(Credits: Alamy)
Tue 20 January 2026 21:00, UK
For someone who was born and raised in rock and roll, Joni Mitchell was never on everyone else’s musical wavelength.
She certainly had great tunes and could play with some of the best rock stars on the planet, but even if she rubbed elbows with the likes of David Crosby and Neil Young, her first love was trying to make music that could appeal to legends like Miles Davis and Duke Ellington. She was speaking their language most of the time, but not every single musical icon needed to have that same sort of vocabulary whenever they picked up an instrument.
Because, really, it’s not fair for anyone to try and match what Mitchell was doing whenever she made a record. Her understanding of open tunings was beyond anything anyone could comprehend half the time, and while it wasn’t the hardest thing to get under one’s fingers, her melodic choices were never the customary blues progressions. Even when making a tune like ‘Big Yellow Taxi’, Mitchell was someone who could think of musical extensions that had a lot more ringing chords than the straight major chords everyone else was used to.
What mattered were those outside notes that made people feel something, but by the time punk took over, people didn’t necessarily care about that kind of attitude anymore. The masses wanted to bring rock and roll back to its origins, and while that movement quickly faded, all it was doing was building momentum. And once everything exploded once again in the early 1990s, Nirvana was everything that kids could have asked for.
Their music wasn’t revolutionary on a technical level, but you have to understand the era that it came out in. Kids had been spoonfed hair metal bands that were getting more ridiculous by the day throughout the 1980s, and once they saw someone like Kurt Cobain raging against the system and rocking harder than anyone else on the radio, it was easy to prop him up as the next voice of a generation.
It wasn’t the kind of title that Cobain wanted, but it was also a title that Mitchell didn’t think he deserved, either. Her idols were the ones who could play the most outlandish solos possible, and she only saw a kid trying to make a half-decent tune, saying, “Everybody says Kurt Cobain was a great writer. I don’t see it. Why is he a hero? Whining and killing yourself – I fail to see the heroism in that.” Granted, there’s a lot more to Cobain’s legacy than his self-destructive behaviour.
Sure, there were people that related to some of the more downtrodden songs, but there were also a lot of abstract statements in there as well. ‘In Bloom’ is one of the best critiques of what toxic male rock and roll fans could be like, and while Cobain was nowhere near Mitchell’s level when it came to crafting melodies, a song like ‘Something in the Way’ took only two chords and put the audience in the headspace of someone lost inside their own mind, not unlike what Mitchell herself did on Blue.
And let’s get one thing straight: Kurt Cobain was not a terrible guitarist. He didn’t have proper training, that’s for sure, but when listening to the way he used his instrument, he had as much of an impact on the way that people approach the guitar as Eddie Van Halen did when he came out. Playing from the heart was now really cool, and even from a music theory perspective, the way he played power chords led to him accidentally creating suspended chords, which gave their songs a more aching sound whenever they came on.
So while Mitchell could have her personal hangups with Cobain, his legacy was about more than a couple of songs about feeling down. Countless people around the world were feeling the same way he did, and being able to speak for them and let the world know about one’s inner struggles is all that any musician could ever ask for.
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