This year’s nominations are dominated by female artists, including Taylor Swift, SZA, Olivia Rodrigo, Boy Genius, Lana Del Rey, and Miley Cyrus.
Swift, who previously won the coveted Best Album award three times for her album “Midnights,” is attempting to make history by winning it four times.
However, it will be a difficult task because SZA, who has the potential to become the first Black woman to receive the prestigious award in 25 years, will be a formidable opponent.
Mitchell suffered a brain aneurysm in 2015, which kept her from walking or speaking for a short time. She had not performed live since 2002, and her health concerns meant she might never do so again.
So her recent return to the stage appears miraculous (a live recording of her surprise appearance at the Newport Folk Festival in 2022 has been nominated for Best Folk Album).
Her Grammy performance, on the other hand, is noteworthy not only for what it represents (a truly inspiring story of perseverance), but also for the impact she has had on many of the artists who will be in attendance.
Lana Del Rey frequently incorporates Joni references into her songs. Phoebe Bridgers, one-third of Boygenius, has cited Mitchell as a major influence, as has Olivia Rodrigo.
SZA’s 2021 single Joni is a tribute to the singer. Then there is Taylor Swift, whose 2012 album Red is thought to have been partially inspired by Joni’s 1971 album Blue, and who shares Joni’s penchant for emotionally raw lyrics.
Harry Styles‘ album, Harry’s House, which won Album of the Year last year, is named after a Mitchell song. Joni may have been out of the spotlight for some time, but her presence in the music industry is felt all over.
Joni was born in Canada in 1943 and, by her mid-twenties, had survived polio, given up her child for adoption, and ended her first marriage to folk singer Chuck Mitchell. Songwriting became her outlet for dealing with her emotions.
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In 1968, she released her debut album, Song to a Seagull. Her second album, Clouds, won the Grammy for Best Folk Album and propelled her into the spotlight.
However, both fame and domesticity gave her a sense of claustrophobia. She fled to Europe in 1970, abandoning her lover, Graham Nash, who wanted to marry her.
Mitchell explained in the 2003 documentary A Woman of Heart and Mind that her grandmother was a frustrated poet who was claustrophobic and a musician.
“At the farm, she kicked the kitchen door off its hinges. As much as I loved and cared for Graham, I could not help but think, “I am going to end up like my grandmother, kicking the door off its hinges.”
Mitchell had a vision for her life and art, and she pursued it fearlessly, tearing up the rulebook of what was expected of women then. “I want to wreck my stockings in some jukebox dive,” she sang on All I Want, the first track from her fourth studio album, Blue.
The album is widely regarded as her masterpiece, as well as the one in which she exposes herself the most. She wrote about her relationship with Nash, her affairs with James Taylor and Cary Raditz (whom she met in the Matala caves in Crete), and her feelings of heartbreak, homesickness, and loneliness.
On Little Green, she sings about the child “born with the moon in cancer” that she abandoned (Mitchell eventually reunited with her daughter in the 1990s).
“I was demanding from myself a deeper and greater honesty, more and more revelation in my work,” she stated in A Woman of Heart and Mind.
Mitchell believed she owed it to her audience to create music that “strikes against the very nerves of their lives, and to do so, you have to strike against the very nerves of your own.”
Not only did the lyrics elicit every ounce of emotion, but so did the music, with Joni “twisting the knobs on the guitar until I could get these chords that I heard inside that suited me; they feel like my feelings.”
Mitchell told Cameron Crowe for Rolling Stone in 1979: “I felt like a cellophane wrapper on a pack of cigarettes.” People’s intense connection to her music was fueled by her radical transparency, which was unusual at the time.
She has stated, “On occasion, I have sacrificed myself and my emotional makeup… singing ‘I am selfish and I am sad’, for example. We all feel lonely, but our pop stars never admitted this during the Blue Era.”
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