Bandsplain - Joni Mitchell with Jessica Hopper

Episode Date: June 24, 2021

In honor of the 50th anniversary of her masterwork, Blue, author and critic Jessica Hopper comes on the show to demystify the groundbreaking genius of the one and only Joni Mitchell. Follow Jessica Hopper on Twitter at @missjesshop. Find her books, The First Collection of Criticism By A Living Female Rock Critic, Night Moves, and the upcoming No God But Herself: How Women Changed Music in 1975 (out fall 2022). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

What's with this band anyway? I don't get it. Can you please explain? Wait, like, Bansplane. Welcome back to Bansplane, a show where I, Yossi Salik, invite music experts on to explain cult bands and their fandoms to me. Today, we are going to talk about Joni Mitchell, an artist I have heard because I have seen repeatedly the film Love Actually. But if you haven't heard Joni Mitchell, this is what she sounds like. California. Oh, make me feel good. Rock and roll band. I'm your biggest fan.

We're joined today by a very special guest, writer, critic, author, editor, Miss Jessica Hopper. Welcome to the show, Jessica. Thanks for having me, Yassie. I'm very excited to be here on Bansplain. I did like a really NPR voice there and I don't know if it was to impress you. I don't know where it came from, but it really just came out of my body. Please don't worry about it. I mean, it's also, you know, it's the end of the day. We're very calm. We're very relaxed and we're going to get even more relaxed because we're talking about Joni Mitchell. I'll be honest and I'm not proud of this, but I'm not ashamed either.

I'm not super familiar with the work of Joni Mitchell. So I am coming in pretty green here. I did spend a lot of time for whatever reason with just one album, Blue, but that's really all I have to work with. So I'm particularly excited today to learn. I think if you're going to, if you're just going to inhabit one Joni Mitchell record, blue is definitely a pretty solid way to go. Blue is her record that is probably the best known,

and a lot of people know it as, quote unquote, you know, the harshest breakup record of all time, or the most perfect breakup record of all time. But that's really the album that is she is considered her peak and also, you know, really the place that she innovates the most. So it's a great place for you to start and just hang out in it, though hanging out in it can be, as maybe you already know, fairly depressing. Still a great album. Before we get too far into the episode, can you just like for the newest of new give like a little overview of like who Joni Mitchell was, is, she's still alive.

Who Joni Mitchell is? I murdered her in my mind. I'm so sorry, Joni. Much like Ringo Star. I always murder Ringo Starr in my mind, but he is still alive. Blessedly Ringo is still with us. So, Jannie Mitchell is perhaps best known as the woman who is at the vanguard of singer-songwriter music. She's sometimes held up as a folk icon. That's a little bit of a misnomer. That's where she got started.

but she really thinks of herself, and I think correctly, as an American composer. What her sort of great innovation into popular music and American music, not just American music, Joni Mitchell's innovation as a songwriter was to marry personal lyrics into songs, which maybe sounds like you're like, well, gee whiz, you know, but back. then, right when she was first coming out, you know, she started on the sort of coffee house folk scene of the mid-60s in Detroit and Canada. And in 1967, David Crosby finds her in this coffee house in this house in Florida. I walked in. It was this girl going. Brings her to Laurel Canaan Castle. Brings her to Laurel Canton.

and, you know, introduces her to like a total who's who of California rock. And everyone's just completely wowed. Here's this really beautiful woman who writes her own lyrics and sings her own songs and makes her own very original music. We've come through another pretty face minimal talent, maximum good looks period. You have young women now coming. upwriting songs. And all of those things being like an innovation or people being like, oh my gosh, all of these things at once really shows you where a lot of music was at. All of those things were

perhaps expected of men, but, you know, all of those things made Joni Mitchell in 1967, 1968 when she's first getting to L.A. and first recording her debut album, it really makes her one of a kind. Joni Mitchell walked, so Phoebe Bridgers could sprint. I mean, in a way, so everyone that came after Johnny Mitchell, I mean, she really changed popular music very suddenly, particularly around blue. You know, you think about her and Bob Dylan are sort of the twins as far as those things go, but Bob Dylan's lyrics were not personal.

You might be able to relate to them, but not in the way that people. people were relating to Jenny Mitchell, and particularly women were relating to Jenny Mitchell at that time because she was singing songs that were very transparently personal. She wanted her audience to know who she was and who they were worshipping, but that her lyrics were really direct and candid and she wanted things. And the things that she wanted weren't like, oh, I want to get married. I want to be in love with you. I want you to love me, which basically everything else on the radio that women were singing, and those were songs written by men for those women artists, 99 times out of 100, Johnny Mitchells are like, I don't want to

get married, I don't want to go to Greece and find a new boyfriend. Maybe I'll go to Amsterdam, oh, maybe I'll go to Rome. You know, I want to go be an artist. I want to be something else. You know, and she's saying about other women and what they wanted to. This is a love song that actually was intended for a man to sing to a woman. I wrote it that way. And I decided I like to sing it anyway.

And so at the time, these things were just, you know, basically unheard of. Damn. I love this. I guess, like, what's one of Joni Mitchell's most, well-known songs that you think also speaks to what you were just saying about, like, how she was doing something with personal lyricism and particularly giving voice to, like, women's desires that were not heard at that time? Like, what's a song that really, you feel like embodies that? That's also maybe really well-known to people. So Junie Mitchell's biggest hit, ostensibly biggest

hit. Her first and only top 10 hit in America was the first single off 1974's Court and Spark. The song Help Me. And in a lot of ways that really embodies what her whole deal was. You know, she's saying, you know, help me. Think I'm falling in love again. But she's talking about being very ambivalent about commitment, about romance. She doesn't want to get married. She doesn't know what she wants, but maybe it's not this. And there's kind of a weariness about it. And it's really, you know, you understand why it's a really iconic song. It's really easy to understand and identify with.

Okay, amazing. Let's hear. Help me. You're listening to a music and talk episode. What's that? It's where full songs and talk segments can live together in gorgeous harmony, only on Spotify. Do you dream of making your own music and talk show? Well, guess what?

You too can create one for free with Anchor, Spotify's podcasting platform. Get started today at anchor.fm slash music and talk. That's anchor.fm slash music and talk. That was Help Me off 1974's Court and Spark. It was the big commercial breakthrough for Joni Mitchell. And you can hear on that song, that's her first. record where she really has like a full band and she's

kind of getting her footing as a band leader and you know she was someone who was always really in love with jazz and she says you know the only people that she looked up to were Miles Davis and Mozart and she rightly considers herself on par

with that and I think certainly she is with Miles Davis as far as being you know someone who helped create the idiom of American music for while I thought I was a country singer and I took a jazz band into the grand old Opry and they never had me back there. But what you can hear in that

is that, you know, she's pretty far from what you would think of as folk music, right? Totally. You know, there's drums, there's horns, there's like a lot of texture. And also, think about what you, you know, what you imagine on the radio in 1974. It's like pretty mellow, you know?

