“I thought, why is it that people are so hard on this stuff? Well, I guess it’s because it’s different,” she said.
Categories don’t apply to Joni Mitchell, and they never have.
She began writing songs in the early Sixties, after growing tired of the territorial Toronto folk scene, in which performers would stake claims on traditional tunes and forbid others to play them.
What followed in the Seventies was a staggering string of masterpieces, starting out spare — as on the epochal Blue, home to indelible songs like the buoyant “All I Want” and the somber title track — and growing increasingly involved across albums like Court and Spark, which yielded her biggest hit in the crazy-in-love anthem “Help Me.” By the time of Hejira, with roomy, formally dazzling songs like “Amelia” and “Song for Sharon,” she was firmly on her own terrain, and she would stay there through the Eighties and Nineties, as she modernized her sound without compromising her signature complexity and laser-focused eye for detail.
But her influence has only grown, with everyone from Taylor Swift to Herbie Hancock , Björk, and Phoebe Bridgers citing her as a beacon of radical honesty and fearless originality.