Joni Mitchell

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Canadian musician, singer songwriter and painter. Born on November 7, 1943, in Fort Macleod, Alberta, as Roberta Joan Anderson. In June 1965, she married Chuck Mitchell and she kept his name when they divorced early in 1967, upon which she left for New York City and its folk music scene. (She had already begun singing in small nightclubs in her native Western Canada and then Toronto.) In New York, she quickly achieved fame first as a songwriter (e.g. with Chelsea Morning, Both Sides Now or Woodstock) and then as a singer in her own right. After David Crosby had discovered her playing in Florida, he introduced her to his folk rock friends in Los Angeles and its Laurel Canyon scene, where Mitchell will find a home. Early 1968 she is recording her debut LP for Reprise in Hollywood, and by the time of her third album she has her first gold album. Mitchell rose above the folk idiom and had pop hits such as Big Yellow Taxi (1970), Free Man In Paris and Help Me, the last two from 1974's best-selling Court And Spark.

Mitchell's distinctive harmonic guitar style, and piano arrangements all grew more complex through the 1970s as she was deeply influenced by jazz, melding it with pop, folk and rock on experimental albums like 1976's Hejira. She worked closely with jazz greats including Pat Metheny, Wayne Shorter, Jaco Pastorius, Herbie Hancock, and on a 1979 record released after his death, Charles Mingus. From the 1980s on, Mitchell reduced her recording and touring schedule but turned again toward pop, making greater use of synthesizers and direct political protest in her lyrics, which often tackled social and environmental themes alongside romantic and emotional ones.

Mitchell is also a visual artist. She created the artwork for each of her albums, and in 2000 described herself as a "painter derailed by circumstance." Mitchell stopped recording over the last several years, focusing more attention on painting, but in 2007 she released Shine, her first album of new songs in 9 years.

In 2020, Mitchell started undefined, a series of releases containing previously unreleased material from her personal vaults, along with box sets of the studio albums.

She was inducted into the Songwriters Hall of Fame and Rock And Roll Hall of Fame (Performer) in 1997. Blue, her starkly personal 1971 album, was voted #30 in Rolling Stone magazine's 500 Greatest Albums Of All Time list of 2003.

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