The story of Joni Mitchell

A prairie childhood

Joni Mitchell was born Roberta Joan Anderson on the seventh of November 1943, in Fort Macleod, Alberta. Her father, William Anderson, was a Royal Canadian Air Force flight lieutenant who trained new pilots, and her mother, Myrtle, was a teacher. After the war her father went into the grocery business, and the family moved between small Saskatchewan towns like Maidstone and North Battleford before settling in Saskatoon when she was eleven. She still calls Saskatoon her hometown. She was an only child, and her first love was not music but painting. She struggled at school, but one unconventional teacher, Arthur Kratzmann, pushed her to write poetry, and she never forgot him.[1] [2] [3]

At nine she caught polio. She was sent to a hospital ward about a hundred miles from home, and as Christmas approached her mother visited once, wearing a mask. Joni later told NPR that a young doctor, himself in a wheelchair from polio, made it clear he did not expect her to walk again. She refused to accept it. She kept working her legs until the staff let her try, pulled herself along a pair of chrome bars and back, and then asked to go home. Decades later she still kept two papier mache ornaments from the little tree in that hospital room. By her own account, that was also the year she started smoking.[1] [2]

Her mother thought the guitar belonged to hillbilly country music, so Joni started on a ukulele, and later taught herself guitar from a Pete Seeger songbook. Polio had weakened her left hand, and she worked around it with unusual tunings, a habit that would become the heart of her sound. She sang with friends around bonfires at Waskesiu Lake. The record that hooked her on jazz was The Hottest New Group in Jazz by Lambert, Hendricks and Ross. She called it her Beatles and learned every note. Her first paid performance came on the thirty first of October 1962, at a Saskatoon coffee house that booked folk and jazz acts.[1] [2]

Toronto, Detroit and a lost daughter

In 1963 she left for the Alberta College of Art in Calgary, but she felt the school prized technique over free creativity. She earned fifteen dollars a week singing long sad songs at a coffee house called The Depression. Near the end of her first year, at twenty, she became pregnant by a fellow student, Brad MacMath. In 1964 she told her mother she would be a folk singer in Toronto and took the train east, writing her first song, Day After Day, on the three day ride. In Toronto she could not afford the two hundred dollar musicians union fee, so she busked, played church basements and worked in a department store.[1] [2]

The father left before the baby came. She later wrote that she was abandoned three months pregnant in an attic room, with winter coming and no money. In February 1965 she gave birth in a Toronto hospital as a charity patient, and named her daughter Kelly Dale Anderson. The stigma of being an unwed mother was so heavy, she said later, that it was as if you had murdered somebody, and she hid it from her parents. She remembered the hospital binding the breasts of unwed mothers to stop their milk. Complications kept her there ten extra days, long enough to hold the baby. She had no job, no money and nowhere to live.[1] [2]

A few weeks after the birth she was playing again in Yorkville, now singing songs of her own. At the Penny Farthing club she met an American folk singer, Chuck Mitchell, who promised steady work in the United States. They married in June 1965 in Michigan, and she took his surname, sewing her own wedding dress. She later called it a marriage of convenience at best, entered partly in the hope of giving her baby a home. It did not work. Pressed by the adoption agency, she signed her daughter away in the second month of the marriage. She later said she had blocked the court hearing from her memory entirely.[1] [2] [3]

The couple settled in the Verona apartments in Detroit's Cass Corridor and played the local coffee houses, including the Chess Mate and the Raven Gallery. There a fellow folk singer, Eric Andersen, showed her open G tuning. She said it opened a whole new world, and that she wrote only two songs in standard tuning in her entire life. Over her career she would use around fifty tunings, which she called Joni's weird chords. She also sang several times on the CBC television show Let's Sing Out. By early 1967 the marriage was over, and she moved to New York on her own to work the East Coast folk circuit.[1] [2]

Other singers' hits and Laurel Canyon

Other singers found her songs before the public found her. Tom Rush recorded Urge for Going, and country singer George Hamilton the Fourth had a hit with it. She wrote The Circle Game in 1966 as a hopeful answer to Sugar Mountain, a song about lost youth by her friend Neil Young. Then Judy Collins took Both Sides, Now to number eight in America in late 1968 and won a Grammy with it, although Mitchell did not like that version. She had written the song after reading Saul Bellow's Henderson the Rain King on a plane, putting the book down to look at the clouds herself. It became her most covered song, recorded more than twelve hundred times.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5]

In 1967, playing a club called the Gaslight South in Coconut Grove, Florida, she was spotted by David Crosby, who was struck by her talent and brought her to Los Angeles. Manager Elliot Roberts, urged on by Buffy Sainte-Marie, signed her, and his friend David Geffen soon joined him at her side. Reprise signed her, and Crosby persuaded the label to let her record alone, without folk rock overdubs. Song to a Seagull came out in March 1968. In 1967 Judy Collins had also brought her to the Newport Folk Festival, where she met Leonard Cohen. Her second album, Clouds, won her first Grammy, for Best Folk Performance, in March 1970.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5] [6]

