Transcript of Joni Mitchell Never Lies

Hey, it's Michael. For our last few episodes of 2024, we're bringing you something really special, a year of culture in review. We're going to begin with one of our all-time favorite guests talking about one of the year's most astonishing performances and the really improbable story of how it even happened. Today, Critic at Large, Wesley Morris on the comeback of the singer and songwriter, Joni Mitchell. It's Christmas Day, Wednesday, December 25th.

I'm Wesley Morris. I'm a critic at the New York Times. Back in 2022, this news broke that this amazing event had taken place at the Newport Folk Festival in Rhode Island, Joni Mitchell had come out and played a concert for the first time in a long time. It was a big deal because Joni Mitchell, the singer, the song writer, influencer of generations of musicians, that person had virtually disappeared from public life. She'd sworn off touring. Then in 2015, a brain aneurysm almost killed her. She survived, but her ability to sing or even speak was gone. You can imagine the shock when she appeared on stage at Newport, surrounded by a bunch of musicians led by Brandi Carlyle and including folks like Winona Judd and Marcus Mumford, some of these same musicians had been convening at her house in LA, and somebody started calling those gatherings, Joni Jams. Now, here they all were, taking her living room sessions public. The Joni Mitchell fans went crazy. She was back, and I might add, back in that signature beret. But honestly, I had my Like, what was really happening here? Did Joni Mitchell even want this? Or were these adoring young musician fans making her do something for their own reasons?

Was it elder care? I wasn't there. I don't know. Then earlier this year, I'm watching the Grammys at home in my living room. In the middle of the show, the stage went dark and a familiar voice filled the room.

Rosen flows of angel hair.

It was low and it was deliberate. And ice cream castles in the air. And slowly, part of the stage spun around to reveal.

And feather can Jony Mitchell.

Seated in an armchair, one hand stirring a walking can, the other moving to the cadences of her own lyrisism. She was indeed surrounded by other musicians.

I looked at love from both sides now.

I was like, Okay, never mind. I take it all back. Because so much about this performance was so moving, First of all, just the way the people on stage, these musicians, these great musicians, were regarding Joni Mitchell like they were having the same experience that I was at home, except they were there and they were in awe of the beauty of this moment, like they were at the feet of a musical mother. Then there were the cutaway to musicians in the audience. One shot looked over Dua Lipa's shoulder at Beyoncé, who was just swaying and thought, Then another shot caught Taylor Swift midstanding ovation. I just got the sense that a lot of people in that room were thinking about what 50 years from now looks like for them. How is antihero going to sound when Taylor Swift's 80 years old? What's that song going to be about then? But mostly, I was struck by how good Joni Mitchell sounded. She's lost an octave over the years, but there's still tremendous power in her lower register. She can still control. She can still wield it. So when more of these Joni jams got scheduled at the Hollywood Bowl, I knew I had to get myself on a plane to hear her with my own ears and see her with my own eyes.

I also knew my friend Sasha Weis was going. Sasha is a writer and my editor at the Times magazine, and we talk a lot. I wanted to ask her what it felt like to be there at one of these shows We went on different nights. She went on Saturday, I went on Sunday. I wanted to talk about who Joni Mitchell is to her and how it feels to experience an 80-year-old in full command of her meaning. Hi, Sasha.

Hi, Wesley. How are you? I'm good.

I want to talk about the concert, obviously. But before we do that, I got to ask you what your relationship to Joni Mitchell is. What's your first Joni Mitchell moment?

My parents introduced me to Joni Mitchell, and it was at a pretty young age. I can't really remember a time when her voice wasn't in my head. I woke to Joni, I slept to Joni, I think from the ages of seven. I mean, very young. They'd play it a lot on car ride. I think Joni- That seems apt. It's so apt, of course.

That seems apt for a person who's- She's a traveler.

She's a traveler. She's a restless wanderer. I think that also implanted something in me that I grew up in, I would say in some ways, in a cozy, somewhat cloistered environment. I grew up in New York City, but in a strong Jewish community. There was a sense of like, Städle-likeness in my upbringing, I would say. I think Joni did implant a seed of wondering and Wandering because so many of her songs are about... I mean, on Blue alone, she's in California and she's in Spain and she's in France, and she's- I have been on...

