Joni Mitchell: 50 Essential Songs

In her early days, Mitchell bristled at being labeled a folk singer, but she came around in 2020 with the launch of her Archives series, the first installment of which focused on the period leading up to her 1968 debut. While her earliest known recording is a 1963 cover of “House of the Rising Sun,” her first original arrived two years later. “Day After Day” might be simplistic in melody, but it gives a first glimpse of Mitchell’s vocal delivery — clean and whimsical, like if Sandy Denny was raised on the Canadian prairie. “The early stuff, I shouldn’t be such a snob against it,” Mitchell said. “For so long I rebelled against the term, ‘I was never a folk singer.’ I would get pissed off if they put that label on me. I didn’t think it was a good description of what I was. And then I listened and … it was beautiful. It made me forgive my beginnings. And I had this realization … I was a folk singer!” —A.M.

“Urge for Going” keens with a sense of longing, capturing the yearning desire to be somewhere, anywhere different from where you are. Mitchell wrote it when she wanted to leave Canada for warmer climes, and in a sense, the song helped get her where she wanted to be. Her friend Tom Rush cut a version of the song that caught the attention of George Hamilton IV, a starchy country singer known for the straight-laced “A White Sportcoat and a Pink Carnation.” Hamilton took a Chet Atkins-produced take to Number Seven on the country charts in 1967, the first time Mitchell had chart success as a songwriter. Mitchell noted the differences in Hamilton’s cover when she introduced the tune to a Gerde’s Folk City crowd that October: “With the help of Mr. Chet Atkins … they came up with a song that was a version of my song with a narration and all sorts of wonderful things in it. And I really enjoyed it.” “Urge for Going” may have been a pivotal composition for Mitchell, yet her own studio version — originally recorded for Blue in 1971 — didn’t come out until 1972 (as the B side to the “You Turn Me On, I’m a Radio” single), and remained unreleased on her albums until 1996, when it appeared on Hits. Recently, it was showcased in a couple of exquisite live renditions on Joni Mitchell Archives, Vol. 1, versions that capture the innocent spirit driving the song’s sentiments. —S.T.E.

Written in the mid-Sixties and performed during some of Mitchell’s earliest TV appearances, “Night in the City” is a sweet, anticipatory ode to Yorkville Avenue in Toronto, the hub of the local folk scene. “You can stand in what I think of as music puddles, where music sort of hangs from here to here,” she recalled, introducing the tune, “and if you step too far over into the other direction, then you’re into a new music puddle.” “Night in the City” buoyantly rose above David Crosby’s flat production to become a highlight of Mitchell’s debut album. —J.D.

Mitchell’s relationship with a Colorado musician, Michael Durbin, inspired this enchanting reverie about a couple taking a morning walk in the rain. The refined, musically chaste aspect of the performance marks it as an early gem, but it’s the finely observed details in the songwriting — the “oil on the puddles in taffeta patterns/That run down the drain” and Michael drying her off “in a towel or two” — that make the song sweetly intimate. Both Mitchell and the listener sense that Michael will soon be on his way, back to those mountains, which makes the song even more bittersweet. —D.B.

With its gingerly fingerpicked melody and Mitchell’s pure soprano floating above it, the opening track on her first album, Song to a Seagull, set the template for a good deal of what was to come. But “I Had a King” was more than just another pretty, folkish ballad. Beneath its surface beauty lays a pinprick-sharp analysis of her failed first marriage, to someone “who carried me off to his country for marriage too soon.” As Mitchell put it later, “I told a very true story from my own life in the form of a fairy tale, but instead of telling it completely as a fairy tale, I told it part in modern day and part in fairy tale.” The message was clear: Mitchell would not be your average coffeehouse troubadour. —D.B.

When “Both Sides, Now” first became a hit, Mitchell was known as a songwriter but hadn’t yet recorded an album of her own. Judy Collins opened both sides of her 1967 Wildflowers with covers of Mitchell’s songs, and a year later Collins’ recording of “Both Sides, Now” became a Top 10 pop hit. Mitchell herself recorded it on her second album, 1969’s Clouds, and it remains one of her most enduring songs: a meditation on personal ambition and the distance between illusion and reality, with a melody as thoughtful and heartbreaking as its lyric. —D.W.

You meet someone, sense an attraction, perhaps fall in love, and yet wonder if the feeling is mutual or what could happen next. Most of us have found ourselves in such a situation, and Mitchell captured those conflicting and complicated feelings in this song. Performed as early as 1967, it ultimately landed on her sophomore album, 1969’s Clouds, and the passage of time helped. Mitchell’s core inner strength, her incessant fight against wimpiness, emerges more strongly in this version. She admits to some vulnerability, but the firmness with which she delivers the title phrase hints that she wants answers from her lover, too. —D.B.

