While the genius of Joni Mitchell is now a settled matter, when she first arrived in Los Angeles in 1967 there was only the idealized moniker “a girl with everything.”
This is how she was introduced to the Laurel Canyon beau monde via David Crosby, how she was remembered by Graham Nash in his 2013 memoir, and how she was regularly described in the earliest profiles of her. At the time, the male-dominated music press was still choosing between archetypes of who and what women artists could be: earth mama or angelic naif. “A girl with everything,” in turn, meant that Mitchell could sing, play an instrument, write a song and, of course, that she was blond and thin and pretty. Such was the world of gendered low expectations that Joni Mitchell’s career was born into.
Yet by the dawn of the 1970s, the true scope of Mitchell’s “everything” was remarkably vast by any measure. She had full contractual, artistic control of her albums and helped blaze that path for others, including Neil Young. She controlled her own music publishing, which reportedly netted her more than a half-million dollars in royalties (roughly $3.5 million today) before she’d even put her 1971 masterwork “Blue” to tape. Mitchell owned a car and multiple homes at a time when a woman couldn’t even legally get a credit card in her own name. She was an unmarried woman who traveled the world on her own and lived as she wished. She canceled tours she didn’t want to do and disappeared to her coastal Canadian hermitage to read, recuperate, compose songs and be alone. She was a celebrated woman who lived with rare freedom.
At first, though, her music was a means of survival. She’d initially set up her own publishing while still a performer on the regional folk-coffeehouse circuit in the mid-’60s, as she needed to earn money in order to leave her marriage. Joni Anderson met and quickly married Chuck Mitchell mere weeks after she’d given birth to a daughter whose father had long since skipped town. As a struggling young singer living off one meager gig at a time, Mitchell could barely afford to feed herself, and was without resources to care for her daughter, so she had put her in foster care. She would come to quickly regret both the marriage and her daughter’s adoption. Bereft, songs poured out of her and she committed herself to being a songwriter, a composer.
The “everything” Joni Mitchell became was in service of herself and her art, of her total independence. She wrote her own songs, produced her own albums, conceived their covers, art directed her own photos and decided on her own image and presentation at every turn. Mitchell was sovereign.