All I want is the first line is- I'm on a lonely road and I'm traveling. Traveling, traveling, traveling.

I mean, I loved to sing. I still love to sing, and I really studied her singing and learned to sing from Blue. I think just the leaping in the rain The way that Joni can adventurously, boldly, almost insulently. She can go from really low to just leaping up.

It's doing a parallel bar routine where it goes from the low bar to the high bar, flips around a little bit, goes back down, comes up, and then sticks the landing every time.

I wish I had a river I feel like there's a desire there.

There's a hunger. There's a command. I wanted that vocally, and I think I wanted it inter-personally or something.

What does that look like? I don't know.

I think the ability to explore, the ability to take command, the ability to be daring. I don't know if I've achieved these things, but I think this was my fantasy, especially Blue. But Court and Spark, too, shaped my ideas about what love was. I always felt like love was a complex, laden thing, not a simple thing because of Joni. Okay. What it was to be a writer, I think. Her songs are so writerly. So many of them are short stories in miniature, and you get a whole life in those songs. I think that her words, I listen to them thousands of times. I mean, blue is just stamped on my consciousness. I think I wanted to see what woman I'd become in encountering Joni.

Oh, my God. We just started talking and my eyes are already welling up. Okay. I first heard Joni Mitchell in the '90s because I was listening to this radio station when I was a kid that was really singer-synced songwriter-heavy. So Night ride Home. Night ride Home was my first Joni Mitchell album.

I bought a cassette, and the voice on it was unlike any of the other people they were playing in this radio station.

The voice was deeper than the leaping that you're talking about. All of that beauty, which I would describe in some ways as young woman-ish, by 1991 had really solidified into something that moved less but weighed more. There's a song on that album called Passion Play When All the Slaves are Free. It's essentially the song that she had begun to really luxuriate in, which is a moral judgment on the condition of this... Well, I'm going to say the United States. She's Canadian, lives in Los Angeles. According to her, it's her workplace, and her home in Western Canada is her home. But she has a real sense of the way the world is operating and the way the world is different in 1991 from how it was in 1974 or '69, even. In this particular case, it's just about the possession of land and this idea that men are not stewards of the land, they're proprietors. What's it going to look like when the people that you have laboring for you to have a revolution. There's just something about the way that she says, Who are you going to get to do your dirty work?

Who are you going to get to do your dirty work?

When all the slaves are free. When all the slaves are free. She's doubling herself. That doubling, it just sounds different when your voice is that low. Who are you going to get? And I just was so drawn to whatever that sound was because there wisdom in it, especially with this later music, which I would say- Which I don't know as well.

I love hearing you talk about it. Most people don't. Yeah.

Most people don't. All right, let's talk about the Hollywood Bowl show we went to this fall.

I've been waiting. It's been hard. I mean, I watched the Newport performance.

The one in 2022?

Her big comeback. I was so moved hearing her sing again. I think in those performances, her voice was still in the of returning. There were moments when her voice broke, moments when the songs felt like they were being explored again. I felt both moved, amazed, sometimes anxious watching her. I really wanted to see her a couple of years later and to see what had happened to her voice and her performance now that she'd really decided to take it on the road.

What was different?

I felt it was really her show. Yeah. That she was the band leader. It's so interesting because she was seated the whole time. She sits.

Oh, my God. The chair.

On this phone-like chair. Oh, my God, the chair. We got to talk about the furniture, which is incredible. But her presence just has this gravitas and physicality, even though she's not standing, but she really draws this 17,000-seat, beautiful outdoor amphitheater into her. There's something energetically incredibly potent. Maybe that was true at Newport, too, but I just felt that she returned to some energetic center. I could feel the minute I saw her come on the stage.

I felt the same thing. I mean, there's something about the chair, right? I mean, it really is a thrown-like set piece, and it really gives everybody around her a, not subservient role, but they're all there to facilitate the needs of this monarch.

But at the same time, she's so playful. I mean, there's There's the chair and there's the scepter-like cane, which looked to me to be gilded.

There's a coyote, I think. It might be a coyote.

It's a coyote.

