Both Sides Singing

Today we meet an artist who doesn’t blow the doors off with volume or choreography, but with something quieter—and in many ways, just as radical.

A woman alone with a guitar in an open tuning.
A voice that can sound like a bell, a blade, or a diary you were never meant to read.
A songwriter who refuses to keep her feelings, or her harmonies, inside the lines.
But inwardly a mother with empty arms carrying shame that didn't belong to her and grief she poured into songs that people around her could feel even if they didn't know why  both sides now Chelsea morning  
Joni Mitchell.

In this episode, I want to explore:

Her background: prairie girl, painter, survivor.

Her influences: folk clubs, jazz giants, poets, painters, and her own wounds.

Her effect on music: especially the singer-songwriter era and beyond.

Her life’s arc: including the hidden child, the fame she never really trusted, the experiments that confused critics, the silence, the aneurysm, and the astonishing later-life return.

Because if Hendrix reimagined what a guitar could do, Joni Mitchell reimagined what a song could say.

Small-town skies, big inner world

Transcript

Welcome to Celebrate Creativity – Episode 511 Both Sides Singing

My name is George Bartley.

In our last episodes, we stood in the distortion storm of Jimi Hendrix and the immaculate precision of The Supremes.

Today we meet an artist who doesn’t blow the doors off with volume or choreography, but with something quieter—and in many ways, just as radical.

A woman alone with a guitar in an open tuning.
A voice that can sound like a bell, a blade, or a diary you were never meant to read.
A songwriter who refuses to keep her feelings, or her harmonies, inside the lines.
But inwardly a mother with empty arms carrying shame that didn't belong to her and grief she poured into songs that people around her could feel even if they didn't know why  both sides now Chelsea morning  
Joni Mitchell.

In this episode, I want to explore:

Her background: prairie girl, painter, survivor.

Her influences: folk clubs, jazz giants, poets, painters, and her own wounds.

Her effect on music: especially the singer-songwriter era and beyond.

Her life’s arc: including the hidden child, the fame she never really trusted, the experiments that confused critics, the silence, the aneurysm, and the astonishing later-life return.

Because if Hendrix reimagined what a guitar could do, Joni Mitchell reimagined what a song could say.

Small-town skies, big inner world

Joni Mitchell was born Roberta Joan Anderson on November 7, 1943, in Fort Macleod, Alberta, and grew up mostly in Saskatchewan. Big sky country. Harsh winters. A lot of room for the imagination to wander. 

She nearly didn’t become Joni Mitchell at all.

At age nine, she contracted polio and spent weeks in a hospital ward, unsure if she would walk again. That brush with fragility mattered. It gave her a stubbornness, a sense that life was borrowed and therefore to be used.

She loved to draw and paint. She loved to sing. She loved to smoke very early, which she later insisted did more to shape her voice than to ruin it.

Her parents were not in show business. There was no Hollywood pipeline. Just a bright, artistic girl in a small place, teaching herself to turn feeling into form.

One of the keys to Joni is that she never stopped thinking of herself as a painter. Even when she became famous as a musician, she called herself “a painter derailed by circumstance.” 

You can hear that painter’s eye in her lyrics—always noticing angles, colors, reflections.

In the early 1960s, she moved east, chasing the growing folk scene—Calgary, Toronto, then eventually the U.S. coffeehouse circuit. She sang long ballads in smoky rooms, sometimes for almost no money, but with a growing certainty that this was her path. 

Then came a wound that would sit underneath many songs.

In 1965, unmarried, poor, and far from home, she became pregnant. She gave birth to a daughter and, with almost no support or resources, placed the baby for adoption. The existence of that child remained secret to the public for decades.

Outwardly: polite, composed young woman with a guitar.

Inwardly: a mother with empty arms, carrying shame that didn’t belong to her, and grief she poured into songs that people around her could feel even if they didn’t know why.

