glowering impatiently from their table, I asked, “Are those guys next on your schedule? I don’t want to run into their time.”
“Oh, it’s just the New York Times,” she said, smiling playfully. “They can wait.”
And they did. Sorry, guys.
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How do you assess the state of pop songwriting today, as compared to the Sixties, when it seemed that the most successful writers were those who had the most distinctive styles?
If you go back and listen to that era, everybody had their own sound. If you go back even further, there was a story — I think it was about the Benny Goodman band — where the trumpet player cracked his lip and they had to rewrite his part for clarinet the next night. And in that manner, this band found its sound. So an individual sound was part of the criteria in Forties music, in Fifties music and in Sixties music. But it isn’t any longer. It’s now the terrain of producers who slot artists into markets, dictating down to the degree that if it’s a sampled-drum genre you use this drum and you have it hot in the mix so that the bottom end of the music sounds the same from beginning to end.
I sat in a restaurant the other day where they were playing a tape from the black pop genre. Even though there was a diversity of grooves and the colors of the drums and the artists kept changing, the volume of the lead singer and the background singers all seemed to be identical from artist to artist. I’m sure they all had different producers, but the formula was so settled in! Now, the dancer in me liked that groove, but the artist in me, when I woke up and stopped being the dancer and started to scrutinize it, was offended. You can’t say that they weren’t great singers, although maybe they over-embellished for my taste, or great players. But …
... you hear the same FM Rhodes sounds again and again [i.e., a digital emulation of the Rhodes electric piano sound].
That’s it. There was a palette of four or five drum sounds and generally the same bass sound. There was one transparent strings-but-not-trying-to-simulate-strings sound — very thin, so that the voices came up with a lot of space between them.
The point is, it was a formula. It was about conforming rather than exploring.
Yeah. It wasn’t music. But the way it is not, being premature in music is worse than being late, because hip lasts for a while, so the latecomers can still enjoy success. As a matter of fact, the innovator gets kissed off as weird, and then the copycats get the glory.
Well, you have to have faith that innovation in music will somehow be rewarded.
But history doesn’t necessarily correct things. You have to correct it yourself, even if it seems like you’re arrogant or blowing your own horn. If nobody’s picking up on it, you’ve got to do it yourself. Basically, I was kissed off after Court and Spark. I cut my players some slack on Hissing of Summer Lawns and they reverted to jazz harmony. Without me harmonizing them, they applied some jazz licks and chords against my harmonies. A lot of people didn’t like that. Prince fell in love with it, but generally that was the beginning of my fall from grace.
Didn’t that free you to say, “Screw you, I’m gonna do what I want”?
I always did! But knowing that you’re out of vogue, yeah, I chose to take that as further liberty.
“Folk music is still the best format for telling a story, with long lines that give you more space.”
What about lyrics? How do you rate pop music as a vehicle for creativity in writing words?
Well, folk music is still the best format for telling a story, with long lines that give you more space. I stopped being a folk singer in 1965, when I began writing my own songs, but I’ve kept that from the folk tradition. When Dylan came along [she imitates a long, incomprehensible Dylan whine], you can make quite a statement in that much space, as opposed to [sings a line from Gershwin] “embrace me, my sweet embraceable you.” The melody is fragmented into little sound bites in that kind of pop music. You can’t tell a story with those pauses. Those Gershwin things, they’re one-mood songs. You’re either happy or you’re sad.
On my songs, singing has to be sacrificed for drama, because they’re more like Shakespearian soliloquies. You’ve got to go through intricate emotional challenges, sometimes within one sentence. You have dramatic options as to whether you want to overstate or understate. At this particular time in my life, I have no stomach for melodrama, so the vocals on my new album [Taming the Tiger] are, for the most part, way understated. A song like “No Apologies,” for instance, has a heavy text, and if you get all emotionally engaged, like I did on my earlier work, it sounds like you’re slapping the wrists of boys, you know what I mean?
You recorded some Gershwin songs for the new Herbie Hancock album, with Wayne Shorter and Stevie Wonder. How was it to shift to that classic style of pop lyrics?