By then she lived in a small house on Lookout Mountain Avenue in Laurel Canyon, the leafy neighbourhood that became home to many of the rock musicians of Los Angeles. Graham Nash of the Hollies moved in with her, and they were together for about two years. One morning they bought a cheap vase at an antiques shop on Ventura Boulevard, and Nash went home and wrote Our House on her piano in about an hour. Crosby, Stills and Nash are said to have first sung together in her living room. When she recorded The Circle Game, the trio sang backing vocals under the joke name the Lookout Mountain United Downstairs Choir.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5]

In August 1969 she was meant to go to Woodstock, but a manager decided a spot on The Dick Cavett Show would do her more good. So she stayed in a New York hotel room watching the television reports, and wrote Woodstock from what she saw and what Nash told her. Crosby later said she captured the feeling better than anyone who had been there. Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young made it a rock hit. Her own version appeared on Ladies of the Canyon in April 1970, her first gold album, which also carried Big Yellow Taxi. She wrote it in Hawaii, after opening her hotel curtains to green mountains and a vast parking lot below.[1] [2] [3]

That August she played the Isle of Wight Festival in England, where some six hundred thousand people had poured onto the island. The crowd was restless and angry. After she sang Woodstock, a hippie known as Yogi Joe climbed up to make a speech, and when her manager hauled him off, the audience began to boo. Mitchell stopped and scolded them, making an emotional plea for the performers to be given some respect. The crowd settled, she closed with Both Sides, Now, and came back for an encore. Kris Kristofferson, booed that same weekend, remembered that they booed Joni Mitchell too. A film of her set was finally released in 2018.[1] [2] [3]

Blue

When her relationship with Nash ended, Mitchell stepped off the road. She decided to stop touring for a year to write, paint and travel, and she went to Europe, spending time in Greece among a community of travellers living in caves. She carried an Appalachian dulcimer, bought at the 1969 Big Sur Folk Festival from its maker, Joellen Lapidus, for two hundred dollars, and most of her next album was written on it. In Greece she met Carey Raditz, a flamboyant man with a red beard and a white turban, and the song Carey grew out of that time. She later said her feet were covered in beach tar and she was still heartbroken over Nash.[1] [2] [3]

Back in California she fell for James Taylor. In October 1970 they played together at a benefit concert in Vancouver that raised money for the protest voyage that launched Greenpeace. Taylor was fighting depression and heroin addiction, and her biographer David Yaffe wrote that she came out of the relationship with some of her darkest songs yet. She sang backing vocals on Taylor's number one hit You've Got a Friend, and he played guitar on three of her new songs. Down the hall at A&M Studios, Carole King was making Tapestry. Mitchell worked in Studio C, which had a coveted red Steinway piano, and the two women competed to book it.[1] [2]

Blue was made almost in seclusion. Mitchell said they had to lock the doors to make it, because she felt she had no defences at all, like the cellophane wrapper on a pack of cigarettes. Engineer Henry Lewy kept things spare: dulcimer, guitar and piano, a little percussion from Russ Kunkel, and Stephen Stills on bass and guitar for Carey. She had already delivered a track list when she urged Reprise to stop the pressing, dropping two songs and adding All I Want and The Last Time I Saw Richard as the opener and closer. Little Green, written in 1966 about the daughter she gave up, went on the album with its meaning hidden.[1] [2] [3]

Blue came out on the twenty second of June 1971. It reached number fifteen in America and number three in Britain. Some friends were startled by how exposed it was. Kris Kristofferson reportedly told her to save something of herself, and Sandy Denny said she would never want her own business known like that. Mitchell came to hate the word confessional, saying critics looked at the artist instead of the art. Time has been kind. Rolling Stone ranked Blue the third greatest album ever made in 2020, NPR put it first among albums by women, and David Crosby called it the best singer songwriter record ever made. Taylor Swift calls it her favourite album.[1] [2]

Court and Spark and the Asylum years

She followed David Geffen to his new label, Asylum, and in November 1972 released For the Roses. Its songs took aim at the music business, and one, Cold Blue Steel and Sweet Fire, was a menacing portrait of James Taylor's heroin addiction. When the label asked for something radio friendly, she wrote You Turn Me On, I'm a Radio, half as a joke. It became her first American top forty hit under her own name, peaking at number twenty five. She wanted the cover to be her own drawing of roses sticking out of a horse's backside, a comment on the industry. Asylum wanted her face instead. In 2007 the album entered the National Recording Registry.[1] [2] [3]