Legend has it that this exquisite gem from Clouds was inspired by Mitchell meeting Leonard Cohen at the 1967 Newport Folk Festival. David Crosby, who had produced Mitchell’s first album, and also had a relationship with her, feels this often-chastising song was about him. “It was a very ‘goodbye David’ song,” Crosby said. “She sang it while looking right at me, like ‘Did you get it? I’m really mad at you.’ And then she sang it again.” Either way, Mitchell made it clear that she saw through the man in question and was ready to move on. —D.B.

“Chelsea Morning” is a portrait of a happy bohemian existence, performed by artists including Judy Collins, Fairport Convention, and Jennifer Warnes before the author recorded her own version. Mitchell attributed the “rainbow on the wall” mentioned in the song to a mobile that she and her friends built out of bits of colored glass, an apt symbol of the hopeful, pre-fame life she was living at the time in New York’s Chelsea neighborhood. “The sun would hit the mobile and send these moving colors all around the room,” Mitchell later recalled. “As a young girl, I found that to be a thing of beauty.” —D.W.

Mitchell’s career was just starting to take flight, but her restless mind was already second-guessing the value of stardom on this highlight from Ladies of the Canyon, her third LP and first front-to-back classic. She sings proudly about her material success (“I slept last night in a good hotel/I went shopping today for jewels”), but stops short after encountering a clarinet busker on the street. Which performance means more, the one that’s celebrated by millions or the one no one notices over the sound of nearby traffic? Mitchell’s search for true freedom would take her to much more complex and ambitious places in the years that followed, but this bittersweet piano ballad about art and commerce has continued to resonate. It’s no surprise that it’s one of her most frequently covered songs, with everyone from David Crosby to Lana Del Rey saluting Mitchell’s “one-man band by the quick-lunch stand.” —S.V.L.

Ladies of the Canyon closes with a legendary three-song run: “Big Yellow Taxi,” “Woodstock,” and “The Circle Game,” tracks so beloved that they often overshadow the rest of the record. The opener, “Morning Morgantown,” is one of them. Mitchell paints a peaceful portrait of a town at dawn — milk trucks and merchants rise with the sun, while tea and lemonade is sipped in the shade. The guitar twinkles as Mitchell sets the scene, concluding with a cheery send-off: “But the only thing I have to give/To make you smile, to win you with/Are all the mornings still to live/In morning Morgantown.” It’s the warmest of introductions to a successful album — her first to go platinum. —A.M.

Mitchell famously did not attend the music-and-mud–fest in the summer of 1969; co-manager David Geffen insisted she stay behind in New York to make sure she could tape a TV appearance. Her then-beau, Graham Nash, went on to Woodstock with CSNY, who also later released a rocked-out version of the song that reveled in it as “a song and a celebration.” But Mitchell’s own, far-spookier version, played on a bed of simple electric piano, felt only cautiously optimistic. “It should be kind of a curio about the event,” she said about still performing it later in her career. It’s also one of many Mitchell songs that make exquisite use of the double-tracking of her own voice, resulting in a sort of Joni tabernacle choir. —D.B.

Before Taylor Swift’s “August,” there was “Conversation.” Mitchell is the other woman in this love triangle, providing comfort, fruit, and cheese to a man in an unhappy relationship. Mitchell longs to be with him, but she knows he’ll never leave the woman for her. “She only brings him out to show her friends/I want to free him,” she sings. Despite these unfortunate circumstances, the Ladies of the Canyon track is shimmery and buoyant, with Mitchell strumming the acoustic guitar and dancing through the octaves — nothing can get in the way of her good time. “Sometimes a best friend won’t tell a best friend really anything near the truth because they don’t know it themselves,” she said, introducing the song onstage in Philadelphia in 1967. “This is a song about a triangle.” —A.M.

Written on a trip to Hawaii during which a gigantic parking lot harshed Mitchell’s mellow, “Big Yellow Taxi” is a song about environmentalism that conceals a song about a failed romance (take note of the one place in the song where its title appears). “I took a taxi to the hotel, and when I woke up the next morning, I threw back the curtains and saw these beautiful green mountains in the distance,” she later recalled. “Then, I looked down and there was a parking lot as far as the eye could see, and it broke my heart — this blight on paradise.” The original Ladies of the Canyon recording — part folk song, part girl-group goof, with a delicious ending in which Mitchell shows off both extremes of her vocal range and then bursts into giggles — was her first single to dent the pop charts. A live recording from 1974’s Miles of Aisles reached Number 24. —D.W.