Shortly after, she married musician Chuck Mitchell; the marriage was brief and unhappy. She took his last name; his shadow did not last, but the name did. Joni Mitchell emerged from that period not as a “pure” folkie, but as someone who had already paid an emotional price for being young, female, and ambitious in that world.

That matters. Because Joni’s great subject is cost.

The cost of love. The cost of leaving. The cost of being free.

The songwriter other singers needed

Before most people heard Joni Mitchell, they heard her through other people.

Her songs traveled ahead of her:

“Urge for Going,” “Chelsea Morning,” “The Circle Game,” “Both Sides Now”—picked up by artists like Tom Rush, Judy Collins, and others. “Both Sides Now” became a hit for Collins in 1968, bringing Joni’s writing into the mainstream before Joni’s own voice did. 

This is another crucial point: she was not discovered because she was cute on a poster; she was discovered because the songs were undeniable.

David Crosby heard her in Florida, brought her to Los Angeles, and helped produce her first album—not by smothering her in arrangements, but by getting out of the way.

Song to a Seagull (1968), Clouds (1969), Ladies of the Canyon (1970): early Joni is often labeled “folk,” but that’s shorthand. Even then, she was twisting chords into unfamiliar shapes, using tunings that made other guitarists feel lost, and writing lyrics that sounded like private thoughts said out loud.

“Both Sides Now”
“Chelsea Morning”
“Woodstock” (which she wrote though she famously wasn’t there)
“Big Yellow Taxi”

These songs are already deeper and stranger than they appear at first listen.

And then—just when many artists would have settled into that winning formula—she took a flying leap.

“Blue”: Joni released Blue and the mask comes off
If earlier records hinted at vulnerability, Blue tore away the filters.

Songs about love, obsession, jealousy, self-sabotage, travel, abortion, longing for the child she had given up—all sung with a voice that could narrow to a fragile thread. At the time, some critics and even fellow musicians were startled. Too confessional. Too exposed. As if there were rules she had forgotten to follow.

In truth, she was writing a new rulebook.

Blue helped define what we now call the singer-songwriter: not just someone who writes and sings, but someone who makes their own emotional bloodstream the territory of the song.

It’s not diary-for-diaries’ sake. It’s crafted. Structured. Full of key changes and melodic choices that mirror the emotional lurches.

Many later artists—male and female—owe a debt to that leap:

Carole King, Jackson Browne, Carly Simon, James Taylor and then onward to Annie Lennox, Tori Amos, Sarah McLachlan,, Taylor Swift, and countless others, consciously or not, walk on stones Joni laid down.

Guitars that don’t behave, melodies that don’t sit still

She is, quietly, one of the most inventive guitar and harmony writers in popular music. She uses dozens of alternate tunings. Not as a parlor trick, but to find chords and resonances that standard tuning resists.

Chords that feel like slightly unstable emotional states—never quite resolved.

Listen to “Cactus Tree” or “All I Want” or “Case of You”: the guitar is not strumming; it’s breathing.

As her career goes on, the harmonies grow more complex. She starts voicing chords the way a pianist or jazz arranger might, but on guitar or dulcimer.

And that restlessness is about to take her somewhere the folk world did not expect.

Court and Spark, and then off the map

After Blue, she continues to evolve:

For the Roses (1972): sharp-eyed about fame, ecology, and the music business.

Then Court and Spark (1974): her most commercially successful album. Songs like “Help Me” and “Free Man in Paris” blend her sophisticated writing with radio-friendly arrangements.

It would have been the perfect place to stay.

She did not stay.

With The Hissing of Summer Lawns (1975), Hejira (1976), and later Don Juan’s Reckless Daughter and Mingus, she moves deeper into jazz-inflected territory.
The chords get stranger. The rhythms loosen. Wayne Shorter’s saxophone appears, She collaborates directly with Charles Mingus near the end of his life. 

Some critics at the time were baffled or hostile.

This wasn’t the Joni they thought they wanted—the mournful woman at the piano.

