![]() Recently, it was showcased in a couple of exquisite live renditions on Joni Mitchell Archives, Vol. And I really enjoyed it.” “Urge for Going” may have been a pivotal composition for Mitchell, yet her own studio version - originally recorded for Blue in 1971 - didn’t come out until 1972 (as the B side to the “You Turn Me On, I’m a Radio” single), and remained unreleased on her albums until 1996, when it appeared on Hits. Chet Atkins … they came up with a song that was a version of my song with a narration and all sorts of wonderful things in it. ![]() Mitchell noted the differences in Hamilton’s cover when she introduced the tune to a Gerde’s Folk City crowd that October: “With the help of Mr. Her friend Tom Rush cut a version of the song that caught the attention of George Hamilton IV, a starchy country singer known for the straight-laced “A White Sportcoat and a Pink Carnation.” Hamilton took a Chet Atkins-produced take to Number Seven on the country charts in 1967, the first time Mitchell had chart success as a songwriter. Mitchell wrote it when she wanted to leave Canada for warmer climes, and in a sense, the song helped get her where she wanted to be. “Urge for Going” keens with a sense of longing, capturing the yearning desire to be somewhere, anywhere different from where you are. ![]() Image Credit: Sulfiati Magnuson/Getty Images And I had this realization … I was a folk singer !” - A.M. And then I listened and … it was beautiful. I didn’t think it was a good description of what I was. “For so long I rebelled against the term, ‘I was never a folk singer.’ I would get pissed off if they put that label on me. “The early stuff, I shouldn’t be such a snob against it,” Mitchell said. “Day After Day” might be simplistic in melody, but it gives a first glimpse of Mitchell’s vocal delivery - clean and whimsical, like if Sandy Denny was raised on the Canadian prairie. ![]() While her earliest known recording is a 1963 cover of “ House of the Rising Sun ,” her first original arrived two years later. In her early days, Mitchell bristled at being labeled a folk singer, but she came around in 2020 with the launch of her Archives series, the first installment of which focused on the period leading up to her 1968 debut. Image Credit: Evening Standard/Getty Images Get the Joni Mitchell Cover Tee at the Rolling Stone Shop. Here, we look back at 50 of her greatest songs. But her influence has only grown, with everyone from Taylor Swift to Herbie Hancock (whose Grammy–winning 2007 Album of the Year, River: The Joni Letters, featured mostly her songs), Björk, and Phoebe Bridgers citing her as a beacon of radical honesty and fearless originality. Her later-era social critiques like “Sex Kills” were as trenchant as her earlier, more autobiographical material.ĭuring the past two decades, Mitchell’s output has slowed - since 1998, she’s released just one new album of original songs. What followed in the Seventies was a staggering string of masterpieces, starting out spare - as on the epochal Blue, home to indelible songs like the buoyant “All I Want” and the somber title track - and growing increasingly involved across albums like Court and Spark, which yielded her biggest hit in the crazy-in-love anthem “Help Me.” By the time of Hejira, with roomy, formally dazzling songs like “Amelia” and “Song for Sharon,” she was firmly on her own terrain, and she would stay there through the Eighties and Nineties, as she modernized her sound without compromising her signature complexity and laser-focused eye for detail. But from the time of her first album, 1968’s Song to a Seagull, Mitchell showed that her plaintive, dazzlingly clear delivery was as unique as her writing. Her early triumphs, poetic and preternaturally wise efforts like “The Circle Game” and “Both Sides, Now,” found fame before she did, via covers by Judy Collins, Buffy Sainte-Marie, and others. She began writing songs in the early Sixties, after growing tired of the territorial Toronto folk scene, in which performers would stake claims on traditional tunes and forbid others to play them. Where so many of her contemporaries built on familiar folk or rock & roll models, Mitchell devised her own musical language, one that could encompass songs as intimate and plainspoken as “River” or as imaginative and epic as “Paprika Plains.” She became famous in the early Seventies as the ultimate confessional singer-songwriter, but she’ll go down as maybe the greatest formal innovator in modern pop. You can’t say it’s folk music or jazz it’s somewhere in between.”Ĭategories don’t apply to Joni Mitchell, and they never have. “I thought, why is it that people are so hard on this stuff? Well, I guess it’s because it’s different,” she said. In May 2021, during an interview with Clive Davis, Joni Mitchell reflected on negative reviews she’s received over the years.
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