Happy birthday to Joni Mitchell!

November 7, 2023

Joni Mitchell, the Canadian singer / songwriter / guitarist / pianist / genius, turns 80 today.

Here she is playing “Big Yellow Taxi” (“You don’t know what you’ve got till it’s gone”):

Rolling Stone recently ranked her the 9th greatest guitarist of all time, saying:

Joni Mitchell has reigned as rock’s ultimate acoustic guitarist for over 50 years, using alternate tunings to devise her own complex guitar language. “I wanted to play the guitar like an orchestra,” she told Rolling Stone in 1999. “I know I have a unique way of playing, but nobody seemed to notice. I found it kinda silly that they kept describing it as folk guitar when it was more like Duke Ellington.” After childhood polio weakened her left hand, she compensated by using over 50 different tunings. “I always thought of the top three strings as a horn section and the bottom three as a rhythm section.”

This is her great 1971 album Blue (free on her official YouTube channel):

Here’s a transcendently beautiful song, “Both Sides Now” (from the same concert as the first video). The way she changes just one word in the last line of each chorus is so moving.