I mean, it's like it would kind of fit with what was happening. then, but, you know, she was a phenomenally inventive guitarist and created all of her own tunings and, you know, all of these jazz bows that were playing with her on these sessions said that she was, you know, the most over-the-top musician that they ever worked with. And when you hear that song, it's like kind of the closest she ever got to pop music. And then after that, she kind of dovetails into kind of jazz fusion. She heads there slowly for a few albums.

But before then, it's like she's coming from folk. And so this is where she's kind of meeting in that perfect middle. And so this was a huge song and a huge record for her. I want to piggyback off of something you just said about her becoming like an idiom for American music. Even though I'm not super familiar with her entire catalog and a lot of her music, I am super familiar with her persona and her look. You know, a lot of that has really endured. You know, Hym would not have that hair without Joni Mitchell.

You know, there's a lot that has been distilled down into popular culture and never left that came from Joni Mitchell. this idea of Ladies of the Canyon, you know. So I wanted to ask you like, why do you think her persona was so clearly communicated and how, why did people take to it so much? I think that's a great question. And to even kind of zoom back from that a little bit, you know, along the lines of what you're saying,

it's like, if you know about one woman from American, can music in the 70s. It's just like a picture of Joni Mitchell in your head probably. You know, that she's like the one, the one woman of the 70s. And I think part of the reason is that she was to so many people really emblematic of a time where her rise really mirrored the rise of second wave feminism in the mid-70s, the early to mid-70s. You know, in the first half of the 70s, you have, you know, this massive push for the ERA.

And you have a lot of organizing happening for everything from, you know, sex workers to farm workers to stay-at-home moms. You know, there was a big push for universal daycare under NECS. And, you know, all of these things that were happening. But also it was like, you know, fair housing laws for women and the dawn of a lot of women really pushing for being able to even. have their own credit cards and things like this. And here's Tony Mitchell. She's got this, you know, incredible voice. She's very glamorous.

She loved to wear, like, couture suits and gowns. And, like, she was just model-lescent. You know what I mean? She was really glamorous. She was associated with a lot of famous, you know, she dated some of her famous peer men. A lot more is made out of that than I think should be. in her career.

And, you know, she was really considered a peer to those men. And at the time, you have a lot of women, even on like the lowest levels of American culture and society, who are really seeking that for themselves. And because that sort of desire, that desire for something more, is there from her very first records. You know, and she was like a divorced,

woman. She was one of the first artists to ever ask for and get complete artistic control of every aspect of her albums and their release, which it was basically unheard of in 1967, and that she also at different points walked away from her career. She really disliked fame. This will give you an idea. I'm not a kid that played air guitar in the bedroom and go, oh, I'm going to be rich and famous and all of that. Right. I felt sorry for stars. All of these things in the edge, she was just really independent.

And I think because of those things that sort of, I think in a lot of people's minds, though she never aligned herself with feminism, TM, second wave feminism, capital F feminism, she never aligned herself with anything other than periodically, like the environmental movement. You know, she played some like Save the Whales kind of benefits. But other than that, she doesn't like identify with it, but there's so much about her music that is really centered in her independence, her struggles, you know, her talking about like how she thinks and feels. And these were some of the first times that you could, that for women and men and people, then that you were really hearing records where here was a woman who was singing about her life, her love. her libido, all of these things, in her own words. And there was no Spengali behind her.

It was really unfiltered. And so I think in the sort of big picture cultural memory, women in the 70s and Joni Mitchell are like one totemic thing, you know, kind of packed together. So Joni was hot. We can all agree. And you're saying, so she wasn't overtly aligned with them. But is there one of her songs that you think like really directly connects with what was going on in feminism at the time just by nature of?

I know from what you're saying they all kind of do. But like was there one that you felt was like, I don't want to say anthemic, but something that like really spoke to like the tides that were turning at that time. Yeah. So your question really leads into a great and very interesting place in her career. that allows us to talk a lot about what shaped her early career. So she wrote the song Woodstock, which was a generation-defining song. And it was obviously written about Woodstock. And it was a hit for Crosby Stilts, Nash, and Young,

before Joni had a chance to issue it. I guess that's sort of the downfall of Graham Nash being your boyfriend, you know, that they were like, we want this song. And she wrote it, despite having not gone to Woodstock, just from the sort of reports and what people told her, she wrote it the same day and then performed it on Dick Cavett on national TV the next day, whatever, because she's a genius, right? But as much as she was, you know, later on sort of in the cultural imagination,

aligned with feminism, she was always from the get-go really seen. as being kind of like an oracle of her generation of really capturing the mood of the times. And before she even had a record out of her own, there was a song of hers called Both Sides Now. Before Jenny Mitchell even had a record out, it had been recorded by Judy Collins, by Leonard Nimoy.

by Sinatra Spock. Yes. About two dozen people covered both sides now between 1967 and 1970. It was an instant classic American standard because Judy Collins had had such a big hit with it. And she was sort of like a benefactor a little bit to Joni. She was sort of the crossover between like mellow folk rock and like very smooth AM 70s, 6070s pop.

Should we hear a clip of a Judy Collins song just to sort of contextualize this for everybody? Like what Judy Collins sounded like? Give us the Judy Collins both sides new. So at the dawn of her career, she was really known as a songwriter and her songs were becoming huge hits for other people before she was having hits.

But the thing about both Woodstock and earlier before it, both sides now, is that they were understood to be really capturing a kind of malaise and hope of youth culture, of the hippies of her generation. And though both sides now really became like a standard for these people who would have been like the icons of her parents' generation, you know, Sinatra and all of these very sort of like, you know, Bing Crosby and stuff like that. With Woodstock, I think it just further anchored her as being a songwriter that was speaking the poetic truth of her generation with more clarity than pretty much anybody else. Wow. Voice of a Generation, no Lena Dunham. I would love to hear a clip of Woodstock. Should we hear the Crosby Still as a Nash version?

As someone who, like, was clearly like you're saying so fiercely independent, how did she feel about, you know, her boyfriends and other men kind of just like co-opting her songs and making them, you know, ostensibly into their own? For Joni, it was hard in some ways to have Judy Collins in particular have this men. massive hit with both sides now and that it was sort of like then that song belonged to Judy Collins. You know, she went a Grammy for it before Johnny Mitchell's first record was even out. So, you know, as time goes on, a lot of her songs start to be covered and covered and covered and covered, you know, especially her song, River off of blue is one of the most covered

songs. It's like, you know, the last I read, it was like over 250 versions have since been recorded. And that's on YouTube. Like, we blame YouTube for that. You know, 1967, Jenny Mitchell gets walked into the offices of Reprise, which at the time is really, you know, kind of the happening, cool label to be on. She's walked in by her, maybe boyfriend, maybe no longer her boyfriend, David Crosby. who thinks she's a genius. And still, if you pay attention to David Crosby's Twitter, I don't know if those folks are out there.