She released nothing in 1973, a first in her career, and spent most of the year in the studio. Tired of folk, she hired Tom Scott's jazz fusion band, the L.A. Express, as her first real backing group, and produced Court and Spark herself. Released in January 1974, it reached number two in America and number one in Canada, and it is still her biggest seller, certified double platinum. Help Me became her only American top ten single, peaking at number seven that June. Free Man in Paris was a portrait of her friend David Geffen on holiday in Paris with Robbie Robertson and his wife. Village Voice critics voted it the album of the year.[1] [2] [3]

Not everyone stayed awake for it. She later told Cameron Crowe that when she played the finished album to Bob Dylan, he fell asleep, though she suspected he was trying to be cute in front of Geffen. Her 1974 tour with the L.A. Express, her first ever with a band, drew rave reviews, and the live double album Miles of Aisles also reached number two. At the Grammys in early 1975, Court and Spark was nominated for Album of the Year, and she was the only woman nominated in that category. She came away with just one award, for arrangement. Singer Stevie Nicks later recalled listening to Court and Spark on LSD.[1] [2] [3]

In November 1975 came The Hissing of Summer Lawns, cool jazzy stories about suburban lives and the women trapped in them. On The Jungle Line she looped a field recording of the Drummers of Burundi under her guitar and a Moog synthesizer, and it is credited as the first commercially released song built on a sample. In a 1983 interview she said that for about three years she had felt as if a black poet was trapped inside her. Critics were harsh. Rolling Stone called the music insubstantial. But the album grew in stature, and in 1985 Prince called it the last album he loved all the way through. It reached number four, her last American top ten album.[1] [2]

The road, Jaco and Mingus

In late 1975 she joined Bob Dylan's Rolling Thunder Revue, planning to play a single show, and stayed on. On that tour she became a frequent cocaine user, and she met the playwright Sam Shepard, who many believe is the subject of her song Coyote. Her relationship with drummer John Guerin, who had played on Court and Spark, was falling apart. In February 1976 a tour for Summer Lawns, with Guerin in the band, was abandoned about halfway through after the two of them fought. Mitchell then set off across America with two male friends, one a former lover from Australia, driving from Los Angeles all the way to Maine.[1] [2] [3]

She drove back to California alone, by way of Florida and the Gulf of Mexico, sometimes in a red wig and sunglasses, telling strangers her name was Charlene Latimer or Joan Black. She had no driver's licence, so she drove only by day and tucked in behind truckers, who would signal when police were ahead. In Colorado she visited the Tibetan Buddhist teacher Chögyam Trungpa, and she credited him with ending her cocaine habit and leaving her in a selfless, awakened state for three days. Those miles became Hejira, released in November 1976. She found the title, an Arabic word for departure, in a dictionary, and said it meant running away with honour.[1] [2]

The sound of Hejira came from a new partner. After laying down the basic tracks, she met Jaco Pastorius, the fretless bass virtuoso who joined Weather Report that year. She had grown tired of bass parts that only thumped out the root of each chord, and Jaco made the bass sing. She overdubbed him on four songs, including Coyote and the title track, where he stacked several bass parts together. Hejira reached number thirteen and went gold, but got little radio play. She later said lots of people could have written her other songs, but only she could have written these. That Thanksgiving she sang Coyote at The Last Waltz, the Band's farewell concert in San Francisco.[1] [2] [3] [4]

In December 1977 came the double album Don Juan's Reckless Daughter, her loosest record yet, with Jaco, Wayne Shorter and other Weather Report players, Chaka Khan on backing vocals, and Paprika Plains, a sixteen minute piece with orchestra that filled an entire side. The cover became the most controversial image of her career. On it she appears in blackface, dressed as a pimp, as a character she called Art Nouveau, inspired by a black man who had complimented her on a Los Angeles street. It has been widely criticised as racist, and she defended it for decades. In April 2024 the cover was quietly replaced on streaming services, with no explanation given.[1] [2]

A few months later the jazz giant Charles Mingus heard Paprika Plains and asked to work with her. He was dying of ALS and could no longer play his bass. He wrote six new melodies, called Joni one to six, for her to set words to, and she also wrote lyrics for his classic Goodbye Pork Pie Hat. Mingus died of a heart attack in Cuernavaca, Mexico, on the fifth of January 1979, aged fifty six, before the album was done, and his ashes were scattered in the Ganges. Mingus came out that June and baffled many fans. Her 1979 tour, with Jaco, Pat Metheny and Michael Brecker, became the live album Shadows and Light.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Synthesizers, a second marriage and hard years

As the new decade began, David Geffen started his own label, released her from the rest of her Asylum contract and signed her. She said a trip to the Caribbean in 1981, hearing Steely Dan, Talking Heads and above all the Police in a disco, made her want a more rhythmic record. The result, Wild Things Run Fast, came out in 1982, and her cover of the Elvis song Baby I Don't Care became her best charting single in years. It was also her first album with bassist Larry Klein. They fell in love during the sessions and married in November 1982, and Klein went on to play on and coproduce her next four albums.[1] [2] [3] [4]