Mitchell wasn’t certain if “The Circle Game” was among her best work when she taped a demo recording of it for folk singer Tom Rush in 1966. “As long as kids grow up,” Rush told her, “that song will be relevant.” He recorded it as the title track of his breakthrough 1968 album (which also included two other Mitchell songs), and Mitchell herself recorded it for Ladies of the Canyon. It was one of her first songs to catch on with other musicians — Ian and Sylvia and Buffy Sainte-Marie both recorded memorable early interpretations. Mitchell originally wrote the song to console her friend Neil Young after she heard his lost-youth lament “Sugar Mountain.” “I thought, ‘God, you know, if we get to 21 and there’s nothing after that, that’s a pretty bleak future,’ so I wrote a song for him, and for myself, just to give me some hope,” she said, introducing the tune at a 1970 show. —D.W.

“I am on a lonely road and I am traveling,” Mitchell sings in the iconic opening lines of Blue, then repeats the last word in a rising tide of emotion: “Traveling, traveling, traveling/Looking for something, what can it be?” Thesis statements for classic albums don’t get much pithier. “All I Want” is one of her most playful songs, full of word-drunk rhyming sequences that tumble forward to evoke the rush of a new romance — “I want to talk to you/I want to shampoo you/I want to renew you”; “I want to knit you a sweater/I want to write you a love letter/I want to make you feel better” — and bright, lively acoustic guitar from James Taylor, the guy who was making her feel that way around this time. But it’s also a serious exploration of the jealousy and heartache lurking on the other side of that thrill. She emphasized this aspect of the song in a 1979 Rolling Stone cover interview with Cameron Crowe: “In the state that I was at in my inquiry about life and direction and relationships, I perceived a lot of hate in my heart. … I perceived my inability to love at that point. And it horrified me some.” What she’s searching for on “All I Want” is an ideal kind of relationship, one that’s freeing for everyone involved, and perhaps one that’s too good to exist. For now, the song says, she’s going to have fun looking for it. —S.V.L.

The title track to Mitchell’s greatest album is a somber and brooding message to those who search to fill their void — sometimes dangerously so. Kicking off with a dirge-like piano intro and pulling back into a spare lament, the track is a foggy lullaby for the ages, undoubtedly inspired by her relationship with James Taylor and his heroin addiction. Her fellow Canadian Neil Young mulled over the drug on “The Needle and the Damage Done,” but “Blue” has an extra layer of intensity. It’s an ode to darkness, and the beauty that comes from surrendering to it. It’s also the centerpiece to an album where Mitchell was her most vulnerable, starkly exposing her deepest thoughts and fears for anyone who listened. “I was demanding of myself a deeper and greater honesty, more and more revelation in my work in order to give it back to the people where it goes into their lives, and nourishes them, and changes their direction, and makes lightbulbs go off in their heads, and makes them feel,” she said in 2003. “And it isn’t vague. It strikes against the very nerves of their life, and in order to do that, you have to strike against the very nerves of your own.” —A.M.

Mitchell’s slowest-breaking hit was just another track from her gorgeous 1971 album, Blue, until it appeared in a string of movies three decades later, notably Almost Famous and Love Actually. Over the course of the 2000s, “River,” a wrenching portrait of someone who has just said goodbye to “the best baby [they] ever had,” has become a Christmas standard for a generation whose feelings about the holidays are conflicted at best. “It’s about being lonely at Christmastime, which is one reason for its popularity, I think,” Mitchell told Cameron Crowe of the song in a 2021 L.A. Times interview. “I heard somebody on the radio, or maybe it was in print, but they were ragging on ‘River.’ … ‘This is not a Christmas song!’ And I thought, ‘It’s absolutely a Christmas song. It’s a Christmas song for people who are lonely at Christmas! We need a song like that.'” —D.W.

Seeking a momentary respite from fame and Hollywood, Mitchell traveled to Greece in 1970. On the island of Crete, she met a fellow transplanted American (and local cook and sandal maker) named Cary Raditz. Their friendship and bonding inspired one of Mitchell’s most jubilant and playful songs: “I liked him immediately and we became very good friends,” she told one audience in 1972. The relationship would prove fleeting: “It sure is hard to leave here, Carey, but it’s really not my home,” she sings. But the thrill of adventure and new possibilities powers the song as much as Mitchell’s dulcimer, Stephen Stills’ bass and acoustic guitar, and Russ Kunkel’s conga. —D.B.