But if you pay attention, he still says, you know, she is like the most incredible musician, songwriter, et cetera, of all time. So he goes in there and he says, sure, I'll produce Joni Mitchell, but it's kind of a ruse between them because no one's going to let a woman produce their own record, right? but so there's this sort of like pretending that David Crosby is going to produce her record

and it's the first time she's really ever been in the studio she's like a coffee house musician up until this point and so her first record is really steeped in this this kind of coffee house folk tradition and there's some notable songs but it's really not until her third record, Ladies of the Canyon, that people kind of really start to understand or that you can even really hear on this record who and what Joni Mitchell really is as a songwriter and as a singer. And that is where you get woodstock, you get Ladies of the Canyon, which are some of the earliest songs where people really identified that independent women vibe. And that was really unusual. So that's really the record where we start to get her both, you know, the voice of a generation

Joni and then also kind of what people understand is kind of that like independent women, Joni, become much clearer on her third record. Wouldn't it be weird if all of the ladies of the Canyon had the same name. We can't move on from Ladies of the Canyon until we talk about a little ditty called Big Yellow Taxi, which I personally know from the Q-Tip and Janet Jackson song. You mean you didn't learn it at like summer camp? Everyone, this is like, this is, she had a lot of songs that were like real um like the like the songs you sing at camp oh if you go to a camp where they're singing around a campfire kind of thing so yeah my parents are immigrants so i didn't go to summer camp um but i do see what you're saying and i wish i had sang it at camp um

i do know it and the counting crows also have covered it don't it you got till it's gone It's a big song. I think it's an inescapable song. You could probably not know who Joni Mitchell is and hear some of this song and be like, oh yeah. And you know what? Let's hear a bit of that song. Don't it always seem to go that you don't know what you've got till it's gone? It's paradise. Put up a parking lot. I wish I could hear that song for the first time without the crushing familiarity and context. People liked it, right? I mean, that song was huge, and it kind of was a, it kind of gave her a little bit of a late, later career boost.

And then again, a few years later, Green Day, revived Big Yellow Taxi as a cover. And then, you know, there was also, all through the 80s, Prince would basically shout out her mass. influence on him and, you know, quotes her songs in his own songs. But yeah, Big Yellow Taxi, it's very, you know, not to say that she disowned this sort of work later, but it, but this song and the circle game and some of this like early, almost sort of simplistic, certainly simplistic in comparison to her later work, her more mature work. You know, that this is the sort of,

her songs that have remained really popular in kind of just in like the popular lexicon of songs like the American Canon. You know, like these are songs you sing at camp. These are songs that you might learn in a dorm room, you know, that kind of thing, four generations. But they're really not her best songs, like at all. Damn. But this is a real, you know, this is real like proto, the ills of,

gentrification anthem, courtesy of Joni. Well, so Ladies of the Canyon kind of put Joni on the map, at least amongst her contemporaries, but it was Blue that made her a star. Is that the case? Is that the case of you, if you will? Yes. I hear what you're doing there.

Blue is the record where Joni's just broken up from Graham. Now she wants to get married. She doesn't. And so she splits, she goes to Greece, she has some love affairs there. She sort of gallivance around and then is like, I need to go back home to California and get myself together. But it's just a very soul-bearing record. The songwriting is masterful.

And it's a record where you really hear this is obviously a lived experience for her. And so it's a record that's just really easy. to get very deep on very quickly. You know, people joke about like, oh, it's like the most emo album of all time. But the thing is, it's not, it's so full of nuance and kind of, a lot of it is about aging, and it rightly has this huge rep as being like the breakup record.

There's something about it too where it's, She talks about this more with her records that follow. But in 1970, 1971, there's people are kind of talking about like the death of the hippie dream. And there's a bit more cynicism there. And on this record, she's like, is love even possible? You know, that kind of heartbreak where she's just going, maybe this is it for me. Maybe I can't really attach with anybody. Maybe I can't really what I want with someone is like an impossible dream.

or maybe maybe I just can't stand being loved. You know, it's a lot more grown up. It's a lot more complicated than just like, you dumped me,

I want you back. My, whatever, isn't the same without you. It's really, it's a lot more complicated than that. And I think that's part of the reason that this album is so enduring. And an older professor

friend of mine who was in his early 20s when this record came out said it was such a revelation to hear because you for for a young man like him he wondered is this how women really think and it's hard to believe now that basically a really intense sort of depressed breakup record was such a landmark but the idea that a woman was singing so transparently about her own own experience. You know, Joni has often said in interviews that she felt like her skin was like the cellophane on the cigarette package, that she had no barrier between her in the world and that she was just really, she was putting all of it out there. She said, I had no defenses. And it's so

audible. But at the same time, it doesn't feel heavy. It doesn't bog down the record. There's a lot of nuance. And of course, you know, there's California, there's Carrie, which is like this great rebound song about finding like some towny boyfriend in a Grecian cave, you know, making the most of it for a summer. And then, you know, but her kind of needing to get back to herself. And so it kind of just becomes this complete cycle. And more than anything else, it is about a woman, a young woman coming to know her own self. And I think that is at that time, those records didn't really exist. And for this to be one of the first big ones down the pike is what makes it a landmark.

Oh my God, totally. It's totally exactly everything you just said. I don't even have one word to add to it except that Carrie was the original hymbo. Wow. I love that take. I love that take. I think we can all agree that Carrie was the original hymnbo. And I took away a lot from exactly what you're saying from this album that was like,

A lot of it was like, yes, sad and emo, but a lot of it is like the other side of disenchantment, which there was a lot of weird hope and freedom in which I was like, oh, this is how a woman relates to the world, you know, after you've kind of abandoned your illusions. And there's a lot of power in relating to the world from a place of like knowing yourself and knowing the world as it is. And one of the other things in the scope of this, too, is that. Part of the reason that Joni didn't want to get married was because she had her own career. And not just like, oh, I don't want to marry Graham Nash. It was, I am married to my career. I want to be able to stay up all night and do, you know, all the songwriting and the painting and the whatever I want. She was married to herself.

She was married to her career. And then the other thing that is really worth mentioning here is that because she had had all these songs that had been covered so much. You know, she basically had at least one song a record by that point that had been a massive hit for one person or 20 people. So she kept all of her own songwriting publishing because she's smart like that.

So by the time she recorded Blue, she had earned, you know, half a million dollars in songwriting royalties by, you know, in the span of two years, which is in today's money, just shy of $4 million. at a time where women might not even be able to buy a car on their own without a man co-signing it. And women couldn't have credit cards and all of these things.