For the next album, Geffen suggested a producer who knew the new technology, and she brought in the British synth pop musician Thomas Dolby. They clashed. She said he might do it faster, maybe even better, but then it would not really be her music, and Dolby later admitted he had probably been a brat. Dog Eat Dog, released in October 1985, was her first album with no guitar from her at all, built on synthesizers and a Fairlight sampler. Its song Tax Free, with actor Rod Steiger playing a televangelist, attacked the religious right. She said the churches came after her, though the Episcopalians wrote to congratulate her. It peaked at number sixty three.[1] [2] [3]

The eighties were hard on her public standing. At a 1986 Amnesty International benefit, stepping in at the last minute for Pete Townshend, she played a hastily arranged acoustic set and was booed by a crowd that did not know her work. Her old bandmate Jaco Pastorius was faring far worse. Diagnosed with bipolar disorder in 1982, he struggled with drugs and was at times homeless. On the eleventh of September 1987, refused entry to a club in Wilton Manors, Florida, and after reportedly kicking in a glass door, he was beaten in a fight with a club employee, Luc Havan. He fell into a coma and died on the twenty first of September, aged thirty five.[1] [2]

Chalk Mark in a Rain Storm arrived in March 1988. It began at Peter Gabriel's studio near Bath, where the two of them cut the duet My Secret Place. Willie Nelson, Tom Petty, Billy Idol, Don Henley and Wendy and Lisa all dropped in, and Lakota dealt with the destruction of Native American culture. Another track, The Reoccurring Dream, was pieced together from television commercials she had taped on her video recorder for two weeks. Billboard called it her most commercial sounding effort in years, and it charted higher than its predecessor. In 1990, rarely performing by then, she sang Goodbye Blue Sky at Roger Waters's staging of The Wall in Berlin.[1] [2]

She delivered Night Ride Home to Geffen just before Christmas 1990, after trying almost a hundred different running orders for its songs. Released in March 1991, it was her first album distributed outside the Warner family, after Geffen Records was sold to MCA. Critics warmed to it more than to anything she had made in the eighties. Its title song, first aired on British television in 1988 as Fourth of July, was inspired by a moonlit night in Hawaii. Cherokee Louise told of a childhood friend in Saskatoon who suffered sexual abuse, Come in from the Cold looked back at youth from middle age, and The Windfall was about a maid who tried to sue her.[1] [2] [3] [4]

A secret revealed and a daughter found

In 1993 the secret she had carried for almost thirty years came out, when a roommate from her art school days sold the story of her lost daughter to a supermarket tabloid. Mitchell said it hurt like hell. Around the same time her marriage to Larry Klein ended, in the middle of making Turbulent Indigo, and they kept working together through the divorce. Released in 1994, with a self portrait of her styled like Van Gogh on the cover, it was hailed as a startling comeback and won two Grammys, including Best Pop Album. It carried The Magdalene Laundries, about Irish women forced to work in laundries run by the Catholic Church.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Honours began to pile up. In 1995 she received Billboard's Century Award, and in 1996 the Polar Music Prize. While promoting Turbulent Indigo she revealed she had post polio syndrome, which made performing difficult, and the chore of retuning guitars for dozens of tunings had helped drive her off the road after 1983. Her friend Fred Walecki, of Westwood Music in Los Angeles, built her a guitar wired to a Roland virtual guitar system. The guitar stayed in standard tuning while the system turned its sound into whichever tuning each song needed, so one instrument could do everything. Biographer David Yaffe compared its sound to a computerised guitar with a head cold.[1] [2] [3]

The tabloid story had a happy ending. Kelly Dale, renamed Kilauren Gibb by her adoptive parents, had worked for years as a model and was now a mother herself. When she received basic facts about her birth parents, friends saw the parallels, and on a fan's Joni Mitchell website she counted fourteen or fifteen matches, including a mother who had polio at nine. Mitchell's manager listened to her on the phone and said it made his hair stand on end. Mother and daughter met in 1997, and Mitchell gained a grandson, Marlin. That spring, Rolling Stone reported, she skipped her own induction into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame to spend a first Mother's Day with them.[1] [2] [3]

After the reunion she said she lost interest in songwriting for a while. Taming the Tiger, in 1998, was widely taken to be her last album of new songs, and she toured with Bob Dylan and Van Morrison. Critics noticed that her voice had dropped and roughened. In 2000 she made that her strength on Both Sides Now, an orchestral album of jazz standards arranged by Vince Mendoza, with new versions of A Case of You and the title song. It won two Grammys. That April she sang Both Sides, Now with a seventy piece orchestra at a televised tribute in New York, and that recording later scored an emotional scene in the film Love Actually.[1] [2] [3]