“At that period of my life, I had no personal defenses,” Mitchell told Cameron Crowe in Rolling Stone of the era when she recorded Blue. “But the advantage of it in the music was that there were no defenses there either.” On “A Case of You,” Mitchell takes on an intimately conversational tone inspired by her relationship with Leonard Cohen, who told her he was “as constant as the Northern Star.” “I was a young man entranced by this radiant person,” Cohen recalled to David Yaffe in Mitchell’s biography, Reckless Daughter. “She was like a storm.” “A Case of You” is genuinely funny in places (she even breaks into a bit of the Canadian national anthem), genuinely sad in others, and remarkably complicated: The song’s central conceit is one kind of communion (“You said, ‘Love is touching souls’”) becoming another, the lover’s blood as “holy wine.” —D.W.

A live version of this deep cut came out on 2009’s Amchitka — documenting the 1970 Vancouver Greenpeace benefit Mitchell performed with James Taylor — but a studio version, an outtake from the Blue sessions, finally arrived in June 2021, ahead of that album’s 50th anniversary. In the song, Mitchell describes an incident in which a stray cat arrives at her home, and she struggles over taking it inside or letting it be. The lyrics sound almost tortured — “What if he was an angel, and I left him out in the rain?/And what if he was the devil? He’ll be comin’ after me again” — but the upbeat guitar part and buoyant melody give the song an appealingly playful feel. “It was like some sort of temptation,” she said of the feline encounter in 1969. “I wrote a good-Samaritan verse, which was the first thought, to feed him and give him a blanket; and then an innkeeper verse where I hurried him away in spite of my first good intentions, because of myself.” —A.M.

Perhaps because it’s nestled between two masterpieces — Blue and Court and Spark — 1972’s For the Roses is severely underrated. It’s the work of an artist who retreated to the woods, huddled inside a stone cottage (without electricity!), and allowed nature to heal her. With the exception of the hit “You Turn Me On, I’m a Radio,” each track reflects this seclusion, as Mitchell slows down to process recent career success and heartbreak. The all-too-brief penultimate track, “Woman of Heart and Mind,” is one of the record’s highlights, as Mitchell untangles romance and disappointment over delicate instrumentation. “Drive your bargains/Push your papers/Win your medals/Fuck your strangers,” she sings. “Don’t it leave you on the empty side?” —A.M.

When Mitchell’s managers David Geffen and Elliot Roberts started their label Asylum Records, she signed up with them to record 1972’s For the Roses, and Geffen tried to convince Mitchell that she should write a hit single for herself. The result was “You Turn Me On, I’m a Radio,” a DJ-friendly two-and-a-half-minute string of radio-broadcasting metaphors. (“It was almost kind of making fun of my attempt for her to write a hit record,” Geffen later said.) It did, in fact, become a minor hit, but as Mitchell told Vogue, “I was an albums artist, not a singles artist. And that’s got nothing to do with the hit parade.” —D.W.

A beautifully complex song that processes conflicting emotions with warm resignation, “See You Sometimes” is a fare-thee-well to James Taylor that leaves their relationship enticingly open-ended: “I’m not after/A piece of your fortune/And your fame/’Cause I tasted mine/I’d just like to see you sometime,” she sings, availing herself of the kind of sexual self-determination that was still exclusively the province of male rock stars at the time. Taylor responded to the lyrics’ allusion to his suspenders by wearing them on the cover of his next record, Mud Slide Slim. “The cat was out of the bag,” Mitchell said later. —J.D.

On “Lesson in Survival,” the hassle of negotiating a lover’s protective social world becomes a metaphor for the claustrophobia of fame, eventually giving way to a vivid evocation of escape into the isolated beauty of nature: “I can’t seem to make it/With you socially/There’s this reef around me/I’m looking way out at the ocean/Love to see that green water in motion,” Mitchell sings. The melody recalls “The Last Time I Saw Richard,” the devastating song that ends Blue, but here, there’s hope mixed in with the sense that trying to make it work just might be too much, as she lands on a lovely final image of romantic connection, singing “Hands alive/Magnet and iron/The souls.” —J.D.

“John Guerin and I fell in love during the making of Court and Spark,” Mitchell once recalled. “He was a drummer and we courted and sparked.“ Guerin drummed for the L.A. Express, a jazz-fusion combo fronted by saxophonist Tom Scott, who entered Mitchell’s orbit when he played a variety of woodwinds on For the Roses. When Russ Kunkel, the drummer who anchored Blue and For the Roses, passed on playing on Joni’s sixth studio LP, he suggested she play with jazz musicians, advice she took to heart. Guerin’s nimble, elastic rhythms buttressed and nudged Mitchell’s love songs, giving them an expansiveness that never undercut her melodies. He also proved to be a worthy muse, inspiring many of the album’s indelible songs, including the title track. “Court and Spark” captures the excitement and danger of a new relationship, one that arrives with “a madman’s soul.” The infatuation is consuming and insistent, a feeling reflected in how the L.A. Express with Guerin on drums dramatize and empathize with Mitchell’s tale of courtship. —S.T.E.

