Joni Mitchell
Canadian singer-songwriter and painter.
I don't like being too looked up at or too looked down on. I prefer meeting in the middle to being worshipped or spat out.
Joni, you have more class than Richard Nixon, Mick Jagger, and Gomer Pyle combined!
By the time we got to Woodstock
We were half a million strong
And everywhere there was song and celebration.
And I dreamed I saw the bombers
Riding shotgun in the sky
And they were turning into butterflies
Above our nation.
We are stardust,
We are golden,
And we’ve got to get ourselves
Back to the garden.
In our possessive coupling
So much could not be expressed
So now I'm returning to myself
These things that you and I suppressed.
Secrets and sharing soda,
That's how our time began.
Love is a story told to a friend
It's second hand.
Any time I make a record it's followed by a painting period. It's good crop rotation.
I remember the time you told me, you said
"Love is touching souls,"
Surely you've touched mine, cause
Part of you pours out of me
In these lines from time to time.
Hey farmer, farmer,
Put away that DDT now
Give me spots on my apples
But leave me the birds and the bees
Please!
They took all the trees
And put them in a tree museum
And they charged all the people
A dollar and a half just to see 'em.
Rows and flows of angel hair,
And ice cream castles in the air,
And feather canyons ev’rywhere,
I’ve looked at clouds that way.
But now they only block the sun,
They rain and snow on ev’ryone,
So many things I would have done
But clouds got in my way.
There's been a tremendous amount of growth. An actress is not expected to continue to play her ingenue roles, you know, I've written myself roles to grow into gracefully, but there is no growing into gracefully in the pop world. Basically the reason I'm so unruly in this business is because I never wanted to be a human jukebox.
I’ve looked at love from both sides now
From give and take, and still somehow,
It’s love’s illusions I recall
I really don’t know love at all.
They paved paradise
And put up a parking lot
With a pink hotel, a boutique
and a swinging hot spot.
I was demanding of myself a deeper and greater honesty, more and more revelation in my work in order to give it back to the people where it goes into their lives and nourishes them and changes their direction and makes light bulbs go off in their head and makes them feel. And it isn't vague, it strikes against the very nerves of their life and in order to do that you have to strike against the very nerves of your own.
I’ve looked at clouds from both sides now,
From up and down, and still somehow
It’s cloud illusions I recall,
I really don’t know clouds at all.
It's coming on Christmas,
They're cutting down trees.
They're putting up reindeer
And singing songs of joy and peace.
I wish I had a river
I could skate away on
She is of course well past the stage of having to prove herself artistically. She is in possession of one of the most extraordinary song catalogs of the past half-century. Her chords break harmonic rules, have no technical names and defy Western musical theory. Her voice is an instrument that has grown sublimely heavier and huskier over the decades. . . .Once you get past the security gates, Ms. Mitchell's house feels like a pocket of middle-class comfort in the midst of zillionaire Beverly Hills. In some ways life is still as it was in 1974, when she bought the house: She has no computer, no voice mail, no cellphone and no e-mail. At one point, when we tried to remember one of her lyrics, we scrolled through my iPod. She said it was the first time she had listened to one.
I wanna be strong,
I wanna laugh along,
I wanna belong to the living.
Alive, alive, I wanna get up and jive,
Wanna wreck my stockings in some jukebox dive.
Oh, you're in my blood like holy wine,
You taste so bitter and so sweet
Oh I could drink a case of you, darling
And I would still be on my feet
I would still be on my feet.