In 2002 came Travelogue, lavish orchestral remakes of her own songs, which she said would be her final album. She told Rolling Stone the music industry was a cesspool and announced she was leaving it. The same year she was made a Companion of the Order of Canada and received a Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award. In 2004 she told the Los Angeles Times she now spent her time painting, often all night, with a Jack Russell and three cats for company, and wanted nothing to do with galleries. She said she had made sixteen records hearing that she was not as good as she used to be, and had finally agreed.[1] [2]

Shine, silence and the aneurysm

She did not stay away for long. In February 2007 she worked with the Alberta Ballet in Calgary on The Fiddle and the Drum, a dance set to her songs. That September she released Shine on Starbucks' Hear Music label, her first album of new songs in nearly a decade, driven by the Iraq war and her despair about the environment. It entered the Billboard chart at number fourteen, her best American placing since Hejira. The same day Herbie Hancock released River: The Joni Letters, produced by Larry Klein, with Leonard Cohen, Norah Jones and Tina Turner. It won Album of the Year in 2008, and Mitchell won a Grammy of her own for One Week Last Summer.[1] [2] [3] [4]

In 2009 she said she had Morgellons, a condition in which sufferers report strange fibres coming out of their skin. Many doctors regard it as delusional rather than a real infection, and she complained that American doctors simply sent sufferers to psychiatrists. In April 2010 she told the Los Angeles Times she was trying to get out of the music business to fight for people with the condition to be believed. In the same interview she called Bob Dylan a plagiarist and said his name and voice were fake, and she also took shots at Madonna, Grace Slick and Janis Joplin. It made headlines around the world. She said she now mostly painted.[1] [2] [3] [4]

On the thirty first of March 2015, Joni Mitchell was found unconscious at her home in Los Angeles. She had suffered a brain aneurysm, and David Crosby said that nobody had found her for a while. In June Crosby said she was not yet speaking, but her lawyer reported that she was home, feeding herself and having physical therapy every day. Her longtime friend Leslie Morris acted as her temporary conservator, and court papers recommended making that permanent. By October, Judy Collins passed on word that Joni was walking, talking and painting a little. In August 2016 she made her first public appearance, at a Chick Corea concert in Los Angeles.[1] [2] [3]

Recovery was slow. In 2018 Crosby said she was having to learn to walk again. On her seventy fifth birthday that November, the audience at the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion in Los Angeles stood to sing to her as Brandi Carlile, Chaka Khan, Kris Kristofferson, Emmylou Harris and others performed her songs. Graham Nash sat at the piano and sang Our House, and she sang along from her seat. Music was also returning to her home. After a visit from her old friend Eric Andersen, Carlile began organising Joni Jams in her living room, where guests included Elton John, Paul McCartney and Harry Styles. Slowly Mitchell began to sing again, and to relearn guitar.[1] [2] [3]

In 2020 she launched the Joni Mitchell Archives with Rhino Records, a project planned with her old manager Elliot Roberts, who died in 2019 and to whom the first box set was dedicated. It won the Grammy for Best Historical Album in April 2022, and she collected it in person. In December 2021 she received a Kennedy Center Honor. In January 2022 she asked Spotify to remove her music, in solidarity with Neil Young over Covid misinformation on Joe Rogan's podcast, saying irresponsible people were spreading lies that cost lives. Both had survived polio as children, not long before a vaccine arrived. She came back to Spotify in March 2024, after Young did.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5]

The return to the stage

On the twenty fourth of July 2022, the closing set of the Newport Folk Festival in Rhode Island was billed as Brandi Carlile and Friends. Then Carlile's surprise guest walked slowly onto a stage set up like Mitchell's living room, and the crowd erupted. It was her first full public concert since 2000, at the festival where Judy Collins had first brought her in 1967. Until rehearsals two nights before, no one was sure she could do it. She sat in a throne of a chair, sang Carey, A Case of You and Both Sides, Now, and strapped on an electric guitar for a long passage of Just Like This Train. She closed with The Circle Game.[1] [2] [3]

Afterwards she told Carlile she wanted to play again. She told CBS the aneurysm had taken away even how to get out of a chair, and that she had relearned guitar by watching videos online to see where to put her fingers. In March 2023 she received the Library of Congress Gershwin Prize and sang Summertime at her own tribute concert in Washington. On the tenth of June 2023 she played her first headline show in twenty three years, to twenty seven thousand people at the Gorge Amphitheatre in Washington state. She held a cane topped with a small bear's head and joked that nothing pleased Bob Dylan more than seeing her mess up.[1] [2] [3]

The Newport set came out as a live album in 2023 and won the Grammy for Best Folk Album. On the fourth of February 2024, aged eighty, she performed at the Grammy Awards for the very first time, singing Both Sides, Now surrounded by her Joni Jam friends. That October she played two sold out nights at the Hollywood Bowl, her first full concerts in Los Angeles in more than twenty years, with Carlile, Annie Lennox and Jon Batiste. She skipped hits like Help Me for deep cuts from the eighties and nineties, and sang Elton John's I'm Still Standing. With an election weeks away, she told the crowd she was one of those lousy immigrants.[1] [2] [3]

