The songwriter Joni Mitchell desperately avoided sounding like: “I better cut that out”

The songwriter Joni Mitchell desperately avoided sounding like: “I better cut that out”By now, Joni Mitchell is such a singular talent that no one would ever dare liken her to anyone else. In fact, she’s become the pinnacle, the label that is stuck to so many other artists, typically female artists writing folk-leaning ballads. I see her name come up over and over and over in interviews as Mitchell has become one of the ultimate references, maybe even more so than that. “Paul Simon started piling up a lot of words, more than the bar could handle, and I stopped,” Mitchell once said. Learning to tell her stories in far fewer words, maybe it all genuinely did stem from a distaste for Simon’s lyric-heavy tunes.