#20 - A Case of You / Joni Mitchell

Writing candidly about intimate, private moments and feelings is today such an accepted practice in pop songwriting that it can be startling to go back to 1971 and find Joni Mitchell reflecting that, at that point, 'the only thing that I could see to do fresh, that hadn't really been explored poetically, was the internal landscape. … [to] write from my own experience … was one of the few territories left for a poet to be a contributor of any kind'. The album she's talking about is Blue, and if she's right, then it might be viewed as the origin of this tradition of songwriting as 'an investigation of self, self-analysis of sorts', as she put it elsewhere. In this final episode of the series, I look at the penultimate song on this great album, 'A Case of You', in the context of wider shifts in American society, as well as Mitchell's particular musical and philosophical development, to see what's revealed in this bold venture inwards.

All the songs discussed in this episode, including the original recording of 'A Case of You' can be heard here. If you've enjoyed it, please leave a review on Apple podcasts; thank you.

With very special thanks to Paul Wierdak, the producer of this episode. 

Transcript

Hello and welcome to the Secret Life of Songs, a podcast on pop songs and what they mean to us with me, Anthony, a musician who writes and performs under the name sky coloured. About fifty seconds into her 1971 song, ‘A Case of You’, Joni Mitchell, singing and playing a traditional Appalachian string instrument called a dulcimer, is joined by a second musician, filling out the harmonies only implied by the dulcimer on the warmer, more familiar-sounding strings of his acoustic guitar. It’s James Taylor, who at that point was rapidly becoming the most famous singer-songwriter in America. Time Magazine, in March of that year, had emblazoned a remarkable, Art Nouveau-style image of Taylor on its cover, framing his head with a red halo, embellished with what even then must have seemed like the deliberately nostalgic colours and patterns of late 60s psychedelia, captioned with the phrase, ‘The New Rock: Bittersweet and Low’. The article which accompanied it positioned Taylor as the figurehead for the ‘startling change’ it had observed in rock music at the beginning of the 1970s, one that had ‘dropped such devices as the electrified guitar and wall-to-wall loudspeaker banks’ and replaced them with intimate small-scale arrangements, typically just solo piano or non-amplified guitar. Above all, the article argued, what this ‘collection of individual balladeers and rock composer-performers … seem to want most is an intimate mixture of lyricism and personal expression - the often exquisitely melodic reflections of a private “I.”’

This new trend towards self-interrogation in rock was not universally welcomed by music critics. Lester Bangs, then Rolling Stone’s lead music writer, attacked what he called ‘I-Rock’ with vehemence, calling it ‘relentlessly, involutedly egocentric’ and singling Taylor out as ‘a one-man parade indeed … He doesn’t care about anything in particular except himself, the love he’s found, his dog, and the lanes and pastures in his neighborhood which he finds great contentment ambling through.’ The strength of feeling in such condemnations - then typical - of the newly popular singer-songwriters of the early 1970s is comprehensible only in the light of what their music represented to a certain section of rock’s listenership who had grown up through rock n roll’s initial explosion into the public consciousness and its evolution into the prime expression of what had already, by 1969, been labelled the ‘counterculture’. This ‘turn inward’, celebrated in the 1971 Time feature covering James Taylor, was seen by these critics as nothing less than a betrayal: of rock’s idealism, of its subversiveness, and of the artist’s duty - particularly the young artist - to address the nation’s conscience and provoke a collective awakening to its inherited myths and delusions. The evolving output of the group of artists and musicians who took up residence in Laurel Canyon, a neighbourhood in the Hollywood Hills region of Los Angeles, towards the end of the 1960s, and who for much of the wider world simply were the counterculture, was held particularly responsible for this abandonment of rock’n’roll’s original promise. The veteran critic Barney Hoskyns dates the moment precisely to June 1970 when the prototypical Laurel Canyon group - Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young - released their blistering protest song, Young’s ‘Ohio’, ‘a last gasp of rock’n’roll rage,’ Hoskyns writes, ‘before [the] actions and philosophies’ of ‘the sixties’ were swept ‘under the rug of memory’, following it up in September of that year with Graham Nash’s ‘Our House’; a ‘trite ditty’, in Hoskyns’ words, which symbolised the ‘general failure of nerve in the LA music scene’.

[‘Our House’]

Joni Mitchell has consistently been identified with these artists, and with the ‘singer-songwriter’ archetype more generally, partly through sheer proximity: ‘Our House’, for instance, was written about the home she and Nash had made on Lookout Mountain in Laurel Canyon: she is, we presume, the singer Nash describes ‘playing your love songs all night long’. The historian Bradford Martin groups Mitchell in with Taylor and Jackson Browne as leading figures of a musical movement which ‘reflected a larger narrative transformation from the search for the beloved community to the search for self, from concern with social justice and global peace to the quest for inner peace, from fighting to liberate the oppressed to the triumph of personal liberation.’ It’s his contribution to a book of essays entitled Rightward Bound: Making America Conservative in the 1970s which implicates the singer-songwriters, however unwittingly, in a broad social shift away from the collective values underpinning American society during the long presidency of Franklin D. Roosevelt towards the acquisitive individualism of the Reagan era. The accusation is that these more introspective, supposedly more self-centred performers took the oppositionality and defiant anti-traditionalism of 1960s radicals and divested it of any hope for wholesale social reform, leaving the self as the only possible territory for improvement or meaningful action, a move which, according to the editors of that volume, ‘unintentionally lent support to a culture that blended easily with the market-centred, anti-government ethos promoted by movement conservatives.’

