Here is how I fell in love with Joni Mitchell.
It is a predictable kind of story one that begins when I got my heart broken by a boy for the first time when I was fifteen years old. I’d had heartache from unrequited crushes before that, but this was the first boy I liked who actually liked me back. Until he didn’t.
His name was Richard* and one night, moping in the bathtub with CBC radio playing on our water-proof shower radio (thank you, Consumers Distributing) I heard the song “The Last Time I Saw Richard”. Listening to the lyrics I figured that since Richard’s reason for breaking up with me was that I was “too weird” then he probably WOULD get married to a figure skater and buy her a dishwasher and a coffee percolator. It seemed an appropriate fate for him.
At the time, my favourite weekend activity was to take the bus and subway from the suburbs into the downtown core of Toronto to go shopping for new cassettes at Sam the Record Man. I can not adequately convey the pure joy of walking into that absolutely enormous music store. It was magic. If someone bottled the smell of that old building full of vinyl and plastic and curling posters and the sweat of a thousand music fans into a perfume I would wear it every day.
So away I went on the boring bus and the more-exciting-and-efficient subway, to Sam the Record Man where I located the Joni Mitchell section. I looked at the song listings for each album until I found the one with the Richard song on it. Blue. I didn’t know it was considered to be one of her greatest albums. I didn’t even know what any of the other songs sounded like. I bought it, slid it immediately into my ever-present Walkman, and listened to it- pretty much non-stop- for the rest of the year.
My parents had Joni Mitchell records, bought as they were released in the 70s. But by the time I was mooning over high school boys, they’d boxed their record collection and put in the basement, listening instead to CDs on the tall multi-component stereo in the living room. They were amused and encouraging about my newfound love of Joni. We took a family vacation to Spain the summer before I graduated from high school, and my dad and I sang “Carey” and “California” the whole time. My mom told us to stop more than once.
Now I have all of my parents’ Joni Mitchell records in my own collection, rescued from that large box that sat in their basement for years. And it’s a good thing too, since none of those songs are on Spotify anymore. It actually feels nice to have to make a purposeful occasion out of playing her albums these days, to have to touch them with my hands and hear the warm tones of the vinyl. Joni has been with me forever, it feels like, frozen in time. Relevant regardless of the decade.
And now, after many years of mostly silence, here she is again. Her voice is a new voice, the voice of an older person, who has been through heartache and illness and criticism and I don’t even know what else. That is her business. She has now performed at the Newport Folk Festival in 2022 and then again just this month at an amphitheatre in Washington State. The Newport appearance was a surprise. I can only imagine what it would have been like to be in that audience. I’m not sure I would have recovered. I have never seen her play before, and I worry that I never will. It wasn’t even remotely affordable to fly to Washington for that show, but maybe if she comes closer I’ll have a shot.
I know people are already asking her to play more shows, to tour, to make new music and to sing her old songs live for her throngs of devoted fans. But Joni doesn’t have to tour if she doesn’t want to. She’s given me so much since that first cassette came into my heart-broken-teen life. She doesn’t owe me anything else.
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*I won’t reveal his last name here because one time a different guy who I dated while I was in high school wrote stories about me on line almost a decade later and used my full name and talked about how “plain” I was and how he’d “upgraded” to his current girlfriend and whenever people googled me for a period of time those stories would come up and it was unpleasant.
June 2023 - Songs
Well, of course, here is The Last Time I Saw Richard.
It is hard to escape the story of the Graham Nash song “Our House” which is about living with Joni in her gorgeous Laurel Canyon house in the 70s. But maybe you haven’t heard this demo with Joni singing back up (and giggling when Nash messes up and swears).
This is “Both Sides Now” live from that Newport Folk Festival performance. I will admit that when I first heard it I had to turn it off because I was crying too hard.
June 2023 - Feelings
Two very delightful romances to recommend this month. Two for the Road by Chantal Guertin (titled Gigi Listening in other countries) is a fun and charming story about a bookstore owner who goes on a bus tour of England because the leader of the tour happens to be an audiobook narrator whose voice she has a crush on. You know a book is good when a long-shot premise like that just works. This one kept surprising me, doling out excellent and satisfying reveals all the way through. Guertin does a great job with the secondary characters as well, with the other bus passengers getting full stories and various quirks of their own. It’s a fun and absorbing story, a good book to bring along on your summer vacation, especially if you happen to be taking a bus tour somewhere.
Emma of 83rd Street was a book I picked up at Perfect Books while browsing their romance section on my way home from work. I love Jane Austen, and because of that I am wary of retellings which can go very wrong very fast. But this had high ratings on Goodreads and the first paragraph amused me, so I took a chance. It was GREAT. True enough to the original to be clever but new enough to be interesting. The authors weren’t afraid to pick and choose what plot elements from the original they wanted to incorporate, so I was constantly engaged while reading, trying to guess what they were going to do next. If you like an Austen retelling, or even if you don’t have Austen-related opinions, this is a good one.
Thanks for reading! See you next month.
J.W.
Instagram : @JenniferWhitefordWrites
Razorcake columns, reviews, interviews etc
My debut romance novel, MAKE ME A MIXTAPE is coming from Doubleday in 2024.
It boggles my mind when others say they don't know Joni's music, or worse, don't like it. There's such an immediacy when she sings and plays, it feels so sporadic and yet so grounded at the same time. I had to cancel my Spotify account when she announced that she was taking her music off of their platform because I don't think a day goes by where I don't hear her voice. She is like the coziest blanket for my ears and my soul.
My niece’s choir sang “Both sides now” at the spring concert.. needless to say, not only did I cry, but I made my sister cry too! There’s something about the words and melody that get me every time.🎶❤️