'We Live In The Time Of Joni Mitchell': Brandi Carlile Turns 'Blue' Into Repertoire
When Brandi Carlile decided to perform Joni Mitchell's 1971 album Blue in its entirety at Disney Hall – the primary home of the Los Angeles Philharmonic and the site of many classical music premieres — one reason was to remind the audience of the 75-year-old's near-singular status among popular musicians of the past half-century. "We didn't live in the time of Shakespeare, Rembrandt or Beethoven," she said before she began her October 14 performance. "But we live in the time of Joni Mitchell."
This loving hyperbole is not unfamiliar. It's surrounded Mitchell, and been generated by her, for her entire career. Lindsay Zoladz argued in a that the singer-songwriter's casual assertion of her own genius made men uncomfortable in ways that led them to underestimate her, but the evidence suggests a more complicated reality. Mitchell was in fact highly praised in the rock press from the start of her career, though's "A Case of You," identifying with the more "serious" art of painting even as she shouted her love for rock and roll. She addressed Beethoven as a friend in her 1972 song "Judgment of the Moon and Stars" and (like Ken Kesey and the beatnik before her) casually dropped the name "Willy the Shake" in 1977's "Talk To Me." Very much like Bob Dylan and Leonard Cohen, the only two singer-songwriters whom she regularly claimed as kindred spirits, Mitchell made clear that she wasn't in the pop game just for the money or the hot sex. She sought a place in eternity from the beginning. Making that ask, she forced a reconsideration of popular music itself.