And so getting beyond blue, we start to kind of see this on her next record for The Roses, is that she's like, I don't want all this stuff. I'm going to cancel a tour and run away to Canada and live in my little like hermitage cottage up in Canada. and that she just, she felt like not only did she have the power to do this stuff, she really had the resources to do this stuff as well. And so in many ways, all this freedom and all this power and all these ability to make these choices and invest in herself, as we might say, it made her really iconoclastic at a time when so many women were just trying to kind of like, you know, I'm making a pawing.

Like a plying, clon. Like, eke their way. Yeah, eke their way up. And that she was already, she was kind of like light years ahead and kind of singing about what it meant to live in this particular way. That I think a lot of, a lot of women from all different backgrounds were pushing towards at that moment, which is, you know, independence and the ability to have some determination over their own lives, choices, bodies, minds. minds. We're going to need, I think, to hear at least two songs off blue to really illustrate what we're

talking about. Should we start with like a classically breakupy sad song? Let's do Case of You and Carrie. Okay, here is Case of You off of Blue. That was Case of You off of Blue. I just want to jump in real quick to. point out that Joni Mitchell, like, predates the manic pixie dream girl as the most ideal feminine specimen. She sings and plays guitar. Everyone loves that. She paints and draws extra bonus points.

She loves drinking at the bar. Like, who can compete with that? I wish that now people held in the same esteem elite podcasting in something along those lines as an art, but they don't yet. But when they do, I will be on that level with Joni Mitchell. I'm here for it. This song, correct me if I'm wrong, is about Leonard Cohen. Supposedly. Allegedly. You know, I mean, Rolling Stone really had a go of it, amongst many other magazines at the time, of really, you know, they printed straight up, sort of speculative maps of who she had slept with, who they believed songs were about. You know, they called her the queen of L. L.A. Not L.A. L.A. At the peak. At the peak. At the peak. At the peak of her, you know, early success, which is the reason that then Jenny Mitchell

doesn't talk to the press for basically a decade for the 70s, which I think is actually like a huge loss. There's a real absence of. of information about her as an artist in part and her process and all of this stuff until later, in part because when people would talk to her, even years later, she does this huge kind of comeback interview with Cameron Crow for Rolling Stone in 1979. And she's trying to talk about hissing of summer lawns,

which is like her absolute masterwork. It's incredible record, what she does there. And he's like, so what about Bob Dylan? You ever talked Bob Dylan still? Oh, God. You know, like, whatever. What do you think about? It just, it was this constant redirection towards men.

And by that point, also she had really had enough because in the press, particularly once she had just an iota of success at the tail end of the 60s, all of what she had was forever credited to men. And her quote is, you know, my genius. my talent was always described to whatever man happened to be in the room with me at the time. And I think particularly when you listen to this record, you're just like, this is all her. All you can hear is her. A man could never, a man could never have written these songs. Sorry. Yeah.

Also, Case of You is just, like we were talking about, like there is a lot of, you know, it's not just sadness. It's like longing, you know, this like aching longing. It's so well done. And on the flip side, we should hear some of the lightness that's on this record. Should we hear Carrie? Let's hear Carrie. Based on a very true story. She spends a summer in a cave that someone had turned into an apartment where hippies like to hang out in Greece.

And yeah, paid for the good time of our friends. Just got drunk on the beach for like a few months to get over it all. Icon. This is Carrie off blue. that was Carrie off blue. One of the things at the time is that, you know, she always wanted to be very transparent about, you know, what she said is like,

I want people to know who they're essentially worshipping up here on the stage. But the other thing, too, is that she thought it was really ridiculous. And she sings about this a few different ways on a few different records about how, you know, her friends who are becoming these massive rock stars at the time are really pretending to still be like the kind of these super down and out boho hippie, like, you know, really playing down the fact that they're millionaires at that point.

And, you know, soon enough, she too would be living in Bel Air. She was very reluctant right about this point. Her life was changing so much and she was on the road a lot. And she didn't want to be singing about that. She didn't just want to be writing about this sort of like myopic, my life as a rock star, oh, or, you know, woe is me. And then on this next song that I want to play you called Blonde in the Bleacher, which is really one of my favorites.

And I think it's sort of widely assumed that it's a song about groupiedom, but it's really about in some ways the nature of transaction, transactional relationships on the road, but also in some ways I really think she is singing about herself, you know, rather than another woman. But it's, I think it's really also a song where we're starting to really see the more like sort of mature, Joni start to appear as a songwriter.

So at this point, Joni's come back to California. I'm sorry, we can cut that out. I thought that was horrible. She's come back to California. So she actually makes, you know, after her big breakup, after blue all of this, she comes back to the States. And not too long after she's really, she's kind of having a freak out. She's kind of having a meltdown.

Supposedly, you know, it's caused by her breakup with James Taylor. And she's like, I'm quitting this tour. I'm retiring from public life, et cetera, et cetera. and moves this pretty spare cabin, quote unquote, up in Canada, back where she's from. She's Canadian artist. And she makes this record for the roses. And this song is called Blonde in the Bleachers. That was Blonde in the Bleachers off for the Roses.

Isn't that song amazing? That song is amazing. I had never heard it. And it really like drove home to me. I don't know if the listeners who are maybe like experiencing Jone Mitchell for the first time, something that I thought a lot when I was listening to Blue, which is maybe why it was more inaccessible to me when I was younger. Nothing about how Joni Mitchell writes songs is expected.

Like there's no pop music structure really. It's like at any point when I think something else is going to come, it goes in a different direction, things last longer than I think they would. A new part comes in. Obviously, I have no real fluency in speaking about music. that I don't play it. No, I mean, that song, if you listen to it, is if you listen, if you're just looking for the structure,

it's sort of like an intro, three verses a bridge and an outro. Her mind. Yeah, I mean, and like the arrangement of it changes vastly by the end of the song. The way that she works, In doing that is like, you know, the unease and the way that the songs don't resolve. I mean, there's so much more of a mood there, you know, that she's not resolved with it.

It just makes, it's like it imbues so much more into the song than if it was just first chorus verse. What's the kids would say? It's a whole mood. Truly. I learned five chords on the guitar, and that's how I speak about music now, because I'm now an expert on songwriting. That's probably enough to play, like, most of Neil Young's discography. My God, sick burn. He's the other, as I like to say, he's the other greatest living American Canadian songwriter.