One defence of Mitchell from the charge of complicity in America’s rightwards shift as the 1980s approached would be to point out how sharp-eyed a critic she has been of exactly those developments, most notably in her 1985 album Dog Eat Dog but also in interviews where, with characteristic bluntness, she has said of her generation that, ‘The 70's were a time in which all of us, having discovered we couldn't change the world, thought that perhaps we could change ourselves … Once we discovered we couldn't change ourselves, we said, 'Well, then, let's make money’.’ And yet there is something in her work from the early 1970s, and above all in her album, Blue, from which ‘A Case of You’ is taken, which does chime with this concept of ‘the search for self’, and in fact enacts the ‘turn inward’ with an intensity that none of her songwriter peers were attempting. ​​When the music journalist Vic Garbarini asked her which of her albums she considered to be the most ‘honest and clear’, Mitchell replied, ‘The purest one of all, of course, is Blue. At the time I was absolutely transparent, like cellophane … Imagine yourself stripped of all defenses ... There's nothing there … but what is there. … There was no social personality, but still a strong inner life … There is not a false note on that album. I love that record more than any of them, really … and I'll never be that pure again.’ Mitchell may have been reflecting a wider cultural trend towards self-investigation but, for reasons specific to her own personal and intellectual development, she went further than any of her contemporaries in her efforts toward, as she put it, ‘peeling back the layers of your own onion’. One of her favourite anecdotes she tells about her early life - the origin story, more or less, of her existence as an artist - concerns her seventh-grade English teacher, Arthur Kratzmann, to whom she would dedicate her first album. Kratzmann told her two things which would stay with her: seeing one of her pictures, he told her that ‘if you can paint with a brush you can paint with words’, and that if she did write, she had to ‘write in her own blood’. She uses this phrase so frequently across her career it appears like a mantra: a reminder of what she sees as the artist’s solemn responsibility to write with an absolute honesty, but it’s in relation to the songs on Blue that the idea comes closest to a literal description of what she was trying to do. As she saw it, at that time, ‘as a poet, the only thing that I could see to do fresh, that hadn't really been explored poetically, was the internal landscape. … I had a good teacher at one time who told me that I should write in my own blood, write from my own experience. … I thought … that was one of the few territories left for a poet to be a contributor of any kind.’ The metaphor here is spatial: the self is a ‘landscape’ and a ‘territory’ to be ‘explored’. This quest has a goal: to find the ‘human truth’ at the core of one’s self, with no deceptions, and there are, in these songs, some powerful revelations uncovered in Mitchell’s bold venture inwards. But there’s also something haunting this quest, and the songs which document it, something which only gradually reveals itself through careful listening and a sifting of the diverse historical threads which weave together the particular conception of the human subject that Mitchell encountered in her time, and channelled, and grappled with, in her words and music.

* * *

It wasn’t long before the new popular fixation with one’s own personality, noted by music critics in the work of singer-songwriters in the first years of the 1970s, was being recognised as a defining feature of wider American society. The author Tom Wolfe, in a 1976 essay for New York magazine, gave the era perhaps its most enduring label: the ‘Me Decade’. Comparing the phenomenon to nineteenth-century religious revivals, he called it a ‘Great Awakening’, originating in countercultural communities such as the Esalen Institute in California and rapidly spreading across the whole of society, creating, Wolfe wrote, ‘the greatest age of individualism in American history’. In these institutes and communes, ideas derived from psychoanalysis were reformulated as a comprehensive lifestyle involving practices such as ‘encounter sessions’, where what Wolfe called ‘candidates for personality change’ were encouraged, in words which may well remind us of Mitchell’s account of what she was doing during the making of Blue, ‘to bare their own souls and to strip away one another’s defensive facade … all the shams and excess baggage of society and … upbringing in order to find the Real Me’. Wolfe summarised the entire ethos of the age in a single phrase which repeats throughout his essay: ‘Let’s talk about Me.’

‘The Me Decade’ is a piece of satire and Wolfe’s approach is, at least in part, to exaggerate the significance of anecdotal examples for polemic or comic effect; some of his observations, though, have been borne out by more thorough sociological research into the era. The social scientist Daniel Yankelovich, for instance, summarising the results of the many public opinion surveys he conducted between the early 1960s and late 1970s, has said that during this period American society saw ‘an extraordinary transformation in social values of the sort usually associated with generations or even centuries’, which, above all, involved ‘a radical extension of individualism’. Values associated with traditional collective identities - sacrifice, duty, conformity - had diminished in favour of what he called ‘expressiveness … forms of choice and individualism that express one’s unique inner nature’. The classic study of individualism in post-war American life, Habits of the Heart, offered the year 1970 as the crucial turning point: society in the twenty-five years leading up to it ‘enjoyed a vigorous civic culture’; twenty-five years later, in 1995, the writers could diagnose ‘a crisis of civic membership … vividly evident at virtually every level.’