On the actual handle of the cane.

I didn't observe that. I just saw something metallic and glinting. It's like she's wielding it, but she's so playful. As you were talking about earlier, her rhythms, her rhythms are so unusual. She's tapping them and tracing this rhythm idiosyncratic signature throughout the songs. It's just incredible. She's at once grand, and there's just something drool and fun and playful about her in her posture. It's both. It's both end. Also, I would say that the way the stage looks, it's a recreation, as I understand it, of the Joni Jams that took place in her living room over the course of many years, which led up to this moment of coming back to the stage. Where she'd gather with musician friends. I think Brandy really facilitated it, and all these different people would come.

Right. Many different people came to play for her over several years. Herbie Hancock, Dolly Parton, Chaka Khan, Harry Style. But Not all of those people were on stage that night at the Hollywood Bowl. Definitely none of the people I just named.

But it seemed like there was a core group.

Yes, and those were the people who were on stage.

Those were the people on stage who clearly had a long-running experience singing with her. Like an ability to improvise that seemed to me to be drawing from the experience of having done a lot of work together. But the stage, it felt very intimate. From where I was sitting, everyone seemed in a pile. It was both really like an ensemble, Yes, Joni was this commanding presence.

I can't imagine what it would be like to go to this concert. If you're someone who has flown halfway, completely across the country, to hear what you think is going to be a night of her doing blue? Yes. There are 10 songs on that album, and people only heard three. California. California, more than. Kerry, which the audience it's song.

It was explicitly stated, This song is for you.

You and the audience can sing it. I think that was it. I might be missing something, but I don't think I She did a case of you, my night. Oh, she did do A Case Of You.

I could drink a case of you, oh, darling.

But most of the songs were from these later albums, from Kajira in '76, up to Shine, which is 2007.

Part of the feeling that I got of her being in command was the setlist, which I felt like she was preaching. She was not bringing nostalgia and comfort.

I got the sense that this is a person who does not think that they've gotten their due as an artist past a certain point. I think in the popular imagination, Blue has eaten her entire body of work, which is interesting to me because the song she sing at the Grammys that night was both sides now, not on Blue. It was like, on clouds. The songs that have all of the world weariness come after that. It's the experience of being extremely popular and extremely famous for those two albums that put her off of... I mean, what's the great line from Free Man in Paris? I'm out here stoking the star making machinery behind the popular songs.

Stoking the star-maker machinery behind the popular song.

I can't be free. I cannot be a free man in Paris if I'm out here trying to sell records. The two things are incompatible. There's making my art, and then there's toiling for money.

She gave us mostly her art songs.

Yes, 100%. 27 songs, most of which are songs she wrote after 1976.

I did feel like I was being schooled in a really good way. There's the quality of attention that you have to bring to her new register. There's- Yes, I agree. Such a depth and a richness. I kept thinking of wood grain. It just felt so rich and so much to hear and think about in movement. But maybe it's also about the reverence. You could hear the crickets. Maybe you always can in the high wood bowl, but I felt it was about a sense… Again, it's this energetic gravitas. I did feel she was demanding a listening, partly in the choice of song. She wanted a hush. Choosing those later songs, it didn't create the excitation. It created something else that was unusual.

I just was so in tune with her voice, and I was really hearing these songs in a new way. I just closed my eyes and just got transported to wherever it was she was trying take us.

I also think there is a really special listening going on on the stage.

Say more about that.

Well, I think this gets back to the way that these concerts came about. I mean, This is what I understand from reading and listening around, that she had these regular gatherings.

The Joni jams in her living room.

At first, she wasn't singing much because she couldn't, and she was still recovering. I think over time, she started to chime in. Sometimes it was just with a line or two. Sometimes, I think as her voice strengthened, it was more and more. Eventually, she started to pick up the guitar. I felt very much the attunement of the other musicians to her, which I guess with any great band, you feel that. But it felt really potent because I felt like they really understood when she was taking over the song. To me, it was It modeled something really beautiful. They were partners and they could recede. I really liked watching them do that. I think they're doing really intense listening and you can feel that atmosphere and it invites you to listen in a different way. There's some intimate communal collaborative act of attunement that was going on in this concert. But whatever is happening and however they're following along, there is a shagginess and an imperfection. On the one hand, Joni is such a virtuosity. She does have a consummit Apollonian artistry to her. Everything she does is excellent. But I did feel that there was a...

