Joni Mitchell Shifts the Weather

When Joni Mitchell first appears in Martin Scorsese’s 1976 concert film The Last Waltz, she’s in silhouette offstage, adding vocals to Neil Young’s “Helpless.” Young stands in the spotlight with the Band’s Robbie Robertson and Rick Danko; grinning like fools, they look like they’re in on some off-topic joke. Mitchell, on the other hand, is serious, listening intently. Her features are obscured in shadow, the clean lines of her long neck and strong chin reinforcing the posture that always makes her seem to be bound skyward, like an egret.

Like Young, Mitchell grew up in a chilly part of Canada, and the stark dreaminess of “Helpless,” its evocation of a place where creativity grows from lonely ground, is hers, too. When Mitchell enters the song with her high, nearly wild yet perfectly modulated wail, it doesn’t blend; instead, her voice hits the others like a weather event, an intangible and irresistible current. Kept out of the spotlight, she still claims it—yet she also charts her own path, beyond anyone else’s grasp.

I often think about this moment when trying to comprehend Mitchell’s central, singular role in rock’s evolution. When she began her career in the mid-1960s as part of the folk revival, rock was a game dominated by roguish white boys competing with each other for girls, glamour, and, eventually, social significance. Leading a new cohort of more openly poetic and introspective peers—Young, James Taylor, Jackson Browne, Carole King—Mitchell turned rock into an adult pursuit, and folk into a personal one. From breakthrough ballads like “Both Sides, Now” to irreducible epics like “Coyote” and “Paprika Plains,” she showed that songs in the rock and soul era could be both deeply idiosyncratic and vastly observational. They could move through blues tunings, jazz changes, Latin and African rhythms, torch-song intimacies, and prophetic declarations.

Mitchell is a painter, and she creates in shades and planes of perception; she is a cinematic thinker perfecting every detail in her mise en scène. In the 1970s, when she defined the singer-songwriter position, plenty of people were mining their love affairs for lyrics, or trying new guitar tunings, or blending plain conversation with high-flying metaphor; they might’ve also been thinking, however casually, about how their songs might add up to something bigger than just radio jingles. But no one—except, perhaps, in nearby worlds, Nina Simone or Stevie Wonder or David Bowie—did all of these things with such depth and commitment and inventiveness.