But this is another of her lasting contributions: she insisted that a female artist could refuse to freeze at the moment of her biggest success. She granted herself the same freedom to experiment that rock critics automatically granted to male artists.

High art or “difficult” Joni? She didn’t care what they called it.

Joni is unsparing—of her partners and of herself. She documents infidelity, insecurity, intoxication, tenderness, and the ways creative people can wound each other without quite meaning to.

“Big Yellow Taxi” might sound breezy, but it’s an ecological alarm. “Banquet,” “For the Roses,” “Sex Kills” later on—all show a mind wrestling with exploitation, media superficiality, and political decay.

By the 1980s and 90s, Mitchell’s relationship with the industry had frayed.

She experimented with more electronic textures, political songs, dense arrangements. Some albums were warmly received; others puzzled fans. She bristled at record company expectations and the reduction of her work to “legend” status instead of present-tense listening. 

She increasingly turned back to painting, to privacy, to her homes in Los Angeles and British Columbia.

And then two major turns:

In the 1990s, she reunited with the daughter she had placed for adoption thirty years earlier—a deeply personal full-circle moment.
In 2015, she suffered a brain aneurysm, a life-threatening event that left her needing intense rehabilitation and, for a time, raised fears she would never fully return to public life or music. 

Many people quietly wrote her story’s final chapter right there.

They were wrong.

In the years following the aneurysm, friends and fellow musicians gathered for what came to be called the “Joni Jams” at her home—informal sessions of songs, community, and recovery.

Those living-room gatherings eventually led to one of the most moving moments in recent music history:

In July 2022, Joni Mitchell—who first played Newport Folk Festival in the 1960s—returned unannounced to its stage, surrounded by younger musicians, singing her songs, even taking a guitar solo. It was her first full public performance in years. 

The set was later released and went on to win a Grammy, part of a broader reassessment and celebration of her work in this century. 

It is hard to overstate how extraordinary that moment is in her narrative:

A woman who gave us Blue, who wandered so far into experimentation that some left her behind, who was nearly ended by illness—sitting in a chair onstage, singing “Both Sides Now” with a voice aged, cracked, and yet carrying everything.

The young woman who once wrote about looking at life from both sides had, at last, truly lived both.

So what, finally, is her impact?

She widened the emotional range of popular song

She made it normal—eventually—for albums to be about specific emotional and moral knots, not just themes that fit on a poster.

Her tunings, chord choices, and melodic leaps opened doors for anyone who wanted to push past three-chord comfort.

You hear her DNA in folk, indie, jazz-adjacent pop, even in adventurous country and art rock.

She wrote, performed, produced, and painted her own covers. She argued loudly, sometimes uncomfortably, for artists retaining control of their work and direction.

And she was A model for women in music. Not a saint. Not “just” an inspiration. A working, flawed, towering artist who refused to shrink herself to fit other people’s categories. For many later musicians, simply knowing Joni Mitchell existed the way she did was permission.

Her songs don’t sit politely in their original decade. They have longevity of meaning.

“Big Yellow Taxi” still stings.
“Case of You” still feels like the transcript of a relationship you thought no one else saw.
“Both Sides Now” means one thing in your twenties, another thing entirely when sung by a woman in her late seventies in a wicker chair at Newport.

Very few catalogs age with that kind of elasticity.

If Jimi Hendrix fractured the sound barrier, and The Supremes perfected the pop machine, Joni Mitchell slipped between those poles and said:

“What if the real rebellion is to tell the truth as precisely as you can bear it?”

A single voice.
Odd chords.
An unwillingness to protect her own image at the expense of honesty.

That’s not a side story in modern music. That’s a central pillar.

On our next step through this series, we’ll stay with that question of voice—how artists shape not just what we hear, but how we think and feel about our own lives—moving into another figure who bent popular expectations in their own unmistakable way.

Until then, I’m George Bartley.
Thank you for listening.