Mitchell’s highest-charting single — it went to Number Seven pop and topped the easy-listening chart — “Help Me” was the first song she recorded with jazz-fusion group the L.A. Express for her 1974 album, Court and Spark. As direct as its lyric is — “We love our lovin’/But not like we love our freedom,” she sings, portraying a pair who are equally skittish about settling down — it’s an unusually complicated piece of music, even by Mitchell’s standards. “The harmonic structures that she used — it was so unique,” bassist Max Bennett remembered. “She was really good at producing herself.” Another admirer, Prince, went on to quote from the song in Sign o’ the Times track “The Ballad of Dorothy Parker.“ —D.W.

A minute and a half into “The Same Situation,” Mitchell sends up a prayer over a dutiful piano: “I said, ‘Send me somebody/Who’s strong and somewhat sincere.’” In just two lines, she gets to the very heart of Court and Spark, a quest for love in glittery Los Angeles — a setting only Mitchell could make so relatable. In the song, she finds herself questioning her beauty and worthiness. Many of the album’s songs are rumored to be about Warren Beatty (making this one a distant cousin of “You’re So Vain”), but Mitchell has never confirmed the subject of “The Same Situation.” “I don’t want to name names or kiss and tell, but basically it is a portrait of a Hollywood bachelor and the parade of women through his life … how he toys with yet another one,” she said. “So many women have been in this position … being vulnerable at a time when you need affection or are searching for love, and you fall into the company of a Don Juan.” —A.M.

Few artists have captured Los Angeles in the early Seventies as perfectly as Mitchell did on Court and Spark, and “People’s Parties” is where she gets to the heart of that portrayal. The song finds her unraveling the many facets of Hollywood — its glamour, decadence, and facade — in just a few words, studying others’ emotions while exposing her own. “I’m just living on nerves and feelings/With a weak and a lazy mind,” she sings. “And coming to people’s parties/Fumbling deaf dumb and blind.” Introducing the song onstage in 1974, Mitchell described the evening it was inspired by. “This is a strange kind of party — it was in a room with mirrors on the ceilings and on the floors and the walls,” she said. “And it was a candlelit supper actually, so with all of this reflection going on, it was almost like intergalactic travel. Towards the end of the evening I got the feeling that I was sort of transparent. I’d been smiling so much at everybody all night that I had the charley horses in my cheeks, and it seemed like everybody was trying so hard, you know?” —A.M.

Perhaps one of the least complain-y songs ever written about the music business, “Free Man in Paris” is Mitchell’s imagining of her friend, record exec David Geffen, on vacation and loving life away from the office — one California rock aristocrat celebrating another. The song was inspired by a vacation Mitchell had taken with Geffen, Robbie Robertson of the Band, and Roberston’s wife Dominique, during which Geffen’s inability to produce enough cash to pay a hefty hotel almost landed him in jail — “This gives a whole other meaning to ‘free man in Paris,’” Robertson recalled. Geffen wasn’t sure the song had much potential as a single, but it still made the Top 40. —J.D.

“Down to You” arrives just over halfway through Court and Spark, yet it feels like the album’s emotional denouement. Over the course of five minutes, Mitchell explores the aftermath of a fling, coming to terms with how “everything comes and goes” and how you’re responsible for the choices you make. The winding ballad reaches a sudden crescendo when David Crosby’s and Susan Webb’s overdubbed harmonies lift the line “love is gone” with the transcendence of a gospel choir. This vivid burst of color is one of the many instrumental twists in “Down to You,” a track so beautifully constructed it earned a Grammy for Best Vocal Arrangement, an award she shared with L.A. Express member Tom Scott. This masterpiece was fated to remain locked to the record. Mitchell performed “Down to You” only once in concert, singing it with the London Symphony Orchestra in 1974. She improvised, got lost in the music, stopped playing, and never would attempt to perform it live again. —S.T.E.

As an album, The Hissing of Summer Lawns found Mitchell turning her focus outward, trading personal introspection for wry observation. Fittingly, its title track crystallized this transition. Inspired by a visit to the home of Jose Feliciano, a new neighbor of hers in the Los Angeles hills, “The Hissing of Summer Lawns” is a deft, incisive portrait of a culture unaware of its own ennui. It’s a song only an outsider could’ve written. Mitchell zeroed in on the stilted relationship between Feliciano and his wife, capturing vivid details, such as the “blue pools in the squinting sun” and “a roomful of Chippendale that nobody sits in.” Her words flow like poetry, and the music is also fluid and flexible, an assured assimilation of jazz fusion written in conjunction with John Guerin. —S.T.E.

