Joni Mitchell
Her mostly open-tunings one-of-a-kind guitar playing occupies a field of its own.
In Martin Scorsese’s documentary Rolling Thunder Revue, there’s a great scene from a picking party at singer-songwriter Gordon Lightfoot’s house in 1975. Lightfoot, Dylan and Roger McGuinn, guitars in hand, are gathered around Joni Mitchell, who’s trying out a new song of hers called Coyote. As she starts, you see the guys doing what guitar players do, checking her hands to get their bearings. But it’s like trying to throw a lasso around a meteor. Mitchell’s left hand moves through unfamiliar shapes. Her right hand brushes and flicks the strings in a deceptively non-linear rhythm. By the second verse the guys have given up and are noodling quietly behind her. They look slightly embarrassed. ‘We just come from such different sets of circumstances…’ she sings.
When it comes to guitar, those different circumstances started flowering in the folk clubs in the late 60s, as she distanced from gardenvariety strummers and finger-pickers. From the first song on her debut album, I Had A King, Mitchell was tuning in to her own guitar style. Literally. Everyone knows she uses open tunings. But she’s developed her own distinct harmonic lexicon with them. “In the beginning, I built the repertoire of the open major tunings that the old black blues guys came up with,” she said on her website. “Then going between them I started to get more ‘modern’ chords, for lack of a better word.”
But why open tunings?
“It’s only through error that discovery is made,” she said. “And in order to discover you have to set up some sort of situation with a random element. The more I can surprise myself, the more I’ll stay in this business. You’re constantly pulling the rug out from under yourself, so you don’t get a chance to settle into any kind of formula.”
Mitchell eventually developed more than 50 unique tunings. It has allowed her to play the guitar more like a piano. Or more like an easel. The connection between her talents as a painter and a guitarist is tangible. Those ‘modern’ chords she mentioned often sound like the bursts of color and overlapping washes on her canvases. And watching the fluidity of her right hand, you can almost imagine it holding a brush. The overall effect is perfectly complementary to her octave-ranging voice. Just listen to the languid syncopations and offbeat accents on Don’t Interrupt The Sorrow, the ethereal finger-picking of Amelia or the lively stringed conversation with Jaco Pastorius’s bass on God Must Be a Boogie Man.
Because she’s such a formidable songwriter and singer, her guitar playing often gets overlooked. But that hasn’t prevented it from influencing a generation of singer-songwriters, including Patty Griffin, Shawn Colvin and, most recently, Madison Cunningham. But Mitchell’s greatest torchbearer may have been Prince. Prince advised budding guitarists to learn rhythm chops by listening to Ike Turner, then said: “Put any colours you’ve learned from Joni Mitchell on top of that, and then you’ve got something!”
Listen to this: Amelia (Joni Mitchell, Hejira, 1976)