`Songs are like tattoos," said Joni Mitchell in the title track from her 1971 album, Blue. She was right. If you peel away from Joni's own flesh three songs that span nearly the entire length of her recording career - Little Green, Chinese Cafe/Unchained Melody and Keep In Touch - you will see one prayer. Namely: an invocation to the daughter she gave up for adoption in 1965. The sense of being branded as a result of bearing a child out-of-wedlock also enables Joni to "identify, deeply" with the women she writes about in The Magdalene Laundries, on the Chieftains' new album, Tears Of Stone. "I know what it is to be stigmatised from that experience but I wasn't incarcerated," Mitchell says, speaking on the phone from her home in California. This is one of the relatively few interviews she has permitted since Rolling Stone "stigmatised" her, circa 1970, by describing her as a groupie.
"The Magdalene Laundries song came about because I read that the Sisters of Our Lady of Charity, in Dublin, had sold off land which led to the discovery of graves marked `Magdelene of the Sorrows' or `Magdelene of the Tears' but didn't have the names of these women. And I could identify with that because when I was pregnant and looking for an institution to hide away in, I went to places like the Salvation Army and I was refused. I ended up living in the attic of a Chinese white slaver and, finally, was warned `get out of there, he's just waiting for you to give birth'. It was fraught with peril; an attic room with no heat and half the banister rails gone, from the previous tenant burning them for warmth."
Joni, born Roberta Joan Anderson in Alberta, Canada was 22 at the time and completely alone. "And completely broke in a strange city, Toronto, where I knew no one. Because I had to get out of my home town to protect my mother, protect her reputation," she explains. "Later, my mother, who is Protestant-Irish, asked why I didn't turn to her and I said `I was in enough trouble already, why would I turn to you? You're the last person I'd tell' ."
Mitchell was recently reunited with her daughter, Kilauren, though this process is "difficult", she says. "Right now she's going through some changes and she has ostracised me, so there's much we haven't worked through. I was prepared for that in the beginning. It's fairly typical. But it came quite late. It's not a fairy tale! It's life. Convoluted." Keep In Touch, which relates to Kilauren in the sense that it focuses on "the beginning unsteadiness in a new relationship" is a track from Joni's latest album, Taming The Tiger.
Little Green, more directly rooted in the pain of the original loss of her daughter, comes from Blue, the chillingly self-revealing album that made Mitchell a seminal figure in the singer-songwriter movement of the early 1970s. Indeed, her towering status in this genre is probably only matched by Bob Dylan, whose song Positively Fourth Street first inspired her to compose music.
"That's where I picked up the gauntlet," she says. "I always wrote poetry but only when I was emotionally disturbed, like when a friend committed suicide in high school, or whatever. But I also loved to dance, so lyrics didn't matter. Tutti Frutti was fine by me! Yet when I heard that Dylan song, I thought `oh, my God! You can write about anything in music!' It was a revelation. But Blue I wrote because I had to. I was emotionally disturbed, again. I'd given up my daughter for adoption, out of poverty, not having the money to feed and clothe and put a roof over her head. Then a few years later, suddenly, I had a house and the means. And I became a public figure. The combination of the two made me begin to withdraw, go inside, question who I was, write more honestly. And if I found something I thought was universal I would write about that.
"I became a seeker. But I was also contemptuous of the pseudo-spirituality in music at the time and realised that if I was to discover any illuminations it would be best to present them in a character that was drawing off myself, vulnerable and lost. I never was setting myself up as a guru! But from Blue onwards I did become a witness of my life, looking for things I thought were pertinent, reflecting the broader social struggle I saw all around me."
So it has continued. Though fans who found it easy to identify with the "confessional" nature of albums such as Blue or Court And Spark definitely had greater difficulties with Joni's more externalised "illuminations" on sadly-neglected works such as The Hissing Of Summer Lawns. The music has evolved from what she once described as an "Anglo-melodic" base into the area of avant garde jazz and rock experimentation. Equally innovative, though rarely praised, is her piano and guitar playing, with the latter defined by the kind of polyphonic harmonic structures that make most of her peers sound like primitives. Add to this a singing voice that is meticulously focused, and you have one of those exceedingly rare recording artists who really can live up to every element in the equation: singer-songwriter.
"All of a sudden things are being noticed," she says. "I am being recognised as a guitar player. And I never did receive praise for my piano playing. Mostly it was for the lyrics and, even then, everything was compared, unfavourably, to Court And Spark. But the first music that actually inspired me to make music was Rachmaninov's Variations on A Theme by Paganini.
"So when I began to write my own melodies they had this sad, romantic quality, even though I had absorbed a lot of rock'n'roll. And, in coffee houses, the sound was definitely Irish-influenced, the ballad, melodic, usually minor keys, like the songs on Tears Of Stone. That's what I started out singing. Then, later, I worked with Charles Mingus and so on. "But the challenge was to synthesise all these musical `heads'. And how this affects a song is that the music comes first, for example, and provides the rhyme form. I don't work from an iambic pentameter mentality. If you write like that it's Dylan, a folk-style structure, not my style at all. "
Joni Mitchell is both a songwriter and a painter, who won a Grammy not just for the music on her 1994 album Turbulent Indigo but also for its artwork. The synthesis of these two particular art forms is most obvious in songs like Car On A Hill and Harlem In Havana. "The difference is that I write my frustration and I paint my joy!" Joni explains. "But, yes, such songs are very much influenced by painting. In Car On A Hill I had Tom (Scott) play the horn like passing cars. I am a pictorial thinker. This separates me from pop musicians, makes me more of a classical musician or a painterly musician like Debussy. Joe Sample (pianist) was on Trouble Child and I said `you're just playing notes, can you play more like a wave, arcing back in on itself to illustrate the line "breaking like the waves on Malibu" '. Wayne Shorter has played high heels clicking on stones for me. He takes to this kind of instruction like a champ, knows exactly what to do. And he plays off a lyric, in terms of onomatopoeic instrumentation. But very few players I've worked with can even conceive of that. And I never use a producer, never let the compositions get away from me in the studio."
Given that she adheres to such a strict aesthetic it is hardly surprising that Joni Mitchell, in the title song from her latest album, refers to a radio that "blared so bland/Every disc/A poker chip/Every song/A one night stand/Formula music/Girlie guile/Genuine junk food for juveniles." Obviously she intends her songs to "stand" not just for one night but for, at least, a century, to be works of substance diametrically opposed to such dross - "tattoos" that are permanent.
"What's selling these days is like a degenerate version of what our generation created. Bob Dylan's son is not as good as Dylan but he outsells him twenty-to-one," she says, laughing mischievously. "Then again, there was this cartoon, which I didn't see, but my friends did. It was based on Taming The Tiger, I think. It had Jewel reading her poetry and the stars behind her spell out `this sucks'! I shouldn't laugh but her stuff is insipid! And all the animals are all around her in this cartoon and a unicorn takes out a knife and tries to commit suicide while she's reading this poetry. Then a tiger pounces on her and drags her off and all you see are blood spurts. Then I come on and say `don't it always seem to be, that you don't know what you got till it's gone?' and the animals all start dancing and everyone's happy!
"It's a dark laugh I got out of that, but I needed it. Particularly at a time when I feel so disillusioned with the music business I want to just get out of it altogether. So, yes, one consolation in all this is knowing that my songs will outlast a lot of the `junk food' that's out there these days."
Tears of Stone, by The Chieftains, is available on the BMG label.