Mitchell opens The Hissing of Summer Lawns with a gem that could easily have fit on Court and Spark (or even as the B side to “Help Me”), on which acoustic and electric guitars meet at the intersection of jazz and glossy pop. She harks back to the era of Marlon Brando and the Everly Brothers, as young love blooms at dance halls and pinball arcades — always to the sound of rock & roll. Mitchell takes us through these downtown nights as James Taylor, Graham Nash, and David Crosby lend a hand on backing vocals, bringing a quintessential Seventies flavor to a song set two decades earlier. (She could have kept The Hissing of Summer Lawns in this sonic realm, but she veered in another direction entirely for the next track, where she explored the Moog and sampled the Drummers of Burundi on “The Jungle Line” — classic Joni.) —A.M.

By The Hissing of Summer Lawns, Mitchell’s music was beginning to rise to new, jazz-suffused levels of sophistication. That makeover proved a perfect match for this tale of a loveless marriage between two bourgeoise one-percenters. The helicopters mentioned in “Woodstock” are now carrying the wealthy “to the Pan Am roof/like a dragonfly on a tomb.” As she did on “Twisted,” from Court and Spark, Mitchell revisits the Lambert, Hendricks, and Ross catalog by inserting part of the Fifties jazz standard “Centerpiece” into her song — with the original’s “happiness will never cease” line now sounding impossibly sarcastic. “Harry’s House/Centerpiece” would be the first of many signs of the way Mitchell could step out of herself and still create compelling narratives. —D.B.

The opening track of 1976’s Hejira introduced a new element to Mitchell’s records: jazz musician Jaco Pastorius, whose fretless bass pirouettes and somersaults around her open-tuned guitar strumming. (“To get enough meat to hold his sound, I doubled the guitar,” she later explained.) “Coyote” has long, tricky, rattling verses that chronicle a romance with a womanizing man whose life is very different from the narrator’s. The inspiration: playwright Sam Shepard, whom Mitchell met during her 1975 stint on the Rolling Thunder Revue. The song had already been a highlight of her live repertoire for several years when she recorded it — she’d performed it at the Band’s 1976 farewell concert, the Last Waltz. —D.W.

Hejira starts strong with the playful “Coyote,” but Mitchell’s mid-Seventies masterpiece really hits its jazzy, reflective stride with track two. She’s alone again by now, lost in her own thoughts on a long drive through the desert, when she spies a squad of jets in the sky above her. A few years earlier, when she wrote “Woodstock,” a similar sight made her think of butterflies; this time, she considers a couple of poetic symbols (“It was the hexagram of the heavens/It was the strings of my guitar”) before shaking her head: “Amelia, it was just a false alarm.” That would be Amelia Earhart, the pioneering solo aviator whose story reminds Mitchell that soaring above everyone else can be a lonely job and that life is full of mirages. “Maybe I’ve never really loved/I guess that is the truth/I’ve spent my whole life in clouds at icy altitudes,” she sings, in another masterful reference to the early creative triumphs that have left her feeling disillusioned in her thirties. —S.V.L.

This 10-verse, no-chorus stunner from Side Two of Hejira begins as a postcard from New York addressed to Sharon Bell, a close friend from Mitchell’s childhood in small-town Saskatchewan who chose a more traditional path for her adult life. Mitchell, nursing her wounds after a breakup, has headed east to the big city to find the album’s core questions staring back wherever she looks: “I went to Staten Island, Sharon/To buy myself a mandolin/And I saw the long white dress of love/On a storefront mannequin.” Is it possible to find romantic fulfillment while also pursuing artistic immortality? Is that happy ending even something worth window-shopping for? Mitchell wanders New York’s five boroughs, visits a skating rink and a psychic (“She lit a candle for my love luck/And 18 bucks went up in smoke”), tries to weigh the pain that relationships can cause against the ache of being without one. She ends on a note of tentative hope: “You sing for your friends and your family/I’ll walk green pastures by and by.” —S.V.L.

Along with peers like Jackson Browne, Mitchell began pivoting her songwriting from the personal to the political, and her music from radio-friendly to more experimental. This highlight from one of her most demanding albums, 1977’s Don Juan’s Reckless Daughter, is a trancelike meditation on, in part, the slave trade: “Walter Raleigh and Chris Columbus/Come a-marching out of the waves/And claim the beach and all concessions/In the name of the suntan slave,” she sing-chants over a bare-boned percussion arrangement. With the song, Mitchell staked her own claim to pursuing whatever interests commanded her, no matter what impact they might have on her popularity or record sales. —D.B.