Interestingly, none of my ex-boyfriends have tried to explain Joni Mitchell to me, but maybe every single one has tried to explain Neil Young. So, oh, yeah. Do with that info what you may. So Four of the Roses comes out in 1972. You know, it's notable for being a little bit more rock leaning, but also it is more of this. It gives us a better picture of some Joni coming into her own with some more authority in a way around her ideas

and just getting further and further away from folk music, you know, where she originated, and she's just moving, we don't quite know it yet, but Joni is going towards jazz. So, Cort and Spark, 1974, she's playing with L.A. Express, which at the time are a bunch of L.A. session musicians and jazz bows and members of the Crusaders and folks that have really, been around. And it is the first time that Joni has a band, but that also that she is playing with people who can keep up with her, who are truly on her level. And with Cort and Spark,

she's really transporting us kind of into like famous Joni world. You know, she's going around the world. She's going to parties. She's been very wistful and literate and kind of rye. But she's also kind of poking and and puncturing this world that she is in. And in a lot of ways, this is really one of the first sort of jazz rock fusion records that enters the pop world, predating Steely Dan by several years. And this is the record that gives us, Help Me, gives us Cor in the Hill, which is supposedly about waiting for Jackson Brown to come home, that cad. But it's definitely a lot more mature, but this is also the point where

Joni crosses over truly from being kind of like a celebrated icon or, you know, somebody who's really changing music from within. You know, she's really influential to her peers in a very immediate way. And with Cort and Spark, she, this is essentially her introduction. into the mainstream. I think the thing that indicates probably best where she's going to go thematically in a way, I would say,

is I think the song off of Court and Spark that best indicates where she's going to go. Title Track, Cort and Spark, is pretty, like a wild little ride, but also pretty accessible. Help me, obviously, very accessible. But people's parties and the sort of ryeness of it and kind of setting a scene

and the kind of world building, if you will, of that, and how she brings us into it and how she sort of punctures and picks at the world around her and that she's just such a great observer. It's Joni, the Margaret Mead of

you know, Mulholland Drive, perhaps on this one. I don't know how Margaret Mead is. Okay. Margaret Meade. I'm so sorry. She's a cultural anthropologist.

So what we're saying here is that Joni was being a cultural anthropologist of her world around her. I think this is the record where Joni gets interested and how power is organized around her and the sort of hierarchies of the world that she is in. and starts to really call bullshit on them. I think that's what's starting to happen, and I think you see it best in people's parties. I know this is maybe not your style of music, but if you love the counting crows as much as you do,

and you love the stude observations of one Paul Westerberg. I sure do. There's definitely like less sort of entendre and pun. happening in Joni World. But listen, I was too young and dumb for most of my adult life to understand Johnny Mitchell's music. And that's on me. That's my bad.

But I'm here now. I mean, the thing about people's parties is like, it's like a classic New Yorker short story that you would be assigned in school to read as like, this is masterful. This couldn't be more of an NPRS podcast if we tried between Margaret Mead and the New Yorker short story. we're really like hitting every bingo on the bingo card. But I hear it and I'm here for it. And let's not lie to ourselves. I'm this person now.

And so I should take my final form and be putting on the Joni Mitchell albums while I cook my vegetarian soups. You know, I mean, I think the broad appeal of this song can be found in, have you ever been to a party where you've started crying? Babe. Whomst amongst us? Babe, that's a whole separate separate shahms for us to break down all those instances.

Okay, yeah, now I really want to hear it. This is why this song is going to, is like, is going to, I promise, I promise the song is going to be a mind blower for you. Okay, this is people's parties. That was people's parties off of court and spark. That's a really incredible song. Did it blow your mind? It really did.

This song is incredible. It really, as producer Dylan has pointed out three separate times in the chat, it is relatable content. The only part I think me personally I didn't relate to is I wish I had more of a sense of humor to get through it because it's literally what has life-rafted me through all of my years. And you know what, Joni, I get it. You're too pretty. To have become funny as a defense mechanism. And so I forgive it. Oh, that's a pretty devastating read.

I mean. Accurate. Accurate. That's, we call it like it is here on Bandsplain. We're all just having a good time, as Dylan points out. And she also pointed out that Joni Mitchell is the kind of person that makes fun of a beautiful person for being beautiful, which seems hypocritical. Amazing. I mean, also the thing I want to, that will make sense, too, is, you know,

know the ending of that song where there starts to be all these different harmonic elements and like, you know, sort of the way it starts to sort of counter her voice and, and layer all these different elements to kind of just create this other discreet song at the end of the song. That is probably the closest you get to kind of hearing where we're going to be on hissing of summer lawns the next. year. The quickest way I can set up hissing of summer lawns is that, you know, all the sudden, 1974, this record is huge for Joni. There's Grammy nominations. There's just the world is at her feet, essentially. If they weren't already, now they definitely are,

and people are starting to go like, oh, yeah, no, she's definitely a genius. And still, as all this is starting to happen, Rolling Stone does a big, interview with the guy from LA Express, who was essentially the band leader, and gives him credit, basically lays all the credit for this at his feet. And there was definitely, because people didn't think, well, how could Joni get to jazz on her own? Which just says they weren't paying attention all along. And she starts to kind of get to a place where it's real like, um, damned if I do. and she decides that she really wants to make a record that doesn't leave a doubt in anyone's mind

about who's behind it, but also what a genius. Like she's tired of hemming herself in. She's really just like, I'm just going for it because they're going to credit it to somebody else. They're going to hate it. They're going to love it. They're whatever.

I just feel like I need to ask before we go further into hissing summer lawns. How did Joni get to jazz? Do we know, is there, I know you mentioned she, you know, stopped doing a lot of press and didn't talk a lot about her process, and there's credit being thrown around at various men that just happened to be in the room. But like, do we know as an artist how Joni did find her way to jazz?

Some of Joni's first records were jazz records. And they're more like, you know, what is it, Hendrix Lambert and Ross. To keep a party hearty be a spotty, let your feet get to thumpin. Annie Ross, who just died in the last year, and a lot of vocal jazz. And then later on in the year or two before she makes hissing of summer lawns, she starts going to jazz clubs a lot with her boyfriend at the time who also becomes her drummer. But, you know, what she says she was always trying to do with her voice was just imitate how Miles Davis, plays, which once you're like, oh, yes, well, there we go. That actually makes absolute sense.

But also, she was just not, she really around for the roses, she starts talking about, she's just like, you know, as she's starting to play with drummers and stuff, she's like, feels really hemmed in by, you know, basically four, four time. She's like, this is, you can't do very much here. and then also something that I think starts to develop a little bit more, maybe a little after this big blast of success around Cort and Spark is that she says she looks up around the room by the time she's about like 35 and says, I realized I was the oldest woman in any room I was in. You know, she was already breathing, really rarefied air.

