The spindles of the banister were gap-toothed fuel for last winter's occupants. In Toronto, she could at least do so quietly, without alarming her relatives back home. In February she gave birth to a baby girl.
Unable to provide for the baby, she placed her daughter, Kelly Dale Anderson, for adoption. The experience remained private for most of her career, but she made allusions to it in several songs, for example " Little Green ," which she performed in the s and recorded eventually for the album Blue. The existence of Mitchell's daughter was not publicly known until , when a roommate from Mitchell's art-school days in the s sold the story of the adoption to a tabloid magazine.
Mitchell and her daughter met in When she could not express herself to the person she wanted to talk to, she became attuned to the whole world and she began to write personally. A few weeks after the birth of her daughter in , Joni Anderson was playing gigs again around Yorkville, beginning to sing original material for the first time, written with her unique open tunings.
There she met Chuck Mitchell, an American folk singer from Michigan. Chuck was immediately attracted to her and impressed by her performance, and he told her that he could get her steady work in the coffeehouses he knew in the United States. In one interview, Mitchell claimed she married Chuck only 36 hours after they met, but it is unclear if they were ever married in Toronto. Sometime in late April, Joni left Canada for the first time, going with Chuck to the US, where the two began playing music together. She said, "I made my dress and bridesmaids' dresses.
We had no money I walked down the aisle brandishing my daisies. The marriage and partnership of Joni and Chuck Mitchell dissolved in early , and Joni moved to New York City to follow her musical path as a solo artist. She performed frequently in coffeehouses and folk clubs and, by this time creating her own material, became well known for her unique songwriting and her innovative guitar style. Folk singer Tom Rush had met Mitchell in Toronto and was impressed with her songwriting ability. He took "Urge for Going" to the popular folk artist Judy Collins , but she was not interested in the song at the time, so Rush recorded it himself.
Collins also covered "Chelsea Morning", another recording that eclipsed Mitchell's own commercial success early on. While Mitchell was playing one night in the Gaslight South, [42] a club in Coconut Grove , Florida, David Crosby walked in and was immediately struck by her ability and her appeal as an artist. Soon she was being managed by Elliot Roberts , who, after being urged by Buffy Sainte-Marie, had first seen her play in a Greenwich Village coffee house.
Crosby convinced a record company to let Mitchell record a solo acoustic album without the folk-rock overdubs in vogue at that time, and his clout earned him a producer's credit in March , when Reprise Records released her debut album, known either as Joni Mitchell or Song to a Seagull. Mitchell toured steadily to promote the LP. The tour helped create eager anticipation for Mitchell's second LP, Clouds , which was released in April This album contained Mitchell's own versions of some of her songs already recorded and performed by other artists: The covers of both LPs, including a self-portrait on Clouds , were designed and painted by Mitchell, a blending of her painting and music that she continued throughout her career.
The following month, Reprise released her third album, Ladies of the Canyon. Mitchell's sound was already beginning to expand beyond the confines of acoustic folk music and toward pop and rock, with more overdubs, percussion, and backing vocals, and for the first time, many songs composed on piano, which became a hallmark of Mitchell's style in her most popular era.
The album also included the already-familiar song "The Circle Game" and the environmental anthem " Big Yellow Taxi ", with its now-famous line, "they paved paradise and put up a parking lot. Ladies of the Canyon was an instant smash on FM radio and sold briskly, eventually becoming Mitchell's first gold album selling over a half million copies. She made a decision to stop touring for a year and just write and paint, yet she was still voted "Top Female Performer" for by Melody Maker , a leading UK pop music magazine. The songs she wrote during the months she took off for travel and life experience appeared on her next album, Blue , released in June Comparing Joni Mitchell's talent to his own, David Crosby said, "By the time she did Blue , she was past me and rushing toward the horizon".
Blue was an almost instant critical and commercial success, peaking in the top 20 in the Billboard Album Charts in September and also hitting the British Top 3.
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The lushly produced " Carey " was the single at the time, but musically, other parts of Blue departed further from the sounds of Ladies of the Canyon. Her most confessional album, Mitchell later said of Blue , "I have, on occasion, sacrificed myself and my own emotional makeup, We all suffer for our loneliness, but at the time of Blue , our pop stars never admitted these things.
Mitchell later remarked, "At that period of my life, I had no personal defenses. I felt like a cellophane wrapper on a pack of cigarettes.
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I felt like I had absolutely no secrets from the world and I couldn't pretend in my life to be strong. Mitchell decided to return to the live stage after the great success of Blue , and she presented new songs on tour which appeared on her next album, her fifth, For the Roses. The album was released in October and immediately zoomed up the charts. Court and Spark , released in January , saw Mitchell begin the flirtation with jazz and jazz fusion that marked her experimental period ahead.