You know, sometimes the starts of songs were a little off. I loved that. I love that she let us hear that and see that.

I kept track of when I felt she was most present. When she did ride home, she was back in this song. She's back. Whatever this song is about, whatever memory she's having of this dance, wherever the song came from, she was back then.

I'm just over the man beside me.

And a romance, right? No interruptions, no distractions.

No phones till Friday.

No phones till Friday. I'm your show. I'm your love.

I was struck by just how present she was in this music. When she sounded to me, this arrangement has found a great place for her singing. It happened, out of 27 songs, it happened more than half the time. Yeah. Okay, let's take a break. When we come back, I had one complaint about this show. I only had one. Oh, wait, did you have any, by the way? Zero. Zero? No, I think I can give you one, and I'll tell you after the break. Okay, I do have one complaint about this show, and I don't know how you felt about this.

Okay.

Brandi Carlyle kept calling the music Deep Cuts. Deep cuts like she's singing with Cher. This is the person who has one top 10 song. One top 10 song in 60 years of making me- Which is you Turn Me On on My Radio? Well, that's a top 40 song, yes. Help me. Help me. Help me hit number seven. By the way, come on. Perfect song.

I'm really taking all I have to not burst into song.

You can do it. I'm not going to do it. You can do it. I will not harmonize with you because it will not sound good at all.

Help me, I I think I'm falling in love again. When I get that crazy feeling, I know I'm in trouble again. I'm in trouble because you're a rambler and a gambler and a sweet I love when you're talking ladies' man. And you love your lovin'. Lovin'. But not like you love your freedom.

I will never sing on this show again.

That was beautiful. It was beautiful as a person who cannot sing.

But love when you sing. I love when you sing.

I do enjoy trying. That's one of my- I love it. But that's her only top 10 song. She really was following her heart and not her pocketbook.

She wasn't down with that. She thought it was funny when they were like, Give us a hit.

Oh, wait. Can we listen that part of Miles of Iles, where she's about to do the circle game. Miles of Iles, of course, being her first live album, which came out 50 years ago this year. There's this moment on stage that I just think is so indicative of who Joni Mitchell is as a person. She's standing there, I guess, tinkering with her guitar, and she just finished Blue, and there's like 30 seconds of people just shouting at her.. They're just shouting out song titles. Play this, play that.

Play what you want.

All right. This is what she says in response to that.

That's one thing that's always like...

This is her in 1974.

Been a major difference between the performing arts to me and being a painter. A painter does a painting, and he does a painting. That's it. He's had the joy of creating it, and he hangs it on some wall. Somebody buys it. Somebody buys it again, or maybe nobody buys it, and it sits up in a loft somewhere till he dies. But nobody ever says to him, nobody ever said to Van, Go, Paint a starry night again, man. He painted it. That was it.

She's just like, I don't want people screaming song titles at me.

The concert felt like a culmination of that or some bracket to that, right? She was like, I'm playing what I want to play, and you're going to listen really carefully. It's also worth saying, her persona on stage, I think it's very different than it was. I mean, in the YouTube I've seen of her youthful performance where she was a little more… She always was a cool cat, but a little more soft. She's got a drool, unbothered persona, which is really interesting next to these adoring musicians. It's not like she undercuts them because I think she's really receiving, which is also something we should talk about, the receiving of the love and the adulation. But there is just a knowing this unbotheredness and droelery that I found extremely charming and funny me. She's not ingratiating. She just isn't.

No, not at all. She's not a person out here trying to do what they call fan service. I mean, this is also a person who said she'd never perform again. I mean, I swear to God, in 2015, we found out that she'd had this aneurysm. We thought she wasn't going to make it. I think for people who do come out the other side of that situation, if you're even close to being a death store, the idea that you're going to live for nine more years and that for at least three of those years, you're going to be thriving in public, you're going to go to the Grammys, and I don't know. I can't imagine what that's like.