A genuine epic, running a full 16 minutes — the entirety of Side Two in the original double-LP incarnation of Don Juan’s Reckless Daughter — “Paprika Plains” has its genesis in an offhand remark Bob Dylan made to Mitchell at the wrap party Paul McCartney threw on the Queen Mary after completing the recording of Venus and Mars. Alone with Mitchell for a moment, Dylan asked her what she would paint of the room they were in. She said, “I’d paint the mirrored ball spinning, I’d paint the women in the washroom, the band.” This later came back to her in a dream, and she strung these impressions together with fevered reminiscences of childhood. Mitchell’s sketches in the opening verses seem familiar enough, but then they start to elongate and finally the music descends into an elaborate, orchestra-backed instrumental passage, cut together from four separate sessions. Listen closely and it’s possible to hear the orchestra wobble out of tune, something Charles Mingus brought up to Mitchell in his first meetings with her ahead of their 1979 collaborative album. But the bassist loved the composition — it was the first song that suggested to him he was a kindred spirit with the maverick singer-songwriter. —S.T.E.

From her decades-long partnerships with Herbie Hancock and Wayne Shorter to the band she led with Jaco Pastorius and Pat Metheny, Mitchell’s serious, sustained engagement with jazz artists has made her almost unique in the rock and pop sphere. It’s safe to say that no one else could have made Mingus, her collaboration with the titular bass legend, as he was suffering from ALS and unable to play. In addition to giving her new compositions to pen lyrics for, he also asked her to take a shot at one of his signature tunes, his deep-blue 1959 elegy for tenor-sax legend Lester Young. Riffing on the melody and saxophonist John Handy’s solo on the original version and backed by an all-star band including Hancock, Shorter, and Pastorius, Mitchell memorializes Young not just as “the sweetest singing music man” but as an artist plagued and demoralized by racism: “A bright star/In a dark age/When the bandstands had a thousand ways/Of refusing a black man admission.” “[Ironically], it’s a more natural form of music for me as a singer than my own music because you have such creative liberty within the bar,” she told Rolling Stone’s Ben Sidran at the time of working with Mingus. “After this, rock & roll is like a metronome.” —H.S.

Fresh off the completion of his debut film, Diner, director Barry Levinson approached nine female artists to create short films about the subject of love. Mitchell jumped at the chance, reviving her pimp persona Art Nouveau — a controversial relic from the Don Juan’s Reckless Daughter era — for a 10-minute movie she wrote and directed. Levinson’s project never materialized, but Mitchell’s short generated “Love,” one of her most enduring songs of the 1980s. Based on the biblical verse 1 Corinthians 13, “Love” speaks neither to romantic or sexual love — the elements Levinson was interested in exploring — but rather to the nourishing nature of kindness and generosity. Mitchell took liberties with the verse she found in a hotel-room Gideons Bible. ”I eliminated some of the archaic verses and images of the body being burned, of resurrection and the return of Christ, and did some shuffling to get rhymes and half rhymes,” she said at the time. “And I changed the ‘charity,’ in ‘faith, hope and charity,’ to ‘love,’ because nowadays charity has come to mean tax shelters.” The alterations added ambiguity to otherwise precise language, a trick that gave “Love” lasting power. —S.T.E.

Designed as a clanging, impassioned protest against the Reagan era, 1985’s Dog Eat Dog found Joni Mitchell embracing the electronic production of the mid-1980s, going so far as to bring in synth-pop pioneer Thomas Dolby as a production consultant. “She felt that the guitar twang was not the right way to frame what she was feeling about the times,” Dolby recalled to Mitchell biographer David Yaffe. “She needed to use the tools of the times to throw it back in their faces.” Buried deep within the record lay the spare, haunting “Ethiopia.” A blunt, unflinching portrait of a country ravaged by famine, “Ethiopia” sounds suspended in time even if it was about a particular crisis of the moment. “Ethiopia” earned an unexpected fan in Nina Simone. Mitchell bumped into the iconic singer-pianist while shopping at the Beverly Center in L.A. Simone swept Mitchell off her feet and said only: “Joni Mitchell! ‘Ethiopia!’” —S.T.E.

Larry Klein, who Mitchell married in 1982, played on So, Peter Gabriel’s moody 1986 blockbuster, beginning an association that led to Mitchell heading to Gabriel’s Ashcombe House studio to record Chalk Mark in a Rain Storm. A fast bond with Gabriel developed, and he duetted with her on “My Secret Place.” The pair sing as if they’ve been partners for a while, weaving between and completing each other’s phrases. “It’s a love beginning song,” Mitchell said at the time of the balmy, blissed-out track. “The song’s about the threshold of intimacy. It’s a shared thing so I wanted it to be like the Song of Solomon, where you can’t tell what gender it is. It’s the uniting spirit of two people at the beginning of a relationship.” —S.T.E.