It wasn’t that challenging. You know, “I’m waiting for my man to come,” that’s like, I’m alone and sad, or I’m alone and happy. You can just float and sing. It’s like, I was thinking about Ella [Fitzgerald] and Billie [Holiday]. Ella had perfect pitch and time, but she didn’t shade lyrics very often. Her dramatic approach was monochromatic, whereas Billie had so much warmth! She could sing the heaviest, darkest thing with so much heart, and lay into every word, and emphasize the right ones, and really dig the text out so that you knew what she was singing about. Ella was more like Mariah Carey: You’d just follow the sheen of the line.
Of course, she sang a lot of scat too.
And I love that! It’s a pleasure when I do it, because I get to be a singer instead of an actress.
There’s one song, “Stay in Touch,” on the new album, where the lyrics reflect the folk tradition you’ve described until the bridge, where suddenly there’s this torrent of words, as if there’s a lot to say in a limited space. It’s like a deliberate placement of urgency.
Because of the melody! If you’re working with melody first and words afterwards, you’ll have to get the gist, and then you’ve got to contemplate it, and then you’ve got all these chords! It’s a complex puzzle because your shading comes in first: From here to here it’ll hold an ironic statement, but over here it lightens up and you almost have to tell a joke.
A lot of your recent work seems driven by political or social issues, as opposed to the more personal concerns of your early songs.
I was working through my psychological drama [laughs]. See, the way I view my world is, I’m a witness before the backdrop of my times. And it’s a compelling backdrop. I mean, “Javex bottles on the tide. / I took my dream down by the sea” [from “The Banquet”]. That’s an ironic image, these plastic bottles lapping up in your dream. You don’t even have to comment on it; it makes its own comment. It’s like a telling detail in a film.
When you deliver issue-driven lyrics that you write almost as a list of concerns, how do you handle that as a singer?
They’re never complete lists, though.
Well, when you’ve got lyrics like “lawyers and loan sharks are laying America to waste” as the refrain to the chorus in “No Apologies,” doesn’t that pose an interpretive challenge? You don’t want to just be reciting a grocery list.
That was a funny one. That melody, played at a slightly brighter tempo, is like King Sunny Adé: It’s full of joy. I had no intention for the lyrics to go that way. I was pissed off when they did! It’s just that I got really disturbed by the news when this general, given so many chances by the Japanese to do the right thing, refused. This lack of honor and nobility in the armed forces, the generation into barbarism, the fall of the noble warrior — it opened a lot of questions. Every culture is corrupt, but here was a man of high position, representing America in a foreign place, and all he could say was, “The soldiers erred in judgment. They should have hired a hooker.” The fact that it was disgraceful to gang-bang a civilian girl and didn’t see any reason to hang his head, that’s a new element since World War II. [Note: I’m not sure what this incident was that Joni was referring to.]
You did something unusual in that song, by ending it with a repetition of the first line.
“The general offered no apologies.”
Right. You ended it as you began it, but you varied the melody by letting it drop down to the tonic. Were you aware of doing that as you wrote it?
No, but I can think of two films that I love that do that. Amacord begins and ends with “In the season of the flying fluff.” And Time of the Gypsies, which borrowed a lot from Fellini, begins and ends at a wedding. So again I’ve taken visual ideas and worked them into songs.
Art or Theft: The Paradox of Sampling
The new album has some other twists, including the non-musical samples you use on your opening cut, “Harlem in Havana.”
The thing that’s sampled there, mixed into the intro, is kids on a roller coaster. But I placed them in a musical way. See, that, song came from a sound on the Roland VG-8 [“virtual reality” guitar] that intrigued me — a glassy little marimba/hammered percussion sound. I had to play it in standard tuning, so I came up with the main guitar part in the way it starts. It starts African and then the choruses have a very Argentinian harmony, almost a tango pattern. Brian [Blades, drummer] and I jammed it up. There was no text in sight, but when we listened back to it I dubbed it “Zulu Tango” — that was its title as an instrumental.
We lived with that for a while until I had a memory flashback from early teenhood of Harlem in Havana, which was a carnival revue that came to my hometown. That was my introduction to live black music, and as you stood there listening to it, the Caterpillar engine was behind you; it had its own generator. Next to that was the Bullet; it had its own generator. So the sonic roar in that corner, the screams of people and everybody shouting to be heard over it — that was something I wanted to capture. So the first two songs on the album are tone poems: The music illustrates the memory.
Is there a danger that using a sample like that might encourage you to rely more on effect than on lyric to bring a song to visual life?
