(Credits: Shawn Miller / Library of Congress)
Thu 22 January 2026 18:30, UK
It’s always quite funny reading about Joni Mitchell’s career in 2025, because we now recognise her as one of the best artists to ever exist, but it took a while for people to truly get what she was doing.
You can go right back to the beginning of her career, and you will find people who rejected her before she had even made a name for herself, starting by playing small gigs in tiny cafes where there were some listeners who could recognise the songwriter’s brilliance, but it took a while before managers and label executives were partial to the same vision.
Malka Marom was one of the first people who dragged a record label executive to come watch Joni Mitchell play live. Marom had been previously blown away by her musicianship, but the bigwig she had convinced to come and listen wasn’t quite as open-minded.
“By the time Joni played ‘Night in the City’, he had no ears to hear her,” she recalled. “’This singer has no stage presence, she’ll amount to nothing,’ he declared in a whisper, then left in the middle of her set.”
There were a couple of reasons why people struggled to get on board with Joni Mitchell’s music. The first was because she had a very unique style of playing, as she would change the tuning on her guitar in order to tap into a totally individual sound that was almost impossible to copy. In addition to that, she would utilise strange keys and time signatures that didn’t fit the scope of modern music. Once again, we now recognise her style as wonderfully Joni Mitchell, but people weren’t so receptive at the time.
David Crosby once said her playing was “like a band”, in how she was unique when approaching the way she played chords and strung along a melody. “She was so new and fresh with how she approached it,” he said. “It’s these odd tunings that have tripped up thousands of artists trying to figure out how to get ‘Big Yellow Taxi’ to sound like her ‘Big Yellow Taxi’.”
Of course, it wasn’t just the fact that she was a totally individual musician that stopped people from being receptive, there was also the fact that she was a woman in a male-dominated industry. Despite being a folk musician, writing poetry better than most other lyricists on the planet, Mitchell was never put in the same league as her counterparts, such as Bob Dylan and Leonard Cohen. Instead, she was compared to other female musicians who sounded nothing like her, they made completely different genres, and the only thing that seemed to link the artists was their gender.
“They tend to lump me always with groups of women,” said Mitchell, “I always thought, ‘They don’t put Dylan with the Men of Rock; why do they do that to me with women?’”
If not for other musicians who were also difficult to categorise, there may not have been a market for Mitchell at all. As such, despite making different music than some of these unpredictable artists, she is happy for their existence, as they ensured there was an appetite for musicians doing unprecedented things. One artist who she said indirectly helped her with her career in this sense was Sting.
“Well, I should fit in a little better,” she concluded. “There was a time when I was excommunicated from everything. Then there began to be people making similar kinds of hybrids – Sting being one – and as the airwaves would open up for them, I would say to my management, ‘Surely you can get me into the game.’”
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