And, you know, all of her friends were the absolute. you know, leading lights, level rock stars, marquee name rock stars. And she's kind of the only woman in the room. And then she's also the oldest women in the room. And that kind of tips are off to something. And she says she felt like she was sort of looking around for a space in music where she would be allowed to age

and that women were allowed to be their full genius they could bring their full genius and the full weight of their artistic selves to bear. And she said she really felt like she could see that happening in jazz. And so that just made her that much more inclined. She knew she was just starting to get to like the height of actualization, the height of her powers, the height of her abilities as a composer, as a singer, as a guitarist, as an arranger, as a producer. I mean, she produced all of her own records past the first one.

And so she was just so in a class of her own, and she just wanted to keep pushing. And it's like, you know, the dudes and the Eagles are like, so you're going to make Cort and Spark part two? Now you found out what America wants from you. Are you going to keep giving it to him? And she basically said, fuck all that. I just want to be the most that I can be and actualize.

And people really accuse her. of basically being like her success went to her head, and she thought she could do anything. And she made this weird avant-garde pop jazz record. People were afraid of jazz, I think, as people are afraid of things they don't understand. In the rock community, I know my peer group was afraid of my playing with jazz musicians. They took it as a kind of a personal betrayal.

They used to ridicule me for it. And some of them felt that I had pretensions to something that I wasn't. But if you're going to let people rule your own, life, you'll never come to your full development. I like how they say that, like it's a bad thing. Like, oh, she thought she could do anything. How dare she? Good fucking for her.

And also right around this time, you really start to see a lot of writing about like Joni's ego, that she has an ego. Because before that, she was so sort of pristine, angelic woman. And there was always a, you know, really big marquee named man at her side kind of thing. And so I think it sort of tempered that. But now it was, oh, Johnny thinks she can do. Joni thinks she's the genius that we all said she was last record. I think the song of The Hissing of Summer Lons, her 1975 record,

that best shows us how far she goes on this record, how far out from the, you know, Fokie Legacy, Joni Mitchell, T.M. and her going, watch what I can do, is probably the jungle line. That was the jungle line off of the hissing of summer lawns, Joni Mitchell's 1975 masterwork. So that was a radio hit. No. Is what you're saying.

No. No. Okay, first can we just go, doesn't that song sound like it could be from right now? No, yeah, for sure, that song is on. sacred bones for sure. That's a sacred bones release. Yeah. I mean, it's, it's, you know, but it's 1975. It's Joni Mitchell sampling a tape of drummers from Barundi. It is her playing the ARP. It's her playing the Moog. It is her with this whole, just totally different setup.

And also really notably, you listen that song, and it's she, she, she, she, she. She decided if Dylan can do all these songs where he's singing, you know, kind of narrating these scenes. And up to this point, by this point she had made six records where she had sang in the first person the entire time. And that's what people wanted. People wanted, you know, Joni to really just lay herself out and be like, oh, you know, read us your diary, Joni. And here it sees really astute social observations of really, you know, and sometimes dense, poetic. And this record shipped gold off the basis of the previous one being, you know, one of the biggest records of the previous year. And people are like, excuse me, what is this?

Okay. You know, and it did have, you know, it had some positive reviews, but people did not know. know what to make of it. And this is a record where she's really keenly observing women's fleeting power that resides mostly in their beauty, their youth, their ability to help men to make their homes. And it is incisive. And at the time, people criticized her for basically making fun of people, you know, making fun of women, making fun of people with normal lives. And add to that the fact that, you know, she, on the gatefold of the record, when you open it up, she's in a bikini in her ballet or pool, you know?

And people were like, oh, looking down on the little people. But really what she's doing through the whole record is seeing the ways that women survive these confines of power and what happens to them if they can't break out of them. You know, it's sort of about women withering. It's very anti-marriage. But it makes very clear that she is like outside of this, that she's sort of observing it from above, from outside of it. that this she makes it really clear this fate does not befall her and it's and it just sounds

unlike any other record that she ever made I can only imagine what people thought considering that the like number one song of 1975 was love will keep us together by the captain and to kneel like that was the vibe of 1975 you know and then you have this

So I can see people Just having some questions Some question marks Maybe a couple of no thank yous From her fan base And also the other thing too Is that it's like you know think about it That just two

Three records before this You know go back to blue Which is like you know Four-ish years before There she is with her dulcimer Kind of having this giggly tone You know And barely any back

tracking track to what she's doing to, you know, the last track on hissing of summer lawns, her engineer told me she spent six weeks adding additional tracks of her voice. And so there's basically 200 of her individual vocal tracks, you know, in this giant swell at the end of the record. And her voice has changed. You know, she was famously like a very, very heavy chain smoker. And so her voice is getting kind of more gravely and mature. And you can, you can just hear, you know, her voice isn't this sort of like chirpy up in the rafters, this little bit of glee that's very sort of, you know, there's kind of this like, I always sort of think of it almost as like a little bit of a feminist, like kind of pre-dispopia, you know,

that there's something kind of foreboding and grim about the whole thing and that it's just a very rich record. She's really going for it. What it is ultimately is just her unapologetically, at the height of her power, just fully going for it. Every song, every way. Okay. Not to kill the vibe, but it's clear Joni, you know, really venerated jazz and in general, you know, maybe other African-American music genres.

Was there any time where she may be ventured into problematic territory, maybe that she shares with fellow Canadian Justin Trudeau, for example? Yeah, so if we actually, we jump through a little bit. You know, so she starts to definitely kind of pivot towards jazz and just further into an independent path that is outside what anybody else is doing at that time. And I think in many ways, all the privilege and celebration of her work, which was still happening. It's not like this record was a failure, but the trajectory of her career didn't go up. It kind of went a little sideways and went on to another track. And maybe in like 76, 77, you know, she's made another record,

Hajaira with more famed jazz players, including Jacob Astorius. And then she makes, basically like it's about a double album called Don Juan's Reckless Daughter in 1977. where she appears in blackface, drag on the cover, and then in caricature or costume of an indigenous native person on the back. And at the time, a lot of people didn't realize that was her. When people have asked, I mean, some people did and were like, this is really, you know, questionable. but she had at parties around that time gone in this, what she calls this character.

You know, she has darkened her skin with makeup and has a white suit. It's perhaps her idea of kind of a like a pimp or kind of like a, you know, a, I think she says at the time, like, you know, like a street cat or something like this. you know, that's very 70s, grimm language, and that she sort of based this whole character. I'm doing air quotes, on a guy that had like kind of,

you know, maybe cat called her on the street or something. And so she gets this whole outfit and this whole kind of persona or whatever and goes to the party of some friends of hers. And at least once, and she's photographed in this outfit and attempts to pass as someone else.

