Joni Mitchell, cat lady

What could a girl in her 20s possibly know about both sides of life?

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Joni Mitchell is one of the greatest songwriters to grace this earth. A wide array of critics have named Blue one of the best albums of all time. Joni produced or co-produced most of her albums and even designed many of her own album covers, describing herself as a painter who was “derailed by circumstance” into music. She has received a slew of accolades, including ten Grammy Awards, an induction into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, a Kennedy Center Honor, and a Lifetime Achievement Award at the Grammy Awards in 2002. Even Janet Jackson covered her songs in her prime. Remember this?

And man… Joni Mitchell loves cats.

When she was a little girl, Joni’s mother wouldn’t let her have cats. “My mother was also a farm girl and cats were not indoor things. They were for the barn. But I knew every cat in my neighborhood,” Joni later told a reporter.

When she grew up, Joni started keeping cats as pets. And from her earliest days in the public eye up until now, in her eighties, you can easily find plentiful photos of Joni with one or more cats. She’s had up to four at a time, and despite the refined artistry of her lyrics, she’s often resorted to kitschy names ranging from Nietzsche, Pansy, and Muhammad Ali to Mojo, Puss ’n Boots and El Cafe.

Joni’s a full-on cat lady. She’s painted her cats many times over.

She’s put her own cat paintings on her records.

And she even wrote a song about losing her cat, Nietzsche, for 18 days.

But this post is not really about Joni Mitchell’s cats. It’s about the singer’s nine lives.

Joni described herself as a tomboy who longed to play physically active games with the boys in her neighborhood before she caught Polio.

Joni Mitchell was born Roberta Joan Anderson in Alberta, Canada, in 1943. Her father was a Royal Canadian Air Force flight lieutenant who instructed new pilots, and so Joni moved with her parents to different bases in western Canada as a child before settling in a small town in Saskatchewan.

At nine years old, she contracted Polio. She explained later that her performing career started while recovering in a children's hospital where young Joni passed time by singing to the other patients. (She also started smoking at the same age - nine!) Joni had to learn how to walk again, and because Polio weakened her left hand, when she taught herself guitar, she used alternative tunings to compensate. That quirk would become a signature part of her sound.

Despite struggling in school, an unconventional teacher named Arthur Kratzmann, encouraged her to write poetry. (Her first album includes a dedication to him.) She went on to study at an art college for a brief time, and began singing in small nightclubs across western Canada. Here’s Joni on those early years:

I liked playing the coffeehouses, where I could step off the stage and go sit in the audience and be comfortable, or where there wasn’t a barrier between me and my audience in the clubs. The big stage had no appeal for me; it was too great a distance between me and the audience, and I never really liked it. I didn’t have a lot of fame in the beginning, and that’s probably good because it made it more enjoyable.

In 1965, Joni moved to the United States and began touring and writing her own songs. Below you can listen to the first “real” song she wrote. (Watch her performing another in this incredible archival footage.)

A young Joni. Joni Mitchell Archives.

LA, 1967, recording her first album, Song To A Seagull. Photograph: Sulfiati Magnuson/Getty Images

Two years later, while playing a gig at a club in Coconut Grove, Florida, David Crosby walked in and was instantly struck by Joni.¹ He brought her with him to Los Angeles, and introduced her music to his friends. Joni’s life would never be the same. As The New York Times wrote, from this moment on, she would pursue “one of the most restlessly daring trajectories in popular music.”

Joni wrote the song “Both Sides Now,” in 1967, at just 24 years old. Her second LP, Clouds, was released with the track in 1969, and Joni played the song in her first Newport Folk Festival appearance in the same year (listen to the set here).

Here she is singing “Both Sides Now” in 1970 to a huge festival crowd in the UK. By this point in her mid twenties, Joni had developed a cult following.

Writer’s note: The performance videos in this post are pretty spectacular. I strongly encourage you to watch them, especially the third video from the Newport Folk Festival.

