#7 a year of weird chords

with Joni Mitchell

This was a Joni Mitchell year. After a couple of years in rebellion against their hosting Joe Rogan, she came back to Spotify and sailed straight into my top listens.

A weird one is Joni. She had more to carry than everyone else who came to lead the counterculture of the 60s. For one she was the California Girl all the boys were crooning about. Except, as well as her long blonde beflowered hair, she had the power to speak. For two she had suffered intensely, giving up her daughter at 21 because she had no resources to care for her. For three she refused to be adored dishonestly; if people were going to love her they were going to love every part of her. A rare combination of exactly what people expected on the surface and exactly what people needed below.

‘Carey’ is a song I love. Fourth in on her most vulnerable (some say the most vulnerable) album, ‘Blue’. It comes after her radical exposition of love, freedom and intimacy in ‘All I Want’ but before the sorrow and grief of ‘River’.

I love Carey for the same reasons everyone does: it’s a song about adventure. It starts with this same high up questioning chord as All I Want but quickly takes us down into somewhere more rhythmic and rolling. What we learn is that Joni’s been having a time. Filthy fingernails, beach tar stuck to her feet. She’s had to break up with Graham Nash, a great love of her life, and is trying to return to herself by roaming around Europe. In Carey we hear about her two months sleeping in caves on the island of Crete with a “redneck” “mean old daddy” who ‘gave her back her smile but kept her camera to sell’.

Of course I liked this song when I first heard it four years ago when we were all emerging from lockdown like timid little creatures rediscovering our legs. And of course I like this song this year emerging from my own personal lockdown. I like its sense of freedom. I like how it reminds me of when I lived on a sad old beach in Australia and drank wine every night with the street musicians and lived off stolen food from the supermarket.

It’s an ode to restless, young questing: last night I couldn’t sleep: laughing, toasting to nothing, smashing glasses, some devilish force keeping us in this sort of inbetween town, where things seem to mean more and less than they do otherwise: let’s not talk, the night’s a starry dome and they’re playing that scratchy rock and roll.

I like this scene as told by the real life Carey:

The Mermaid Café smelled of coffee, apple pie, sautéing onions, stale beer and tobacco smoke. That night, it was full of shepherds and soldiers drinking the powerful Cretan drink, raki. One soldier went up to Mitchell with a box of Benson & Hedges cigarettes – “a treasure in those days before the global supermarket,” Raditz says. She didn’t want one because she already had a lit cigarette hanging out of her mouth, having smoked since she was nine. But she didn’t know how to refuse.

“And she’s going, ‘No, thank you! No, thank you’”, he says, “and I think, this is getting to be hilarious, because in Crete, when you give someone an affirmation with your head, it’s like this [he tips his head forward a little], and a no is like this [a vigorous backwards]. So she’s doing this mixed signal to the guy, and she says, ‘What can I do?’

“I said, ‘Knock them out of his hand!’ So she goes like that – [he brings his flat palm upward through the air] – “hits the box, cigarettes explode in the air and all over the place, and the taverna becomes silent. And then she just opens up with this incredible laugh from the depths of her womb or some other cavity, and I think if you ask me if I fell in love – I fell in love then, I fell in love with that laugh and where the laugh was coming from.”

You get this sense that here’s how to navigate while being lost. A default to an absurd, cocky kind of nihilism and laughter. It’s a strategy I get and adore. And it’s also a bit lame. I wouldn’t love the song if that’s all it was about.

What I really like about this song is its simultaneous love of and dissatisfaction with this rambling life. What has she won from this rootless experience? What has she learned about home? It’s a song of discovery in three parts. Part One the romance of an unencumbered life; Part Two the sadness of placelessness; Part Three the power and magic of that freedom.

Why did the real Cary become an investment banker? is my question. What could he have learnt from Joni’s “ditty” (his word) if he’d been able to listen? What could all those guys have learned?

Joni’s chords, guitar unfathomably ingeniously tuned, can reach right through what you expect them to do. Whereas Bob Dylan’s progressions essentially served only as scaffolding for his words, Joni wove intricate and mesmerising melodies. Her first agent called them her “weird chords”, she called them “chords of enquiry”. Her songs are in her words ways to hold “unresolved emotionality”, she could sit for days, perfectly practicing Rilke advice to a young poet half a century earlier, being “patient toward all that is unsolved in [her] heart” and learning “love the questions themselves”.

The adventurous impulse is a dangerous one. (The people that drained and destroyed my homeland called themselves “adventurers”.) The coloniality of Joni’s trip to an exotic place to discover herself is an old, white habit that’s not gone anywhere today. Yet, there is a reasonable and powerful longing for more than the most materially affluent generation in human history had. And the longing is not for more stuff. It’s for something else. And the question is, how to hold that longing, and love its source, without giving in to easy answers? And who asks that question better than Joni Mitchell?