Blue is the warmest colour

I love Joni Mitchell’s voice. Actually, I love Joni Mitchell’s two voices. Because how Joni sounds now is almost unrecognisable as the Joni who sang “Rainy Night House” and “Big Yellow Taxi”. The early voice I like to think of as “Silk”, the later as “Velvet”. Silk is melancholy but still holds hope for romance. Silk has tombs in her eyes but the songs she punches are dreaming. Velvet’s romance is the romance of noir; it is found in rooms where the shades are seldom opened.

I came to Joni in a roundabout way, via Tori Amos’s version of “A Case of You” (it’s actually pretty good: check it out). When I bought Blue to find out what the original was like, I was got – hook, line and sinker. A friend made me a Joni mixtape and there on it were Silk and Velvet, side by side. I fell into Joni’s world of women with blood-red fingernails and fishnet stockings and bowties, of men who gave up golden factories and who kept her camera to sell. I couldn’t get enough; I had to hear it all. Everyone I’ve ever met who likes Joni loves Joni with a fervent passion. She’s a proper under-your-skin type.

From her debut Song to a Seagull (1968), Joni’s pure falsetto folk voice captured the beauty of her lyrics in a sublime and exacting way. But with each subsequent album a huskiness began to creep in, offering a warmer, rounder tone to her songs and adding texture to the stories she told.  By the time Joni was admitting to pissing a tequila anaconda the whole length of the parking lot, Silk was truly hanging out with Velvet. By Hejira (1976), Mitchell’s stories, her hardening face and voice were fully confronting the listener; this is a serious but beautiful journey, a pilgrimage to the questions. Forget the answers.

smoking – that old foe of the pure voice and friend to the husky one – possibly played a part

It was in the 90s that Joni’s voice really transformed. Velvet was fully ensconced and Silk retreated to her rightful place in the back catalogue. The transformation begins in Night Ride Home (1991); by the time of Turbulent Indigo (1994), Velvet reigns. It’s not just a much deeper voice: in this full-blown version of Velvet, Silk’s pure tone has been replaced by a smoky, shakily gorgeous vibrato.

While smoking – that old foe of the pure voice and friend to the husky one – possibly played a part, and various ailments (including the effects of polio) would have done some damage, Joni said the transformation of her voice was simply down to age. And those voices do appear to reflect the younger and older woman and her experiences of the world. Silk, we discovered, had secretly given up a child when she was abandoned, pregnant, in a cold flat in the middle of winter. She revealed this to us, of course – heartbreakingly – in “Little Green”. But no one knew that the tale she told was memoir. The child with a child that was Silk couldn’t handle the responsibility and the stigma. Instead she gave her Little Green away. Joni said this is why she began songwriting – to talk to her absent daughter. And so began decades of gorgeous lyrics, inspired by that loss. When Mitchell’s adoption secret was outed in the 90s and she was reunited with her daughter, she said she would give up song-writing. Now she’d found her child again, she didn’t need it anymore to tell Little Green how she felt.

For 2000’s Both Sides Now, Mitchell re-recorded some of her earlier songs along with some standards that suited Velvet perfectly. This latter voice – and older, experienced, reflective woman – gave these covers an added depth and played with their meanings.

As I have got older myself, the experience of listening to Joni’s two voices has shifted. In some ways I prefer Velvet and what it does to Joni’s story telling. Perhaps I recognise myself there. Still, when I first encountered Joni Mitchell, I too was properly Silk and listening to those early albums now sends me back to that time and that person I was. Melancholic nostalgia never sounded so sweet. And it is the genius of Joni that this quality is found throughout her gorgeous oeuvre. C

jonimitchell.com

Corinna is one of the founders of The Ethel Mermaids. Read more at the Mermania blog, at The Ethel Mermaids Facebook page and on Twitter @ethelsmermaids