And like she doesn't say anything or whatever, you know, that people don't recognize her. And she considers this still like, you know, to this day when she has been interviewed about it, I think the last time anyone asked her about it was probably about 10 years ago. She gives very few interviews. She really says it's like a,

she takes it as a credit and says that she has, she's often thought that she has the soul of a black man. I mean, it is problematic in every regard. And you get a little bit of an inkling of that off of, there's also a song on the album before, Hajira. There's a song on that album called Furry Sings the Blues, which there was at the time some controversy,

you know, a few people noticed. So, 1976, the year before, for Hajara comes out. And this is, this is discernibly the beginning of there being some problematic parts of her work in terms of race. When the album comes out,

you know, the veteran country bluesman, Frey Lewis, he complains to Rolling Stone. Rolling Stone runs this big piece that race says, you know, she used my name without permission. She went and visited him. and he was, you know, elderly, pretty down on his luck, as they say. But in the song, she, you know, he thought she was sort of making this pilgrimage to see him.

You know, it seems like she was. But then in the song she characterizes him as like, you know, really downtrodden and infirm. And, you know, she really portrays him with this air of pity. And there's this line that he's propped up in his bed with his dentures. and his leg removed. And it really makes him seem pathetic. And she never apologized. And there was like this really kind of like bad statement.

Like it could be anybody. But it was very obviously him right at a time that he had sort of become newly like the stones. And it's sort of been rediscovered in the last year or two. And so there was just all these identifying details in there about him. And it was like she was trying on his life, but also just using his life for song fodder in a way that was really, you know, as we say through this, like, you know, the lens of her whiteness and her privilege and at this real remove without any real respect or understanding for Furry Lewis's life.

And then, yeah, the following year, she's in Blackface on her record cover. And later when she's asked about it, she's like, I'm Joni Mitchell. I can do anything I want. Black people love me. I have a pass to do this. It was homage. And really, she has a sense that one, it becomes clear from these things that her ideas about black identity are really, they are small, they're meager, they're not well informed. And, you know, she says, well, you know, I've worked with black musicians my whole life, or I've had black boyfriends or, or, you know,

I've worked with Herbie Hancock and Wayne Shorter for so much of my career. Obviously, I'm not a racist or they wouldn't be around me or vice versa. If I was a racist, I wouldn't be working with them. And then the record after that, she collaborates with Charles Mingus on a record that is then released after his death. But that she says that he, that Charles Mingus wanted to work with her because he thought the black face that she did was so bold. And no one corroborates that. But that's what she says, that he said that he was like, who's this person who's just whatever.

And so it's like she takes all of it as a compliment as a sort of validation that her artistry and proximity to blackness gives her a pass and that she feels like she can just sort of remove her whiteness because she said so and because of this validation from black artists and black peers. I think it is for me the most complicated part of Joni Mitchell fandom. And part of the reason that I really, a lot of my interest in her work ends with the hissing of summer lawns. Because as I get further into it, it's musically, you know, where she goes after hissing of summer lawns, I think is hard to resolve as a conscientious listener.

I also, that's not the stuff that I love most about her work. but also, you know, the way that she conceives of and projects her ideas about blackness on those two records, Hajaira and on Don Juan's reckless daughter, it's really hard to just be like, all right, yeah, I can just scoot right past that because I can't. Those are really dispiriting and complicating aspects of her work for me as a fan. It sounds almost like the like allegations against her earlier of saying, oh, no, she's out of touch now. She looks down on the common people were not true. However, they are true of this version of Joni,

who was wildly out of touch with race. And honestly, it sounds a little bit like reality. Let's listen to something off Higero. What song would you like to hear from that album? Let's do Amelia. Okay. This is Amelia. That was Amelia of Pajara.

Jessica, that sounds to me and my feeble mind, more like her older stuff and less like the noise album that preceded this one. Why do you think she returned a little bit to form here? That's a really, as you see, as you say, said for someone so feeble. That's a very astute observation. You know, in there she's talking about, you know, that she's laying her head down. She's pulling the cactus tree a motel and, you know, just sort of, it's sort of framed as a travelogue, but cactus tree is her first single and is a lot about, you know, the refrain in it is about a woman wanting to be free and, you know, that in a lot of ways it's like the men around her

are able to be very free and she's sort of, you know, seeing about wanting to please them and that she is maybe envious of their freedom and certainly being in relationship with men and having heartbreak and stuff like. That was definitely something that was more

the realm of blue and for the roses and, you know, those first four records. But then musically, Hegira, I think lyrically and tonally in a lot of ways, it really does recall her first four or five records, basically up to For the Roses. But musically, Hezira has, you know, more to do with hissing of summer lawns, and it really takes some of those elements. And, you know, I don't know if you can kind of hear deep in there. There's Victor Feldman's vibraphone. And he shows up all over all the Steely Dan records.

He's like the, you know, the sort of second percussionist and Steely Dan. Shout out Alex Papadamus, who wished he was here. Yes. You know, that's relevant sort of around, that's relevant in that, you know, she would talk about, you know, particularly at the end of the 70s about how she had just been pilloried. She had been abused. She had been, you know, by the press in particular about doing kind of working within the realm of jazz fusion or trying to innovate in that space.

And Steely Dan got all the acclaim making records with basically the same people from her band. What I hear on Amelia is a lot of the song Off Hijara that we just listened to. What I hear there is a lot of her even talking about. about the real disenfranchisement from, you know, as she called it, the star making machinery. And then she takes this long road trip. And that's what Hajair is about. She drives from, I believe, Maine back to California and has some friends along the way with her. She has, like, an affair with some guy who's, like, a flight attendant, and one of the songs is about him.

Hell, you know. famously, Coyote is about she has an affair with Sam Shepard who's on the Rolling Thunder Tour. Also a famous hymbo. Yeah. I mean, but this thing hymbo would imply that very talented.

Yeah, that he didn't have a brain about him. I mean, isn't that the whole thing about a hymnbo that it looks only? You know, I think we reclaimed the word hymbo for men. And now they can be smart and just simply hymnish. It's a quality. It's an air.

but also wouldn't I mean like who wouldn't want to have an affair with 1975 Sam Shepard he was so hot like impeccably hot you know so all of these all of these

all of these things you know it's it's she's Jenny Mitchell's going through a breakup with John Garen who was in her band and she's just had this this fling with Sam Shepard who like maybe around that time

was also just getting out of a relationship with Patty Smith. And also was married. But, you know, I'm not here to shame anybody. It was a different time. It was a different time. It was a 70s. And to me, this record really seems like it thematically really harkens back to, you know, what we hear on Blue, where she's, you know, singing on Carrie about this, you know, a fling that's sort of, you know, she's sort of subsisting on it very briefly.

and she knows it's not real. And she's lamenting this other heartbreak that maybe is real, you know, a longer relationship. But she's talking about, you know, that she has dirt under her fingernails and beached her on her feet and like all this stuff where she's just sort of singing about really like being out in the world and being free and finding herself and knowing herself. And to me that's a lot of what Hajair is about too. and a lot of the sound on it is really influenced and meant to mimic the sound of her road trip

in this convertible where she's... Actually, I don't know if it's a convertible, I'm pretty sure it's comfortable, but that, you know, these sort of, you can hear it in the guitars as kind of like long, open stretches that just sort of rings out and there's a lot of space and expanse. and there's kind of a rumbling.