Court and Spark went to No. The LP made Mitchell a widely popular act for perhaps the only time in her career, on the strength of popular tracks such as the rocker "Raised on Robbery", which was released right before Christmas , and " Help Me ", which was released in March of the following year, and became Mitchell's only Top 10 single when it peaked at No. Express as what she called her first real backing group. In February , her tour with the L. Express began, and they received rave notices as they traveled across the United States and Canada during the next two months.
A series of shows at L. In November, Mitchell released that album, Miles of Aisles , a two-record set including all but two songs from the L. Music Center, on March 4, were also included in the set. The live album slowly moved up to No. Mitchell went into the studio in early to record acoustic demos of some songs that she had written since the Court and Spark tour. A few months later she recorded versions of the tunes with her band. Her musical interests were now diverging from both the folk and the pop scene of the era, toward less structured, more jazz-inspired pieces, with a wider range of instruments.
On "The Jungle Line", she made an early effort at sampling a recording of African musicians, something that became more commonplace among Western rock acts in the s. In early , Mitchell traveled with friends who were driving cross country to Maine.
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Afterwards, she drove back to California alone and composed several songs during her journey which featured on her next album, 's Hejira. She stated that "This album was written mostly while I was traveling in the car. That's why there were no piano songs The album climbed to No. Hejira "did not sell as briskly as Mitchell's earlier, more "radio-friendly" albums, [but] its stature in her catalogue has grown over the years".
In she said, "I suppose a lot of people could have written a lot of my other songs, but I feel the songs on Hejira could only have come from me. In mid, Mitchell began work on new recordings that became her first double studio album. Close to completing her contract with Asylum Records, Mitchell felt that this album could be looser in feel than any album she'd done in the past. She invited Pastorius back, and he brought with him fellow members of jazz fusion pioneers Weather Report , including drummer Don Alias and saxophonist Wayne Shorter.
Other songs continued the jazz-rock-folk collisions of Hejira. Mitchell also revived "Jericho", written years earlier a version is found on her live album but never recorded in a studio setting. Don Juan's Reckless Daughter was released in December The album received mixed reviews but still sold relatively well, peaking at No. The cover of the album created its own controversy: Mitchell was featured in several photographs, including one where she was disguised as a black man, wearing a curly afro wig, a white suit and vest, and dark sunglasses.
The character, whom she called Art Nouveau, was based on a pimp who, she says, once complimented her while walking down an LA street — and was a symbol of her turn toward jazz and streetwise lyrics. A few months after the release of Don Juan's Reckless Daughter , Mitchell was contacted by the esteemed jazz composer, bandleader and bassist Charles Mingus , who had heard the orchestrated song "Paprika Plains", and wanted her to work with him.
She began a collaboration with Mingus, who died before the project was completed in She finished the tracks, and the resulting album, Mingus , was released in June , though it was poorly received in the press. Fans were confused over such a major change in Mitchell's overall sound, and though the album topped out at No.
Mitchell's tour to promote Mingus began in August in Oklahoma City and concluded six weeks later with five shows at Los Angeles' Greek Theatre and one at the Santa Barbara County Bowl , where she recorded and filmed the concert. It was her first tour in several years, and with Pastorius, jazz guitarist Pat Metheny , and other members of her band, Mitchell also performed songs from her other jazz-inspired albums.
When the tour ended she began a year of work, turning the tapes from the Santa Barbara County Bowl show into a two-album set and a concert film, both to be called Shadows and Light. Her final release on Asylum Records and her second live double-album, it was released in September , and made it up to No.
For a year and a half, Mitchell worked on the tracks for her next album. During this period she recorded with bassist Larry Klein , whom she married in While the album was being readied for release, her friend David Geffen, founder of Asylum Records , decided to start a new label, Geffen Records. Still distributed by Warner Bros. The album peaked on the Billboard Charts in its fifth week at No.
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A performance from the tour was videotaped and later released on home video and later DVD as Refuge of the Roads. As ended, Mitchell was writing new songs, when she received a suggestion from Geffen that perhaps an outside producer with experience in the modern technical arenas that they wanted to explore might be a worthy addition.
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British synthpop performer and producer Thomas Dolby was brought on board. Of Dolby's role, Mitchell later commented: So on that level we did have some problems He may be able to do it faster. He may be able to do it better, but the fact is that it then wouldn't really be my music. The album that resulted, Dog Eat Dog , released in October , turned out to be only a moderate seller, peaking at No. One of the songs on the album, "Tax Free", created controversy by lambasting " televangelists " and what she saw as a drift to the religious right in American politics.
Mitchell continued experimenting with synthesizers, drum machines and sequencers for the recordings of her next album, 's Chalk Mark in a Rain Storm. The album's first official single, "My Secret Place", was in fact a duet with Gabriel, and just missed the Billboard Hot charts.