Why Joni Mitchell sounded different from the start

What makes Joni Mitchell’s music special? The lyrics alone put her on 20th-century music’s Mount Rushmore, alongside her cultural mirror Bob Dylan and her brief lover Leonard Cohen. But for me it’s her phrasing, her tunings and her sense of time. Decades on, her music remains endlessly surprising. Think a line is going in a certain direction? Think again, as Mitchell bends it away; or shifts key; or arcs her voice into its celestial sphere, only to suddenly plummet, like a plane in turbulence. And yet the swerves feel somehow right, inevitable.

Enlisting the help of jazz greats from Wayne Shorter to Herbie Hancock, Mitchell invented her own musical grammar: one of conversational fluency, perhaps best articulated with the bassist Jaco Pastorious, the pulsing voice behind Mitchell’s mid-to-late 1970s masterpieces Hejira and Don Juan’s Reckless Daughter.

She arcs her voice into its celestial sphere, only to suddenly plummet, like a plane in turbulence

There was something faintly miraculous about Mitchell from the start. In 1942, Myrtle Maguerite visited a fortune teller in the small town of Alberta, Canada and was told that she would be wed within a month and have a child within a year. Given that most young men were abroad at war, this seemed unlikely. Yet, two weeks later, Myrtle met and married Bill Anderson, an airman, and within a year Roberta Joan Anderson – Joni, as she would name herself – was born.

Never one to be outdone, Mitchell had Lazarus beat: she learnt to walk not twice but three times, overcoming a bout of polio as a nine year-old that left her bedbound for a year, and again after a brain aneurysm in 2015. The polio forced a permanent weakness into her left hand, such that when she picked up a guitar a few years later, she found she couldn’t reach the traditional chords.