The Feminine Musique: Joni Mitchell as a Confessional Writer

In the long tradition of feminine confessional storytelling, Joni Mitchell carved out her name in the 1970s American folk style.

The Feminine Musique is a series where writers analyze portrayals of women in music.

Written by Anjali Krishna

Photo courtesy of Joel Bernstein

In the 1970s, the folk music scene was dominated by men like Bob Dylan, Neil Young, and James Taylor. However, it was in the rising male-generated genre of California folk rock where several women rose to fame. Carole King, Joan Baez, and Joni Mitchell wrote individual narratives about love and life, revealing real-life details with a harrowing specificity, and were quickly associated with the rising confessional poets such as Sylvia Plath and Anne Sexton. Plath and Sexton were “confessional” because they drew on personal experience and cited real people and recognizable events, divulging their own secrets explicitly in their art. Mitchell and her contemporaries did the same, only they painted realities into lyrics and sitar rather than paper. Still, their work can, in some ways, be classified within the same genre.

Though men would write in similarly personal styles, they were rarely recognized as “confessional”  due to a belief that “women lack the imagination to write about anything other than their exact literal lives.” Mitchell indeed rejects the title. Still, there is something useful in the term. As confessional writers, women found a niche in poetry and folk music.

When Joni Mitchell wrote her 1971 album Blue, she was at her most vulnerable. Following a breakup with fellow musician Graham Nash and amidst a budding romance with actor James Taylor, Mitchell found plenty of content for her most personal songwriting.

By the time she’d released Blue, Mitchell had already gained a cult following and became known for her prose set to folk music. She carried a long oral tradition and evoked stories told around campfires of lovers lost and children left. Sorrowfully, “Little Green” tells a deeply vulnerable story about a daughter Mitchell gave up for adoption at a month old. She calls the girl green since “the winters cannot fade her” unchanging image in Mitchell’s mind, and the singer reflects on her own youth, admitting “the children who’ve made her.” Despite giving the little girl up, Mitchell still remembers her with sorrow —or at least, she imagines her — thinking of her as green, unknowing of the world and bright like the first bloom of springtime.

Throughout Blue, Mitchell is decidedly disillusioned, but her humor does not fail her. She is witty as she expresses disbelief in the California trend of believing that “hell's the hippest way to go well” on the title track. In “Case of You,” she tells the story of romantic collapse and the misconstrued words of men: “Just before our love got lost you said / ‘I am as constant as a northern star’ / And I said, ‘Constantly in the darkness / Where's that at? /If you want me I'll be in the bar.’” With a snarky anecdote and shrewd dialogue in her lyrics, she proves that she can make her deepest emotions personable. That is, she tells the story of losing the love of her life with something of a wry smile, hoping her wit will cover the pain.

Mitchell finds her place amongst the confessional poets, particularly Sexton, due to the specificity of her lyrics. In “The Last Time I Saw Richard,” Mitchell gives an account of a chance café encounter with an old cynical friend, telling her listener everything from the dialogue to the drinks. This specificity is mirrored in Sexton’s “All My Pretty Ones.” Sexton’s location is a “residence you could not afford [with] / a gold key, your half of a woolen mill” instead of a cafe, and the object of her poem is her estranged father rather than an old friend. Nevertheless, such personal work of confessional writers is breathtaking for its sincerity in what they include,yet this art becomes universal as its audience  hears the personal details an artist reveals and  acknowledges whispers beneath. It’s important to note that Sexton did not tell all in her confessional poetry, omitting her history of abusing her children from her self-reflective pen.

The theme of disenchantment with reality also links Mitchell’s discography and the confessional poets. “Both Sides Now” sees Mitchell finding that “It's love's illusions that I recall / I really don't know love.” Critics told Mitchell that she was too young to be disenchanted with love, but what aligns her with the confessional poets is that she spoke her truth without considering what listeners would think about her personally. In the same vein, Plath wrote, rather controversially, about harboring hatred for her father as she grew up. She found that “There’s a stake in your fat black heart / And the villagers never liked you” in her poem “Daddy.” Plath knew this would reflect back on her father famous in the world of biology, yet she wrote about her visceral hatred for him anyway. At the time, it was unheard of for someone to write so bleakley and explicitly about recognizable names. Confessional songwriters and poets alike — Mitchell and Plath — were willing to sacrifice confidentiality for the intentional explicitness of their art.

Though Blue is certainly her most celebrated album, Mitchell writes confessionally throughout her discography. On Hejira, she writes like a Beat Poet — a wanderer disillusioned with American reality. The Beat Movement was an artistic subculture which questioned conformist American culture in the mid-twentieth century. Beat Poets such as Jack Kerouac or Allen Ginsberg gained particular acclaim for writing about life off the beaten path and alternatives to American capitalism. Mitchell, like the Beat Poets, was influenced by Eastern religion, which led her to learn the sitar, a Hindustani classical instrument.

Mitchell abandons “the white lines on the freeway” on “Coyote” as comfortably as Kerouac or Ginsberg, shedding her commitment to the American nuclear family and white picket fence and breaking the status quo. She places herself amongst The Beats, who, despite their celebrations of freedom from the status quo, were sexist. Here, too, writing about personal experiences allows her to tear a hole into a male-dominated canon.

Throughout history, women have been demoted to a position of storykeepers, meant to tell the stories they have heard about men. Mitchell claims this position of storyteller proudly, singing about herself instead. Instead of cloaking her lyrics in mystery and secrecy, Mitchell exists among the Plaths and Sextons, who took personal stories and made them universal through sheer powerful emotion. These confessional writers — poets and lyricists — went on to inspire a generation of famous female singer-songwriters such as Lana Del Rey and Taylor Swift, who became famous not only for their lyrics but for the reflections of these lyrics in their personal lives. Their power derives from being the ones to tell their own stories, as Mitchell did in her time.