Joni Mitchell - Both Sides Now

Joni Mitchell: Both Sides Now traces the life and music of one of the most original singer-songwriters of the twentieth century: a woman who entered the public imagination as a delicate folk troubadour and then spent the rest of her career making it increasingly difficult for the record industry to decide which shelf to put her on.

Brian Hinton follows Mitchell from her childhood in the Canadian prairies, through a teenage struggle with polio, art-school ambitions, early performances in coffee houses and an unsuccessful marriage to fellow folk singer Chuck Mitchell. She arrived in America carrying songs of unusual emotional intelligence and soon attracted the attention of performers such as Judy Collins, who turned Both Sides, Now into a hit before much of the public knew who had written it. This was useful publicity, although it established the slightly inconvenient pattern of other people becoming commercially successful with Joni Mitchell’s songs.

Her own recordings rapidly made her one of the defining figures of the late-1960s and early-1970s singer-songwriter movement. Albums including Clouds, Ladies of the Canyon, Blue and For the Roses transformed private experience into music of startling intimacy. Love affairs, loneliness, freedom and regret were examined in meticulous detail, often while the gentlemen concerned were still within hearing distance. Where other songwriters offered romance, Mitchell supplied the emotional accounts, itemised and overdue.

Hinton explores the friendships, relationships and creative circles surrounding Mitchell, including her connections with David Crosby, Graham Nash, James Taylor and the musicians of California’s Laurel Canyon scene. It was a world of artistic freedom, expensive guitars and people writing songs about one another faster than listeners could establish who had left whom. Mitchell stood at its centre while also remaining determinedly apart: admired, imitated and occasionally resented for possessing both the talent and the alarming habit of using it exactly as she pleased.

Success with Blue and Court and Spark might have encouraged a more accommodating artist to repeat the formula indefinitely. Mitchell instead moved towards jazz, complex arrangements and increasingly experimental work with musicians such as Jaco Pastorius, Wayne Shorter and Charles Mingus. The audiences who wanted another wistful acoustic confession were presented with shifting rhythms, unusual tunings and songs requiring rather more concentration than the record company’s marketing department considered medically advisable.

The book also considers Mitchell the painter, poet and fiercely independent artist, for whom an album was not simply a collection of songs but a complete visual and musical statement. She designed much of her own artwork, constantly altered her guitar tunings and resisted the expectations placed upon female performers. The industry was comfortable with women being confessional, provided they remained decorative and repeated the successful confession on schedule. Mitchell declined.

Published in 1996, Both Sides Now surveys a career already spanning folk, rock, pop and jazz, examining the records, the relationships and the restless intelligence behind them. Hinton presents Mitchell as both a product of her era and one of the artists who escaped its boundaries: a musician capable of writing songs that feel intimately personal while remaining mysteriously applicable to everybody who hears them.

This Sanctuary edition is in As New condition—clean, fresh and apparently spared the emotional weather endured by the people in the songs. An excellent copy for Joni Mitchell admirers, students of popular music and anyone who has looked at love from both sides and concluded that neither side came with adequate instructions.

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