Three decades later, when she was 56, Joni Mitchell re-released a version of “Both Sides Now,” backed by a 70-piece orchestra. Here is Joni performing it that year.

As The New York Times wrote, “her voice was deeper, elegiac and elegantly weary. ‘It’s life’s illusions I recall,’ she sang at the end of the song, ‘I really don’t know life at all.’”

After this show, Joni wouldn’t return to the stage for 8,660 days. When she finally did 23 years later, the singer, and the song, would be reborn once more.

Nine years ago, Joni Mitchell suffered a near-fatal brain aneurysm. Similar to her young battle with Polio, the effects were debilitating. Joni couldn’t speak or walk, let alone play the guitar or sing. In an instant, she lost the memory of how to perform her own songs.

In recent years, she relearned the songs she wrote in her twenties by watching old videos of herself “to see where I put my fingers.”² She described the experience as “a return to infancy.”

Then in 2022, Joni finally walked out onstage again. She joined Brandi Carlile at the Newport Folk Festival—her first performance there since her youth in 1969, twelve years before Brandi Carlile was born.³ Attendees were stunned, many cried.

The New York Times wrote that the recordings of this show “have had a rare and profound power,” and offer us all “reminders of the euphoric potential of live music.” They go on:

The highlight of the set, though, was “Both Sides Now,” a song that Mitchell wrote before she played Newport for the first time in 1967, when she was in her early 20s. Back then, some critics scoffed at the lyrics’ presumptive wisdom: What could a girl in her 20s possibly know about both sides of life? But over the years, the song has revealed itself to contain fathomless depths that have only been audible in later interpretations.

While watching this performance video recently, I noticed a noble YouTube commenter had shared a similar sentiment.

In an interview, Joni Michell once shared that she's “good with death,” adding: “I've had a lot of things die in my arms – a robin, cats. I'm not morbid about it.” It seems to me that she hasn’t just held the dying in her arms. She’s died herself, and come back to us, reborn.

What a gift to have an artist of such talent experience that breadth in her lifetime. May we have many more years to hear what Joni has left to teach us.

Both Sides Now

Rows and flows of angel hair
And ice cream castles in the air
And feather canyons everywhere
I’ve looked at clouds that way

But now they only block the sun
They rain and they snow on everyone
So many things I would have done
But clouds got in my way

I've looked at clouds from both sides now
From up and down and still somehow
It's clouds’ illusions I recall
I really don't know clouds at all

Moons and Junes and Ferris wheels
The dizzy dancing way that you feel
As every fairy tale comes real
I've looked at love that way

But now it's just another show
And you leave 'em laughing when you go
And if you care, don't let them know
Don't give yourself away

I've looked at love from both sides now
From give and take and still somehow
It's love's illusions that I recall
I really don't know love
Really don't know love at all

Tears and fears and feeling proud
To say, "I love you" right out loud
Dreams and schemes and circus crowds
I've looked at life that way

Oh, but now old friends they're acting strange
And they shake their heads and they tell me that I've changed
Well something's lost, but something's gained
In living every day

I've looked at life from both sides now
From win and lose and still somehow
It's life's illusions I recall
I really don't know life at all

It's life's illusions that I recall
I really don't know life
I really don't know life at all

Bonus

Joni Michell just gave her first performance at the Grammys at the age of 80. You may have noticed a cane in her hand during the performance—the same cane that she had to help her onstage at Newport. She tapped the cane in rhythm, helping her to keep time while singing “Both Sides Now” on music’s grandest stage. If you look closely, you’ll notice a diamond-encrusted cat head on that cane.

1. https://jonimitchell.com/library/print.cfm?id=2783

2. https://www.npr.org/2022/07/26/1113608539/joni-mitchell-newport-folk-festival-aneurysm

3. https://www.nytimes.com/2022/07/26/arts/music/joni-mitchell-performance.html