Her influence runs through generations. Prince covered A Case of You, Janet Jackson built Got 'til It's Gone around a Big Yellow Taxi sample, and Madonna said no other woman affected her more as a lyricist. Taylor Swift, Björk, Harry Styles, Haim and Lorde have all pointed to her. Rolling Stone once ranked her the seventy second greatest guitarist, the highest placed woman, and later moved her up to number nine. She still owns her publishing, and has painted most of her album covers, calling herself a painter derailed by circumstance. As of 2026 she is in her eighties, and she has long divided her time between Los Angeles and her land at Sechelt in British Columbia.[1] [2] [3]

The people around Joni Mitchell

Joni Mitchell and Graham Nash. Nash moved into her Laurel Canyon house around 1968, and for about two years they were the canyon's golden couple. He wrote Our House there after they bought a cheap vase one morning. The break up fed into Blue, and Neil Young's Only Love Can Break Your Heart was reportedly written for Nash as he grieved. Fifty years later, at her seventy fifth birthday concert, Nash sang Our House while she sang along.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Joni Mitchell and David Crosby. Crosby spotted her in a Florida club in 1967, dated her briefly and brought her to Los Angeles. He produced her first album and persuaded Reprise to let her record without overdubs. He remained a champion for life, calling Blue the best singer songwriter record ever made, and giving the world updates on her health after her 2015 aneurysm. Crosby died in 2023.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5]

Joni Mitchell and Leonard Cohen. They met at the Newport Folk Festival in 1967 and had a short relationship. She said he was worldly and made her own work seem naive, and she counted him an early influence. Rainy Night House describes a night at his childhood home. Four decades later Cohen recited her song The Jungle Line over Herbie Hancock's piano on the Grammy winning River: The Joni Letters.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Joni Mitchell and James Taylor. Their romance ran from about 1970 into 1971, while Taylor battled depression and heroin addiction. They played the 1970 Vancouver benefit that launched Greenpeace, she sang on his hit You've Got a Friend, and he played guitar on Blue. Cold Blue Steel and Sweet Fire, on For the Roses, portrayed his addiction. They stayed friends, and he sang her songs at tributes in 2000 and 2018.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5]

Joni Mitchell and Chuck Mitchell. An American folk singer she met in Toronto in 1965, he married her that June and gave her the surname she still uses. They performed as a duo in Detroit coffee houses. She later called it a marriage of convenience, entered in the hope of keeping her baby, which failed within months. They divorced in early 1967, and The Last Time I Saw Richard is thought to be about him.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Joni Mitchell and Larry Klein. A jazz bassist, Klein joined her sessions for Wild Things Run Fast, and they married in November 1982. He coproduced her albums through the eighties and established himself as a producer while married to her. They split while making Turbulent Indigo and divorced in 1994, yet kept working together on Both Sides Now and Travelogue. He later produced Herbie Hancock's tribute to her, which won Album of the Year.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Joni Mitchell and David Geffen. Geffen, partner of her manager Elliot Roberts, founded Asylum Records in 1971 and brought her there, then signed her again to Geffen Records in 1982. They were close friends, and Free Man in Paris is a portrait of him on a Paris trip. He also nudged her toward an outside producer for Dog Eat Dog, which led to her unhappy collaboration with Thomas Dolby.[1] [2] [3]

Joni Mitchell and Elliot Roberts. Roberts became her manager after Buffy Sainte-Marie played him a tape and he saw her in New York. They moved to Laurel Canyon, and Mitchell persuaded him to manage Neil Young too, which he did for fifty years. He managed her until 1985. He helped plan the Joni Mitchell Archives before his death in 2019, and the first box set is dedicated to him.[1] [2]

Joni Mitchell and Jaco Pastorius. The fretless bass genius transformed her sound, playing on Hejira, Don Juan's Reckless Daughter, Mingus and the Shadows and Light tour between 1976 and 1980. She loved that he refused to just play the root of a chord. His later years were marked by bipolar disorder, drug problems and homelessness, and he died in 1987 after being beaten outside a Florida club.[1] [2]

Joni Mitchell and Neil Young. They met in the Winnipeg and Canadian folk scene in the mid sixties, and her Circle Game was a reply to his Sugar Mountain. Both survived childhood polio. They shared a manager, sang together at The Last Waltz, and in 2022 she pulled her music from Spotify in solidarity with him. He remembered her knitting him a hat with a seashell on it in 1971.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Joni Mitchell and Brandi Carlile. Carlile performed Blue in full in 2019, wrote an essay for the Reprise albums box, and organised the Joni Jams that helped Mitchell recover from her aneurysm. She brought her onstage at Newport in 2022, produced the Grammy winning live album of that night, and led the band at the Gorge in 2023 and the Hollywood Bowl in 2024.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Joni Mitchell and Bob Dylan. A long, prickly friendship. She was a Dylan detractor at first, then decided he had shown songs could be about anything. She joined his Rolling Thunder Revue in 1975 and toured with him in 1998, and he chose Free Man in Paris for a compilation of her work. In 2010 she was quoted calling him a plagiarist, which she later denied saying.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5]

