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The Soundtrack to My Life

POSTED:Fri, November 14, 2008 @ 12:12PM

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Joni Mitchell: Busy Being Free

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I recently watched the DVD, Joni Mitchell: A Life Story: A Woman of Heart and Mind, and was struck by the intimate relationship between Mitchell’s life and her music. The documentary links Mitchell’s impassioned drive for freedom, through her songs, as well as through interview and concert footage. Mitchell was not willing to sacrifice her music and her art for anyone. Her strong-will, independence, drive, and setbacks come through in this DVD, which enhances the meaning behind her music all the more.

A Life Story is a great DVD addition to the collection of any fan of music, specifically, singer-songwriter admirers. It documents Mitchell’s childhood beginnings in Canada, her move to Greenwich Village and Laurel Canyon in the sixties, through her bold move out of folk music and into jazz. Her story is told through interviews, both old and current, of Mitchell, as well as friends, ex-boyfriends, record producers, and those famous musicians who created music with her and changed the musical world as we know it now. It includes clips of nearly fifty songs while interweaving photographs, live performances, and interviews to tell the story behind the poet that helped to define her generation through song.

Joni Mitchell starts off her 1971 album Blue with the song “All I Want,” by singing an invitation to her listeners to come and join her on the “lonely road” where she is “traveling,” and “looking for something.” Blue proved to be her most personal collection of songs up to that point in her career. She sings of personal freedom, love lost and gained, places she has been, and the loneliness she often felt as a female singer-songwriter in the music business.

Mitchell vowed from the very beginning of her career that she was not going to ever hide the truth in her songwriting. In A Life Story, Mitchell said that as a child, she would sit in front of the big picture window in her home in Canada, watching the cars pass by, longing to take off and go somewhere. This personal freedom that she yearned for would ultimately cause her many heartaches as well as moments of pure bliss in the years to come.

Mitchell went to art school in Canada and became pregnant. She was broke, scared, and alone so she took the best offer she could find for herself and her child— she married Chuck Mitchell, a man she sang folk songs with in coffee shops. The marriage proved to be the wrong choice and Mitchell started to write of her emotional turmoil through songs.

One of the first songs she wrote, “Both Sides, Now” tells a story of a young woman growing up fast. In one verse, she sings of the childhood dream of finding that great love and of the wondrous imagination that children possess. In the next verse, those fantasies are met with the harsh adult reality of what really happens when a child grows up. Her young self is remembering “the dizzy dancing way you feel” when you fall in love for the first time, while in the next verse, her adult self is singing, “…if you care, don’t let them know, don’t give yourself away.” Mitchell’s childhood had ended, and she was about to embark on a life-changing journey—a journey that began with a divorce from Chuck Mitchell, giving her child up for adoption, and making the brave move to New York City to make her dreams come true.

Mitchell, inspired by Bob Dylan, started writing in a personal narrative form. On her first album, Song to a Seagull, she wrote of her journey to New York and of her divorce from Chuck Mitchell. “I Had a King,” was written as another fantasy versus reality poem. In the chorus, she sings, “I can’t go back there anymore / You know my keys won’t fit the door / You know my thoughts don’t fit the man / They never can, they never can.”

Mitchell was awakened by her sudden independence as her songs and poems flowed from her pen, developing her voice and her unique melodic and harmonic guitar and vocal style. In A Life Story, Mitchell said, “Chords are depictions of emotions. These chords that I was getting by twisting the knobs on the guitar until I could get these chords that I heard inside that suited me, they feel like my feelings, you know, I called them chords of inquiry. They have a question mark in them. There were so many unresolved things in me that those chords suited me. I would stay in unresolved emotionality for days and days.”

Mitchell was with her then-boyfriend Graham Nash, and with David Crosby, Stephen Stills, and their manager David Geffen, when she wrote “Woodstock,” in August of 1969. They were all scheduled to perform at the music festival that was to change history, but in the last hour, it was decided that Mitchell would stay behind due to the massive numbers of people at the festival and the fact that she might not get back in time for her first national appearance on the Dick Cavett Show. She sat in her hotel room and watched the news coverage of the festival and wrote “Woodstock,” which she sang on her next album, “Ladies of the Canyon,” and which was covered by Crosby, Stills, Nash, and Young the same year.

Her spiritual awakening in the song is expressed by Mitchell’s piano playing as she sings of a “child of God” walking along the road on the way to Yasgur’s farm, where they are going to “camp out on the land” and “set [their] soul free.” She sings of going back to nature, to rid herself of the smog in the city, so that she can “be a cog in something turning.” The chorus is a beautiful image of the bombs of war “turning into butterflies across our nation.” In A Life Story, David Crosby said, “She contributed more to the world’s understanding of that event than anybody that was there.”

On her next album, Blue, her writing is in free-verse, showing that she is less on-guard and very thin-skinned. She wrote “My Old Man,” about her great love, Graham Nash, a love song on the surface, but once the lyrics are stripped down, her vulnerability is exposed. She sings, “We don’t need no piece of paper from the city hall / Keeping us tied and true,” suggesting that her independence that she fought for and gave up everything for is more important than a “piece of paper” declaring her unconditional love for Nash.

The song “Little Green,” is written about the daughter that she gave up for adoption before making it big as a singer-songwriter. “Little Green” is both a story and a faraway wish for her “gypsy-dancer” to “have a happy ending.” She sings of why she gave up her daughter in the third verse—“Child with a child pretending / Weary of lies you are sending home / So you sign all the papers in the family name / You’re sad and you’re sorry but you’re not ashamed.” She ends the song with a little regret, “sometimes there’ll be sorrow,” an emotion that is only expressed in her most defenseless moments.

Mitchell also sings of the places she has been and the people she has met along the way. “California” and “Carey” were written as if they were postcards home from when she was visiting Europe. A theme in both songs is a feeling of loneliness caused by being away from home, enhanced by descriptions of the sights, sounds, and people she met on her journey.

Through song and experience, Mitchell paved the way for female singer-songwriters that would emerge in the future. After viewing A Life Story and listening to her early songs, I feel she has told her tale with beauty and grace. Mitchell was not willing to give up her quest for freedom or her songs for anyone. In song, Mitchell opens up her soul and speaks only of what she knows—the truth. She continues to sing about that aching feeling of personal freedom throughout the rest of her career. Each song is a time capsule in the life of Mitchell, a personal narrative slowly turning into a snapshot of a brief vision that happened long ago, while another song from another time is like a journal entry with her deepest emotion splattered for all to feel and experience with her. She ends the song, “All I Want,” by singing, “I want to make you feel free,” a feeling she successfully accomplishes with each melody, chord, and lyric that pours out of her fingers from that place on the lonely road of her personal journey.

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