Jacopostoria plays bass on this record, but not on this track, and it's pretty unmissable if you know what Jacob Astoria sounds like, which is kind of the thing that initially made me not super be down with this record. I just couldn't deal with like the bass is very fardly. It's extra jazz bow, and I'm here for like the Joni Nugget, you know. It's like her legacy is so,

it's so writ large within music and we just it's like it's so taken for granted that you kind of have to go back to like what is the big innovation of Joni it's like you know you have Dylan Dylan really changes things but what Joni does is really make songs personal there's a real interiority to them It's a woman singing her own thoughts and feelings and composing the music that goes with it and doing it so ambitiously, so beautifully. There's no part, there's like no weak link in the work of Joni. So if you think about that, it's like she came along at this time

where it was like a lot of the other popular music at that time was like the fifth dimension. You know, the carpenters had had just a magnificent string of hits. We've only just begun. You know, she was a peer of Linda Ronstat, and Linda Ronstadt was leading her band, and she chose all of her own music. No, but she wasn't really a songwriter. And so Joni really opens up this huge world of possibility.

for people who want to write their own songs, for people who want to get out of like, you know, her songs are in different tunings. And as you can especially hear, like by the time she gets to Hajaira, like they're really strange and they don't resolve. And there's not like first, chorus, verse, bridge outro. Right.

And so all of these things. And she brought them into popular music. She brought them into, mainstream, you know, mainstream viability. To me, it's really kind of like, you know, there's before Joni and there's after Joni. And they are, they are different. They are really different worlds.

Yeah. I don't think it's possible to overstate her importance to music, period. Speaking of that, I guess what time it is. It's time to hear from fans who love Joni Mitchell. Ah, I can't wait. Her music is so beautiful. She has the voice of a literal angel. Most underrated songwriter and musician of the late 20th century.

Shrewitt Woodstock, the song that defined the 1960s, but no one gives her enough credit. Taking these unconnected, perhaps kind of mundane sites or human interactions and weaving them together into something with a composite meaning. She sang. about celebrity long before it was sort of this shorthand for intimacy. When people lump her in with Bob Dylan, Leonard Cohen, obviously big fan of those two, I try to be very clear. Dylan and Leonard Cohen wrote lyrics, then set them to music. Joni Mitchell wrote lyrics and music together. That's part of why her sound is so unique, along with the fact that she had to create her own chords and guitar tuning because she could only make certain formations with her hands because she'd had polio as a

child. Even that is revelatory and powerful. She turned this physical disability into an asset. She combines the intense physicality of music with the intense physicality of poetic language. She's kind of like bittersweet in all of her songs in a way that I find to be really human. One lyric that I come back to quite often is laughing and crying, you know it's the same release. I tend to laugh in like sad situations. And hearing Joni sing that kind of gave me a little bit of freedom to be myself. There's something special about the fan relationship that gay men have with certain women musicians. And, you know, Joni Mitchell is so much more of my mom's generation than of my own.

But there's something in her feminist, fokey, self mythology, that, you know, that, you know, that is a mirror for me too. I think her music is so much more beautiful and profound than other musicians of her era. Her sheer musicianship is unparalleled. Joni Mitchell never lies, as Q-Tip said on Got Till It's Gone by Janet Jackson, which samples Big Yellow Taxi. Joni Mitchell never lies. Wow, that and no shade to all the other groups of fan voices from all the other episodes,

but this was head and shoulders, the smart. artist, a group of fan voices I've heard to date. I agreed with everything Tavi said, and I recognized Tavi's voice immediately. Well, sadly, Jessica, we've reached the end of the Joni Mitchell Road. Jessica, thank you so much for being here, for being truly the smartest person. I have the pleasure of knowing for educating me on Joni Mitchell. This was a delight. Thank you, Yassi.

I have one parting question for you. Sure. Do you like Joni Mitchell now? Did this ploy work? I do. I think I probably fall in the camp of people who are like, I really appreciate Joni Mitchell, but I, besides my tried and true blue album,

I'm not sure I'll put it on too much. But you have to remember that I'm the person who's number one most played song of the decade of 2010 to 2020 was Carly Ray Jepsen, call me maybe. So I'm certainly not anyone to hold a benchmark of what good taste is. But yeah, I do. I think she's punk. Yeah, Joni Mitchell, she's no sublime.

She's no 3-Eleven, babe, but I'll give her a try. She's no Disturb. Okay, Disturbed is not one of my bands, so I would love to clear that up for anyone listening. I just went really, I just went really all the way to the bottom of that. I hear you. All those bands are the same. I hear you. She's, oh, how about this?

She's no puddle of mud? Jessica, this is just a horrible slander. I'm just fucking. It's a horrible slander. I don't like puddle of mud. No, she's punk, though. And as you know, I love everything punk and also every single band that had a jangly guitar in the 90s. Whatever you are, did you play Horde Fest?

I'm a fan. I've listened to your album. Delamitri? That's right. I listen often. Well, let's leave it. What song do you want to leave the listeners with, if not Puddle of Mud? What song would you like to leave everyone with a last Joni song for their journey?

I'd like to leave the people with Sweetbird. I think it's like a blissful goodbye. Okay. Here's Sweetbird. Come back every Thursday for a new episode of Bansplaine. If you liked what you heard today, subscribe to more episodes of Bansplaine. only on Spotify. Big thank you to our brilliant Joni Mitchell expert, Jessica Hopper.

Follow her on Twitter at Jess Hop, two-piece. Big shout out also to our Joni Mitchell mega fans, Sam Bavarnick, Rachel Dresbeck, Zach Osma, Tavi Gavinson, and Nalina Mason Campbell. Bansplain is a Spotify original series produced in partnership with Spoke Media. This episode was produced and edited by Cody Hoffmackle with help from Shreda Lin Solis and Dylan Rupert. Mixing and sound designed by Will Short.

Our executive producers for spoke media are Alia Tavicoleian, Keith Reynolds, and Janiel Kastner. Our executive producers for Spotify are Gina Delvac and me, Yossi-Salek. Our catchy and gorgeous theme song was composed by Bethany Costantino and Jennifer Claven and graciously recorded by Carlos Delagarza in Los Angeles. Special thanks to Felipe Guillermo, Leah Edwards, David McDonough, Dana Meyerson, and as always, the framed drawing of Dave Matthews I got on Deep Pop, whose spirit does continue to guide this entire show. Come back next week for a new episode of Banslane.