Taking her from a sock-hop party of her youth to more skeptical middle age, this single from 1991’s Night Ride Home finds Mitchell grappling with the dreams of the Sixties and the realities of several decades later: “We had hope/The world held promise,” she sings, before adding, “But then absurdity came over me/And I longed to lose control.” As she said at the time, “The question now is whether people can enjoy the singing of a middle-aged woman, even though the consensus is that if you don’t evoke wet dreams, you’re in trouble.” The sinuous track conjures the folk roots of Michell’s early years but adds a dollop of world-music syncopation and a deeper, slightly throatier voice. A modest hit in her native Canada, it didn’t do nearly as well in the States and deserved a better commercial fate. —D.B.

Unabashedly romantic, “Night Ride Home” captures a specific place in time. “That’s a sweet song that was written in Hawaii when Larry [Klein] and I were driving along on the Fourth of July to this house we had rented,” Mitchell recalled to Mojo in 2019. “There was this big moon and the clouds moving across the island so quickly. Everything looked so magical … even the white line on the highway. It was as if someone had sprinkled fairy dust all around.” Mitchell cut the song late into her marriage to Klein — the pair would divorce in 1992 — but at that point it was a few years old; she performed it under the title “Fourth of July” during the supporting tour for Chalk Mark in a Rain Storm. Appropriately, the song seems to exist somewhat out of time, a vivid yet subdued document of a hushed, special moment. —S.T.E.

Mitchell was always an expert observer, and on “Sex Kills,” she panned out and examined society as a whole. Singing atop a brooding electro-pop soundscape, complete with squalls of noise guitar, Mitchell surveyed early-Nineties America and painted a picture that now seems depressingly prophetic: “All these jack-offs at the office/The rapist in the pool/Oh, and the tragedies in the nurseries/Little kids packin’ guns to school.” Each verse lands on the blunt statement that “sex sells everything, and sex kills.” The song was inspired not just by what Mitchell was seeing around her but the music she was hearing. “I think there is more ugliness,” she said at the time. “I think it’s on the increase. Especially towards women. I’ve never been a feminist, but we haven’t had pop songs up until recently that were so aggressively dangerous to women.” —H.S.

In 1993, news broke that 155 bodies of so-called “fallen women” had been found buried in a mass grave in Dublin on the site of one of Ireland’s Magdalene Laundries, asylums run by the Catholic Church starting in the 18th century. Mitchell happened upon the story in a newspaper and turned it into this suitably heartbreaking ballad from her excellent 1994 album, Turbulent Indigo, sung from the perspective of a Laundry resident sent there against her will after being “branded as a jezebel.” “Why do they call this heartless place/Our Lady of Charity?” she asks, showing that she was just as incisive in her critiques of religion as in matters of the heart. —H.S.

Allison Anders hired Larry Klein as the music supervisor for Grace of My Heart, a musical period piece set during the glory days of the Brill Building, centered on a character who loosely recalled Carole King. Klein approached Joni Mitchell to write a song of heartbreak reminiscent of her Blue period. Mitchell initially balked at writing a song on spec, claiming she couldn’t conjure feelings she wasn’t currently experiencing. Then, her cat Nietzsche went missing. As she recalled, she yelled at Nietzsche after he “peed all over a couple of chairs,” so she threw him out and he disappeared for more than two weeks, an interim which allowed her to summon sadness that flows through “Man From Mars.” In its demo form, heard only on the initial pressing of the film’s soundtrack, it evokes the early 1970s, but she dressed up the song and softened it for her version on 1998’s Taming the Tiger. Underneath the gloss, the sorrow is still apparent, but it’s on the demo version where Mitchell channels the spirit of her early masterpieces. —S.T.E.

In her later years, Mitchell revisited songs she’d recorded much earlier, but also continued to experiment with new ways of writing and recording. Her last studio album to date is 2007’s Shine, recorded five years after she had declared that she was quitting music. Its opening track is this elegantly winding instrumental, built around the unmistakable sound of Mitchell’s piano playing. “One Week Last Summer” won the Grammy for Best Pop Instrumental Performance in 2008, the same year that Herbie Hancock’s River: The Joni Letters, a collection of Mitchell covers, won Album of the Year. —D.W.

This track from Mitchell’s most recent album of new material, Shine, shares a title with Tennessee Williams’ play for a reason. As Mitchell said at the time, “This is loosely based on the film of the same name” — about a defrocked priest accused of statutory rape — and she added that it fit in “with the theological/ecological theme of the album.” Arriving roughly 40 years after her debut, the song demonstrated that Mitchell could remain a commanding presence on record. Both the lyric and the song’s blend of electronic and acoustic accompaniment also made it clear that pushing herself — and ignoring her audience’s expectations — remained on her creative front burner. —D.B.