I wouldn’t use it capriciously. I just go on my own enthusiasm and ideas. When I got this roller-coaster stuff, it was sampled from a perspective where it comes screaming by, so there was a Doppler effect: As the voices subsided, the latter part of the wheels hits across these wooden struts. The tempo of that sample matched beautifully into the tone of Brian’s drums. This combination made sixteenth-notes, so it was a musical decision as well as just dropping something in for effect.
You used the sample to augment rather than to disrupt the flow of the music, an approach that differs from a lot of what we hear in sample-driven music today.
But it’s not the idea of doing that that’s appalling. In fact, I was one of the first to do it, with the Burundi drummers [on “The Jungle Line,” from The Hissing of Summer Lawns], when you had to labor to do it because the technology wasn’t there to take something off a record and build on top of it. I made that loop by copying and gluing and copying and gluing. It was a lot of work. But that loop contains the rhythmic seeds of Bo Diddley and just about every rock ’n’ roll groove there was. This was the origin of rock ’n’ roll: a Burundi war dance. So I’ve experienced the temptation to do that, purely out of love.
Maybe contemporary artists are doing it purely out of love too.
I think it depends on the spirit with which it’s entered into. If it’s just snip, snip, snip, nice picture, it’ll sound like that in ten or fifteen years. It’s kind of Dada, but that wasn’t really an important art movement. It was more of a reactionary thing. It’s the art of channel-changers, where its intent is as chopped up as the minds that perhaps it appeals to.
“When people hear acoustic guitar, it’s like: Folk singer. They don’t hear the Duke Ellington block-chord orchestral movement that’s going with it.”
That raises the question of innovating within a certain style. Obviously, you’ve been through myriad changes in your music, yet from your first recorded note to what you’re doing now, it’s all your music. The way you process your guitar sound today doesn’t make it any less you.
Yeah, but finally you can hear the voicings! I kept thinking, when I got this guitar [the Roland VG-8] it would be like Georgia O'Keeffe's flowers. She said, “I’m gonna paint ‘em big because if I paint ‘em small, no one will notice.” The problem is, when people hear acoustic guitar, it’s like: Folk singer. Rhythm guitar. They don’t hear the Duke Ellington block-chord orchestral movement that’s going with it.
It’s still a guitar, though. You’re not replicating a big band.
But at least the voicings are balanced and even. Mixers still have a tendency to bring the voice up and shove the guitar in the back and tweak it down. The sound is such that you can build a wall with it, and even if I’m singing feathery I’ll still go through it. The point is, this is the orchestra. Don’t put the orchestra in the other room, please!
You overdubbed a lot of your very early acoustic guitar parts.
I remember [David] Crosby saying to me on the first album, “Do you think you could play that twice?” I remember actually feeling nigh on to smug — because that whole album is doubled! I couldn’t do that now. I don’t play like that anymore. It’s completely foreign to me. But you couldn’t tell that I was doubling until the second album. I heard this one tiny flam and I realized, “Oh, that’s how I got the guitar so fat [laughs]!” Then in Chalk Mark in a Rainstorm [1985], I played the guitar part 24 times in trying to see how many times I could double it before they could take one part out and I wouldn’t notice. Well, at 24 I could still hear it, but there was no point in smothering another reel. Most of that album is either sixteen guitar parts as written or, on some tracks, 24. That gives it the fatness. Nothing really gave it to me like that instrument, which is a modified Strat with some chorus and reverb on it.
Jaco
Jaco Pastorius’s fretless bass became an integral part of your sound.
Oh, well, Jaco was irresistible. See, at that time I didn’t understand the bass. You noticed I didn’t play with bass players for years, right? Every bass player who’d come in would disappoint me. I’d tell them to do this and that, and I’d end up offending them, so I’d leave it off. Bass players didn’t change their strings back then; dead strings were the vogue. And the bass sound was always back in the mix, although, with the female ear, I was always digging to hear it. Everybody would say, “That’s not the point. The bass is just supposed to anchor the song.” But I couldn’t understand why I could always have choices with high-end harmony — I could stack voices up and down until I had no air there — but I couldn’t have choices on the bottom. Maybe this is because I’m an uneducated musician, but I refused to accept that the bass merely played the root of the chord, even though I was told this again and again and again. I mean, I would ask bass players to play something and they’d say, "No!” “Well, why not?” “It’s not the root of the chord!” “Okay, what’s the root of the chord?” They’d play it and I’d say, “That sounds boring. Couldn’t you just play this other note?” “I won’t play it!”