Rare facts about Joni Mitchell

• Her debut album is often called just Joni Mitchell because a printing error cut off its title, spelled out by flying seagulls. The cover of Song to a Seagull spelled the title with birds in flight, but the printed sleeves cut part of it off, and nobody at Reprise noticed the birds formed words. So the album was also known by her name alone.[1]
• The debut's song Sisotowbell Lane takes its name from an acronym she made up. Mitchell said Sisotowbell stands for somehow, in spite of trouble, ours will be ever lasting love. Cass Elliot later recorded the song, though it never appeared on any of her albums.[1]
• She dedicated her first album to her grade seven English teacher, Mr Kratzmann. Arthur Kratzmann was the unconventional Saskatoon teacher who pushed her to write poetry. The dedication thanked him for teaching her to love words.[1] [2]
• Mitchell said the original mix of her debut sounded as if it had been recorded under a bowl of Jello. David Crosby had her sing into a grand piano to catch its resonance, but the set up captured so much hiss that cleaning it dulled the sound. In 2021 she oversaw a new mix for The Reprise Albums box.[1] [2]
• The red flower in her Clouds self portrait is a prairie lily, Saskatchewan's provincial flower. Mitchell painted the cover of Clouds herself, as she did for most of her albums. The prairie lily was a quiet tribute to the province she calls home.[1]
• She was meant to sing in the film Alice's Restaurant but pulled out over royalties. Her song Songs to Aging Children Come plays at a funeral scene in the 1969 film. Mitchell was originally cast to perform it, but talks with the producers over royalties failed, and Tigger Outlaw sang it instead.[1]
• The rainbow in Chelsea Morning came from a mobile made of glass rescued from a demolished home for unwed mothers. She and friends built the mobile from coloured glass shards found in the street and coat hangers. In coffee house shows she explained the glass had come from the salvaged windows of a home for unwed mothers.[1]
• Bill and Hillary Clinton named their daughter Chelsea after Judy Collins's recording of Chelsea Morning. The couple heard Judy Collins singing Mitchell's Chelsea Morning while walking in the Chelsea area of London, and it gave them the name for their daughter.[1] [2]
• Her earliest surviving recordings were made in 1963 by a Saskatoon radio DJ and found by his ex wife in 2015. Barry Bowman of the station CFQC recorded her singing traditional folk songs over two nights, giving her a copy and keeping the masters. They opened the first Joni Mitchell Archives box set in 2020.[1]
• The dulcimer that shaped Blue cost two hundred dollars at the Big Sur Folk Festival. Luthier Joellen Lapidus sold it to her in 1969 and nicknamed it Wild Columbine for its carved sound holes. Mitchell took it to Greece and wrote most of Blue on it.[1]
• The Blue cover photo was taken years before the album, at the Troubadour in Los Angeles. According to photographer Joel Bernstein, Tim Considine's shot of her sinking into the colour blue dates from around 1967 or 1968, long before the songs were written.[1]
• She wanted For the Roses to have a nude cover photo, until David Geffen talked her out of it. After Asylum rejected her rude drawing for the cover, she offered a nude photo of herself on ocean rocks. Geffen joked she would not like a price sticker slapped across her backside, so it went inside the gatefold instead.[1]
• Cheech and Chong are the background voices on her cover of Twisted. Court and Spark ends with Twisted, by Annie Ross and Wardell Gray, a Lambert, Hendricks and Ross favourite. The comedy duo Cheech Marin and Tommy Chong added their voices to it.[1]
• An instrumental Free Man in Paris was the theme of a CBC television news show into the early eighties. In the 1970s CBC Television used an instrumental version of the song as the theme for The Saturday Evening News, which ran until it was replaced in 1982.[1]
• Bob Dylan chose Free Man in Paris for a 2005 Starbucks compilation of her songs. Dylan wrote in the liner notes that he liked it because he had been to Paris and understood what being a free man there meant, even if it was not what Joni intended.[1]
• The Jungle Line is credited as the first commercially released song built around a sample. On The Hissing of Summer Lawns in 1975, she looped a field recording of the Drummers of Burundi and laid guitar, Moog and voice on top, years before Peter Gabriel and Paul Simon explored similar sounds.[1]
• Her own house is marked in blue on the cover painting of The Hissing of Summer Lawns. Mitchell painted men carrying a huge snake across a view of Beverly Hills suburbs, and shaded her own house in blue on the right of the picture.[1]
• Driving home in 1976 she wore a red wig and called herself Charlene Latimer or Joan Black. She had no driver's licence, so on the solo drive that inspired Hejira she drove only in daylight behind truckers, relying on them to signal when police were ahead.[1]
