Joni Mitchell created a musical blueprint for #MeToo
“Will you take me as I am?” Joni Mitchell sang on her ground-breaking 1971 album, Blue. There’s a vulnerability in that openness, but also a resolve. Mitchell wasn’t coming from a place of weakness.
The singer never viewed herself as part of a movement — she was not going to be anyone’s figurehead or representative. But Blue still sounds like a map for the road being traveled by countless women in the #MeToo era.
Mitchell, 74, is unlikely to ever tour again. She suffered a brain aneurysm in 2015 and hasn’t performed in years, but her music still sounds visionary. She was celebrated in David Yaffe’s Reckless Daughter (Sarah Crichton/Farrar, Straus and Giroux), and Blue ranked at the top of a recent National Public Radio list of the 150 greatest albums ever made by women.
Blue contained the stories of women wrestling out from under lives that men tried to define, and was met with a mixture of acclaim and disdain. It was confrontational, filled with songs that dared to speak what so many women silently felt.
When Mitchell asked to be accepted for who she was, it made many listeners uncomfortable. “God, Joan, save something of yourself,” Kris Kristofferson said.
“He was embarrassed by it,” Mitchell recalled in a late ’90s interview.
“People were generally embarrassed by it because people, especially women, didn’t say things like that in pop music.”
By the time Mitchell’s debut album, Song to a Seagull, was released 50 years ago, she had already been writing and playing original songs destined to become classics (“Both Sides Now,” “Chelsea Morning,” “The Circle Game”), enough to fill several albums. David Crosby — in his final days with the Byrds and soon to form Crosby Stills & Nash with Stephen Stills and Graham Nash — brought her to the attention of Reprise Records, and then was assigned to produce the label’s latest signing. His flat production turned Song to a Seagull into a ho-hum debut, but Mitchell emerged with a clearer idea of how to get her music across. She would produce herself from then on, and Clouds (1969) and Ladies of the Canyon (1970) established the Canadian-born artist as the most accomplished singer-songwriter in a California scene overflowing with talent and ambition. Her home served as a kind of artistic sanctuary for members of the Mamas and Papas, CSN, fellow Canadian Neil Young, James Taylor, Jackson Browne, JD Souther and countless others.
But for Mitchell, this was also a time for reckoning. Through talent and pluck she had risen from nowhere to become a star, which didn’t suit her. She ran away — to Crete, where she taught herself to play the Appalachian dulcimer — and then suffered a nervous breakdown. She was haunted by the memory of the daughter she had when she was 21 and placed for adoption while struggling to make a living in the mid-’60s. And she was going through a series of troubled romances with famous or soon-to-famous artists: Nash, Taylor, Leonard Cohen.
A number of songs on Blue drew on the emotional toll taken by these relationships without naming names. Yet even though the album arrived to a generally favorable, if often stunned response, it also engendered its share of snark. Rolling Stone, the loudest voice in rock journalism, dubbed her “Queen of El Lay” and diagrammed her affairs, a blatantly sexist putdown to which countless male rock-star lotharios were never subjected.
Mitchell declined interviews with Rolling Stone for years after, but the damage had been done — a landmark album had somehow been discounted, slotted in the bin with other “confessional” singer-songwriter albums. That was rock-critic shorthand for “weepy, self-pitying, solipsistic and melodramatic.”
But Blue was never that. Mitchell’s personal experiences were woven through the songs, but the personalities weren’t the point — intimacy was. This was, above all, a layered, artistic statement that aspired to say something about the human condition, not wallow in petty gossip.
It was not a traditional singer-songwriter work so much as a soul-jazz album — its cover, tone and introspection evoked Otis Redding’s Otis Blue, Miles Davis’ Kind of Blue, Van Morrison’s Astral Weeks. It spoke through a highly personal language: idiosyncratic guitar tunings, a voice that at times resembled a muted jazz trumpet. It suggested an expressionist painting of emotion and texture on a wide-open canvas that provided room for the music to move. Yet somehow it came packaged as a series of three-minute songs brimming with melodies built to linger, familiar yet mysterious.
It’s also an album about longing and shattered illusions. “The Last Time I Saw Richard” might have come off as irrevocably cynical with a less nuanced singer, but Mitchell’s jazz-like phrasing over her counterpoint piano lines gives it all a bittersweet glow. She pulls off a similar feat on the deeply wounded “Little Green,” about the daughter she thought she might never see again, the performance betraying not a hint of self-pity, only a yearning for what might have been.
Many women who followed in the wake of Blue, understood that Mitchell’s question — “Will you take me as I am?” — was not just a plea, but a demand.