Joni's got a new compilation of songs, Songs of a Prarie Girl -- songs about Canada and her childhood, including Urge for Going. Reminded me immediately of another prarie girl - Connie Kaldor -- who has has long written and sung to and about the Canadian Prarie. One of These Days and Moonlight Grocery are among my most favorite albums.
Take a listen to a lesser-known Canadian woman from the Prarie!
what happened to Chuck Mitchell, the guy who gave Joni her last name? He performs every now and then, but also moved on to other things, other lives.
Chuck Mitchell could hardly be called a careerist. A seminal figure on the '60s folk scene in Michigan, he and his ex-wife have traveled very different paths.Joni Mitchell became a huge star and influential singer-songwriter with hit records and major tours. Chuck Mitchell became an actor, fixed up old houses and continued performing, but he made only two self-released records.
"I'm singularly unfocused. She was intensely focused," laughs the 65-year-old singer-guitarist, who returns to his Michigan folk roots Saturday with a performance for the Flint Folk Music Society at the Greater Flint Arts Council.
Mitchell was a fixture on the Detroit-area folk scene in the 1960s, sharing stages with the likes of Gordon Lightfoot, Dave Van Ronk, Tom Rush, Ramblin' Jack Elliott and his now-famous ex-wife, whom he married in 1966. They performed together and separately at Flint's Sippin Lizzard coffeehouse several times.
"There were lots of interesting clubs, so we worked them all. When Joni first came in on the train from Toronto - I picked her up in Windsor - one thing I enticed her with was that we could get these gigs for $25-$40 a night at places like the Sippin Lizzard, where she was a huge draw. So was I," Mitchell recalled from one of his two homes, a 19th century house on the Mississippi River in southeastern Iowa (he has another home in Wisconsin).
San Francisco Chronicle interview with Joni Mitchell about her retirement from music:
On this afternoon, she talks about how she developed her style, but the most essential quality of a songwriter, she suggests, may be mental toughness. Like Bob Dylan and fellow Canadian Neil Young, Mitchell has fallen in and out of favor over the years. She has been revered, imitated -- and ridiculed for being esoteric and out of touch.Ultimately, she was not tough enough. "Everything in my later career, with few exceptions, has been compared unfavorably to my early work," she says, matter-of-factly. "I've done 16 records hearing people say, 'You're not as good as you used to be. Finally, I said, 'OK, I agree with you.' "
Mitchell announced she was leaving the music business in 2002 and hasn't looked back. "My goal as a writer is more to comfort than to disturb," she says, explaining her decision. "Most of the art created in this particular culture is shallow and shocking, and I can't create music for this social climate."
She pauses. In conversation, she is outspoken, funny, self-deprecating and stimulating. But she doesn't find anything funny about the topic at hand. "There's not much room for subtleties today. It's the shallow, flashy heart that grabs the attention; chase scenes, atrocities."
She doesn't have the same opinion of her songs that us fans do. About Both Sides Now she says:
Even after all this time, she doesn't understand all the excitement over the song. "I thought 'Both Sides Now' was a failure, so what do I know?" she says, smiling. "I was not a good judge of my early material; none of it sounded all that good to me. That's why I wanted to keep moving forward."
Certainly the songwriter is going to have a different perspective on a song, but that sounds like she is trying to distance herself from her past, her early years, the years that everyone compares her current songs to. I understand that. Mitchell has long bemoaned fans and critics wanting her to "paint A Starry Night again, man" (from Miles of Aisles). On that live album she went into a long story about artists repeating themselves. Certainly her affinity is more for painters than songwriters.
Nothing beats a good, poetic lyric. I love Joni Mitchell's Urge for Going, when I heard Tom Rush sing it. Today, I heard her version, which I hadn't heard in a long time, from Hits. That voice, that guitar, those words -- that's why it's hard to listen to newer singer/songwriters, to Mitchell's own new stuff. Locked in nostalgia? Not really. I am just a sucker for that confessional voice -- in poetry and folk songs.
I awoke today and found the frost perched on the town It hovered in a frozen sky, then it gobbled summer down When the sun turns traitor cold and all the trees are shivering in a naked rowI get the urge for going
But I never seem to go
I get the urge for going
When the meadow grass is turning brown
Summertime is falling down and winter is closing in[Urge for Going - Joni Mitchell]
I've long longed for Tom Rush's Circle Game -- he was one of the first to sing Joni's songs in the 1960s. He recorded Tin Angel, Circle Game. Mitchell didn't even record Circle Game until 1970's, Ladies of the Canyon.
Where does the name of this blog come from? One of the mothers of singer/songwriting....Joni Mitchell:
I remember that time you told me you saidfrom Case of You
"Love is touching souls"
Surely you touched mine
'Cause part of you pours out of me
In these lines from time to time
Oh, you're in my blood like holy wine
You taste so bitter and so sweet