It may be worth saying that this is the second time in her life life where she came back from a severe illness. When she was a young girl, she had polio, and she was stricken for months and couldn't walk. Apparently, really dreamed herself back into walking. She was lying in a bed, and she was determined to walk. There's some real force of will there, obviously, some capacity for self-creation that she had even as a young girl. I don't know I mean, there's something really amazing and, I mean, very upsetting about the fact that she had another experience of being bedridden again. But there's some- Something was just like, Nope, not like this.

Not like this. You all have to find another way to end this. It's not going to end here.

Yes.

I want to go back to that Grammys moment, actually. The thing that really struck me and completely embarrassed my skepticism about, was this her choice? She got bills to pay. What is What's going on here with this return? But the Grammys performance, I mean, for my own two eyes, it just said, Wesley, shut up.

Why were you suspicious? She's not going to do what she doesn't want to do. That's what we've been talking about the whole time.

I understand that. But the entertainment business is full of stories where people have been weekends and buried. Lots of people have been propped up, made to keep working when they shouldn't have been, and we don't find out until it's too late. So I just wanted to know. But this performance, to me, was just so life-affirming. It was beautiful because I just can't imagine Can you imagine writing something when you're, what, 25, 26 years old.

She was even younger when she wrote that.

Probably even younger when she wrote it. To re-inhabit that song as an 80-year-old and have it mean even more.

Tears of fears and feeling proud to say It was an incredible thing to witness.

I mean, there's a beautiful line in that song, Something's lost and something's gained. And the The way she phrased it in the performance I saw, she really elongated the word gained.

But something's gained In my living every day I felt like she was taking in the riches of experience right there on the stage in front of all of us, and it was incredibly transcendently moving. I really don't know what I need I really don't know life at all.

I mean, it's just so rich. I was going to ask you if there was a moment that really messed you up. Was this a moment?

Yes.

Why are you so sheepish about it?

No, I just just re-inhabiting it. Yeah. I mean, it just felt like the profundity of life right there in the Hollywood Bowl.

I'm throwing a tissue at you.

I can't believe we're lucky enough to experience living on Earth with Joni Mitchell, who is still able to interpret her own music 60 years later. Yeah. In a time of doubt and turbulence in the world.

That got absorbed into that night, too.

The personal and the national and political meaning in all of that in that song. I just feel like she's a distiller and processor of our collective experience in a way that like none other. It's all there in the timbre of the voice. It's all there. I just couldn't believe my good fortune.

We'll be right Can we talk about the laughter? She laughed through that whole show.

She laughed after every applause. She has a great laugh, and she laughs sometimes on her recorded song. She has this musical, slightly antic laugh. To me, it evokes, this is very Jewish, it evokes the biblical laughter of Sarah.

Whoa.

Who, when she was told in her 90s that she was going to be mother to Isaac, laughs. Isaac is the name for laughter in Hebrew. It's this deep story of renaissance, of creation, of surprise, of fertility in old age. I felt like the laughter was an ancient laughter of generativeness that came from someplace really deep. I heard that in the laughter.

I think that's it.

She's saying a song about Job, so she appreciates that.

Sasha, I mean, you've been in my life for such a long time. It's wild to have a conversation with you on a microphone, anyway, about a thing we'd be talking about at our desks.

I know. So fun.

So thank you for doing that. I really appreciate it.

Me too. Thank you, Wesley.

Thanks for listening, everybody. Hey, before you go, I just want to tell you that what you just heard is going to happen every week starting next year. It's going to be me talking to other people who I love talking to about everything, art and movies and books and sports and all kinds of things that are happening in the culture. To be the first to know when we launch, sign up for our audio. There's an audio newsletter? I didn't know. I'm going to sign up with you to find what's happening with my show in the audio newsletter. You can find it at nytimes. Com/audionewsletter, which is what I'm going to do right now. All right. This episode was produced by Elissa Dudley edited by Wendy Dore and Paula Schumann, and engineered by Pat McCusker, with production assistance from Kate Lopresti. Special thanks, by the way, to Maddie Macielo and nick Pitman. And thanks to you for listening. Talk to you soon.

That's it for The Daily. I'm Michael Barbaro. Happy holidays and see you tomorrow..