Mozipedia by Simon Goddard

Author:Simon Goddard
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781407028842
Publisher: Ebury Press

Mitchell, Joni, ‘The greatest lyricist that has ever lived’ according to Morrissey, who believes Mitchell to be ‘very underrated’. Customarily labelled the most important ‘female singer/songwriter’ of the 1970s, her genius transcends any such gender ghettoising.

Born in Canada as Roberta Joan Anderson (Mitchell was the surname of her first husband whom she married in 1965 and divorced in 1967), before making her 1968 debut album Song To A Seagull her work was already being recorded by other folk singers such as Buffy SAINTE-MARIE. Her second, 1969’s Clouds, established her as a prolific musical talent, albeit one immediately stereotyped as the acoustic-strumming ‘daughter who never left home’, an image cemented by 1970’s Ladies Of The Canyon featuring her career albatross, ‘Big Yellow Taxi’. Morrissey ‘came in on’ her fourth album, 1971’s Blue, a deeply confessional set partly inspired by the end of her recent relationship with Salford lad Graham Nash.

Mitchell’s biggest influence upon Morrissey is what he refers to as her ‘second period’ in the mid-70s and a specific trio of lyrically epic, musically ambitious albums marked by her growing interest in complex guitar tunings and modern jazz: 1975’s The Hissing Of Summer Lawns (the first to ‘completely captivate’ Morrissey), 1976’s brooding, introspective Hejira and especially the 1977 double Don Juan’s Reckless Daughter. ‘Everything about that record completely mesmerises me,’ said Morrissey, ‘and when I first saw the lyric sheet and the vastness of these words I actually had to close the record. I thought, “I have to leave this for another day, this is just … a monster!”’

All three albums contain either lyrical motifs or whole stanzas which have evidently shaped Morrissey’s own. Summer Lawns’ ‘The Jungle Line’, with its ‘working girl’ in ‘a low-cut blouse’ is echoed in ‘MALADJUSTED’. Similarly, Hejira’s ‘Amelia’ with its repeated ‘false alarm’ was raw clay to be moulded into ‘LAST NIGHT I DREAMT THAT SOMEBODY LOVED ME’. But it’s the ‘monster’ of Don Juan’s Reckless Daughter which has provided Morrissey with the richest ore. His first noticeable ‘Mitchell-isms’ crop up towards the end of The Smiths. ‘SHOPLIFTERS OF THE WORLD UNITE’ contains a conspicuously comparable line with the album’s title track: ‘Last night the ghost of my old ideals reran on channel five.’ Given the circumstances, it could also be argued that its corresponding B-side, ‘HALF A PERSON’, was just as mindful of Mitchell’s opening verse in which she records ‘I came out two days on your tail’. The impact of ‘Don Juan’s Reckless Daughter’ on Morrissey was compounded by 1988’s ‘SISTER I’M A POET’, mirroring Mitchell’s phrase ‘They love the romance of the crime’. More obvious still is the album’s closing track, ‘The Silky Veils Of Ardor’, an apparent model for ‘SEASICK, YET STILL DOCKED’ with more lyrical repercussions than can be freely quoted.

In October 1996, Mitchell released two simultaneous best-of compilations, Hits and Misses, her first career retrospective after 15 albums in 18 years. To mark its release, Reprise Records, also Morrissey’s US label at the time, invited him to interview Mitchell about her work for a promotional CD.

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