It’s almost like, what do you need the bass for, if all it does is play the root?
Yeah! People would say, “Man, I played with James Brown, and this little lady wants to tell me how to play my axe!” I was also trying to get this sound from them, which was the sound of the jukebox at the Avenue A swimming pool I heard from two blocks away. I loved that sound. The high end would be eaten off and the bass would just come booming at you. The problem was, by the time we hit the Sixties, I couldn’t hear the bottom end on records. People would go, “Great bass player!” And I’d be concentrating, trying to pull it up, and I couldn’t hear it. But that was the style, and you could not get any of those guys to buck it.
How did you connect with Jaco?
This frustrated bass player who wouldn’t do what I was asking him to do finally snarled at me and said, “There’s a kid who plays with Bob Hope and Phyllis Miller in Florida. He’s really weird. You would probably like him.” So I sent for Jaco sight unseen. I thought, okay, if he’s weird, maybe he’s the guy who will do this. Now, I don’t know whether he had already found his way into Weather Report, but I did bring him to town before anyone knew of him, on the basis that he was weird and I liked him [laughs]. It was a long shot, but I figured I’d take him in rather than battle with one more bass player.
What did you think when he showed up?
He kind of blew my mind. He was incorrigible and difficult to deal with, but I was so excited that someone was doing what I had been asking people to do. Here was a kindred person, thinking as I did about the bottom end. Only Jaco — and Stevie Wonder, with his Moog bass — were doing that odd mix of pop grease and melodic fills that I wanted to hear.
Power in Harmony
You’ve always played in alternate guitar tunings. How did your very distinctive harmonic language evolve?
When I began to play folk music, I got a Pete Seeger How to Play record and I tried to do “Cotten picking” — picking in the style of Elizabeth Cotten. The easiest thing in the world, but I could not learn it! My thumb would not navigate between the fifth and sixth strings. Instead, it laid down in its own funny way on the sixth, which is part of why my style is so eccentric. It’s like my thumbs are Latin and my other three fingers are black [laughs]. So I gave up and my own thing grew from that: a slow left hand and a very articulate right hand. And I’ve always loved wide chords. The chords I use are outside of the harmonic movement of jazz too, so some jazzers get offended by them and tell me they’re wrong.
Were the chords you play now already in your head as a child? Or did you develop them as an outgrowth of not knowing standard tuning?
It’s more like I developed my own system for viewing music, so you see patterns and layers in a more painterly way. Chords, to me, depict emotion. Now, I’ve had a really strange life, okay? A lot of childhood disease, a lot of confrontation with death. So when I was seven, I loved minor chords. Loved ‘em! And you don’t get minors right away. They don’t start you out with minor chords. But I could hardly wait to get to them. It’s kind of like Mondrian: I always thought, how can he paint with just three colors? How boring! Primary colors are like three major chords — and that’s all you’re gonna use for the rest of your life?
The point is to be adventurous and exploratory in your work, at least before the critics trash — or lionize — you to the point of doing damage.
Well, I had my playground damage early by having the wrong threads in grades three and four. By the time I was in grades seven and eight, I was a trend-setter. I manipulated fashion all through my teens. Then by the time I was eighteen, I was sick of it. After that I had enough strength that you couldn’t get to me on whether I was hip or not. I knew that was an advantage in this game, because everything is manipulated by hip.
I met a DJ from a small town in the east who confessed to me that he loved my music but someone had caught him playing during one of my unhip periods. They said, “You’re still listening to that old stuff?” And he replied by yanking my CD out! He had been manipulated by hip. It’s just like I hear DJs saying now, “I know we’re supposed to hate Sheryl Crow, but love this record.”
They even begin by exonerating themselves. “I know we’re supposed to hate this” means that they’re hip enough to know.
But who says we’re supposed to hate anything? I’ve heard a lot of X’ers say, “I know we’re supposed to.” I hear that phrase a lot and I think, who’s the dictator? That’s the question I would ask these days.
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Brilliant! I cross-posted it. It's so rare that an interview talks about music and not personalities.
I enjoyed reading this; thank you! BTW, the incident that inspired "No Apologies" is detailed in the wikipedia entry "1995 Okinawa rape incident," and the song's "general" was actually an admiral...
https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1995-11-18-mn-4681-story.html