Joni Mitchell and the ‘Me’ decade

An extract from new book Travelling follows the Canadian songwriter’s restless adventures in psychoanalysis and psychedelia from Hejira to Don Juan’s Reckless Daughter

In the 1970s, Joni Mitchell was reaching out, taking it all in. The shy girl and the party girl did a little boho dance inside her, trading places depending on what day it was. “I’m always talkin’, chicken squawkin’, bigawwk, bigAWWWK!” she yakked in Talk to Me, musicalising the women’s art of conversation as it goes off the rails. That song, from Don Juan’s Reckless Daughter, is an extrovert’s embarrassing indulgence, the final shove from a pushy broad. Mitchell liked to run her mouth off. But then she would retreat into solitude. Reflecting on this period later, she’d describe the 1970s as a time when she moved away from the introversion that had reached its nearly claustrophobic peak on Blue and toward a new role as an observer, telling others’ stories as she encountered them on the road. Yet in another, fundamental way, she remained inwardly focused. She just had a different framework for doing so, one emblematic of the time. A silent listener sits across from her in Hejira’s songs as she recounts her excursions. Herself, in the role of analyst.

“I tried to run away myself,” Mitchell sings in Coyote, “to run away and wrestle with my ego.” Hejira’s opening salvo identifies her travels as both geographical and psychological. She ranges through her own mind as much as anywhere else, but her lyrics show signs of a new mindset. The scholar David Shumway identified the Freudian couch as the source. “Ambivalence is a characteristic of neurotic states, but it is also a product of the work of analysis,” he wrote in his book Rock Star. “Mitchell’s work depends heavily on the discourse of, if not psychoanalysis proper, then the therapy of the talking cure in a general sense.”