• The figure skater Toller Cranston appears on the back cover of Hejira. The Hejira photos were taken by Joel Bernstein at Lake Mendota in Madison, Wisconsin, after an ice storm, with the front portrait by Norman Seeff. Rolling Stone later ranked the cover eleventh among the best ever.[1]
• The blues singer Furry Lewis was not pleased that she wrote a song about him. Furry Sings the Blues describes meeting Lewis on Beale Street in Memphis as the area was being demolished. Lewis disliked her use of his name, though she kept performing the song for years.[1]
• Charles Mingus wrote six melodies titled Joni one to six for their album. Mingus composed them for her to add lyrics, and three made the finished album. The sessions were recorded around his death in January 1979, and the album is dedicated to him.[1]
• The Refuge of the Roads concert video was not filmed in front of a live audience. After her 1983 world tour, the performances were recorded live in a studio and the applause was dubbed in afterwards, mixed with Super 8 footage she shot on the road.[1]
• She built Smokin' around the cigarette machine in the A&M studio parking lot. On Dog Eat Dog, Mitchell played the cigarette machine live rather than sampling it. She also recorded a burglar alarm and hammering for another song, over the objections of Klein and Dolby.[1]
• Wendy and Lisa joined Chalk Mark in a Rain Storm after a chat at a studio coffee machine. Prince had introduced them to Mitchell. They were working at the same studio, and agreed to sing backing vocals on The Tea Leaf Prophecy after bumping into her at the coffee machine.[1]
• She refused Wayne Shorter a second take because his first was perfect. Before A Bird That Whistles, she told Shorter he was the bird in the song. His first phrase sounded so birdlike that she kept it, later joking that he had slept through his own magic.[1]
• The Tea Leaf Prophecy tells how her parents met in wartime after a tea leaf reading. The Chalk Mark in a Rain Storm song describes her parents meeting during World War Two after a prophetic reading of tea leaves. She later sang it again on Herbie Hancock's River: The Joni Letters.[1] [2]
• A limited run of her 2000 album Both Sides Now came in chocolate box packaging for Valentine's Day. The special edition went out on the eighth of February 2000 with lithographs of her paintings. On tour she opened with Debussy's Nuages, French for clouds, echoing her album Clouds.[1]
• The song Bad Dreams came from something her three year old grandson said. Listening to family fighting, the boy said bad dreams are good in the great plan. Mitchell joked on BBC radio that she had promised to cut him in on the profits.[1]
• The Shine CD came with a blue band to hide the bodies of male ballet dancers in tights. The cover showed a scene from The Fiddle and the Drum, her ballet with Alberta Ballet. The loose blue band around the disc obscured the dancers from general view.[1]
• Amy Grant changed a lyric in her Big Yellow Taxi cover because Mitchell asked her to. Grant's 1995 version reached the top twenty in Britain. Mitchell's official site counted more than six hundred other recordings of the song as of 2025.[1]
• The tree museum in Big Yellow Taxi was a real place in Honolulu. It refers to the Foster Botanical Garden, a living museum of tropical plants in downtown Honolulu, some of them rare and endangered.[1]
• She says she and Dylan swapped painting ideas that ended up in Paprika Plains and One More Cup of Coffee. At a club, Dylan asked what she would paint. She said the mirrored ball and dancers, he said his cup of coffee. She told NPR both images turned up in their next songs.[1]
• She still kept two papier mache ornaments from her childhood polio ward Christmas tree. In 2014 she told NPR the tree in her hospital room was why Christmas, for her, is all about the tree, and that two of its original ornaments survived.[1]
• The polar bear logo of the Joni Mitchell Archives comes from a Saulteaux name she was given. At her seventy fifth birthday a childhood friend gave her the name Sparkling White Bear Woman, recognised by the Yellow Quill First Nation.[1]
• In 1971 she knitted Neil Young a hat with a seashell hanging from the front. Young wrote about it in his memoir, Waging Heavy Peace, saying he could feel the love in it.[1]
• Matthews Southern Comfort changed her Woodstock melody because the singer could not reach her high notes. Iain Matthews felt uneasy about meeting her, but Mitchell said she preferred his arrangement, which went to number one in Britain.[1]
• She made her first ever Grammy performance at eighty, in February 2024. Despite winning many Grammys since 1970, she had never performed on the show until she sang Both Sides, Now at the 66th Grammy Awards, backed by her Joni Jam friends.[1]
• In 2003 Rolling Stone ranked her the seventy second greatest guitarist, the highest placed woman on the list. Her open tunings and percussive right hand earned her the place, and by 2023 the magazine had moved her up to number nine.[1]

Disputed stories

These stories are told often but the accounts don't agree. Here are the versions and who says what.