And yet, while Wolfe clearly believed he was witnessing something unprecedented in American history, he was still able to trace the origin of what he called the ‘alchemical dream … [of] remaking … one’s very self’ back to the previous century and to a series of accounts the French historian Alexis de Tocqueville made of his travels in the United States in the 1830s. Tocqueville observed a society fundamentally distinct from anything he had encountered in Europe: in America, ‘traditional ties, supports and restrictions have been left behind’ and individualism - the word used in this way for the first time by Tocqueville - was thriving. Tocqueville’s characterisation of ‘democracy in America’ is a curiously atomised form of political life: ‘Not only does democracy make each man forget his ancestors’, he wrote, ‘it … divides him from his contemporaries; it continually turns him back into himself, and threatens, at last, to enclose him entirely in the solitude of his own heart.’ He explained this particular quirk of American political culture as resulting from the absence, particularly in regions along the western frontier, of both a strong state presence or aristocratic class, resulting in an unprecedented number of people who, in his words, ‘owe no man anything and hardly expect anything from anybody’. It’s in this context that the seminal and enduring statement on individualism in America was made. Ralph Waldo Emerson had been a Unitarian minister in Boston until his resignation from the church in 1832, demonstrating a resistance to conformity which would receive full expression in his 1841 essay, ‘Self-Reliance’. While this famous piece of writing has been seen as a defining encapsulation of the burgeoning individualistic spirit of early nineteenth-century American society, the sociologist Robert Bellah more precisely views Emerson’s essay as the initiation of a new turn in American individualism - one more in keeping with the spirit of  1960s idealists - namely an anti-materialistic, ‘expressive individualism’ in which ‘the search for wealth’ is ‘put aside … in favor of a deeper cultivation of the self’.

‘Nothing is at last sacred but the integrity of your own mind’ is a typical Emersonian declaration from ‘Self-Reliance’, a rhetorical style which betrays more than a hint of the sermons he would have heard and given in his early life; in ‘Self-Reliance’, however, Emerson preaches a belief not in God or the church but in ‘your own thought … what is true for you in your private heart’. He is unambiguous in his low opinion of those people around him who uncritically followed established social mores and indeed of society itself. Included in his list of conformist pressures to resist are not only ‘the smooth mediocrity and squalid contentment’ he saw all around him in contemporary New England society but also the content of all ‘books and traditions’, accepting only that knowledge which he is able to establish for himself, as well as all the conventional obligations of social ties including those connecting a person to their family: ‘I shun father and mother and wife and brother’, he says, ‘when my genius calls me’.

It’s in Emerson’s insistence on a demanding authentic individuality that we arrive at the deep root of Joni Mitchell’s intellectual and moral formation, not directly, but by way of two figures for whom Emerson was a formative influence: the first is Henry David Thoreau, whose Walden tested out a particularly pure interpretation of Emersonian self-reliance in the woods on Emerson’s estate in Massachusetts and which stands as an obvious forbear to Mitchell’s own recurrent retreats into solitude including those made to her secluded property in British Columbia, first used in the period directly after recording Blue, which she came to call her ‘Walden Pond’. The second, and by a distance the most important, is Friedrich Nietzsche, whose philosophy has now been recognised as having been decisively shaped by his lifelong immersion in the writings of Emerson, and whose presence is felt throughout Mitchell’s life and work: she has described him as her ‘kindred’ and once said that her first encounter with Nietzsche’s Thus Spoke Zarathustra was ‘uncanny and pertinent - it was my salvation’.

Kept apart in intellectual history for a long time, due in part to Nietzsche’s association with European fascism in the twentieth century and Emerson’s reputation as a preeminent representative of American liberalism, it has only recently been made clear just how much Nietzsche’s famous pronouncements concerning the relationship of the individual to society owe to Emerson’s essays and in particular to ‘Self-Reliance’. Nietzsche described Emerson as a ‘brother soul’ and the ‘most fertile thinker of their shared century’. Many of his most powerfully expressed ethical and political positions - the belief that the bulk of society constitutes a ‘herd’, that it is pervaded by a stultifying, herd-like conformism and that only through the single-minded individual striving unstintingly against it is any true morality possible - are evidently derived from Emerson’s ‘Self-Reliance’. ‘Morality in Europe today’, wrote Nietzsche in Beyond Good and Evil, ‘is herd animal morality’, and he insists that the only morals an individual should follow are those which they have established - or, as he loved to say, created - for themselves. He is under no illusions as to the difficulties, indeed the suffering, which may be incurred by the person who takes seriously the moral principles he sets down: inevitably their words and actions will be received by most as outrageous, they will risk provoking the revenge or resentment of the herd, and finally may end up as profoundly alone as a single star flung into deep space: ‘Can you be your own judge and avenger of your law?’, he writes in Zarathustra, ‘Thus is a star thrown out into desolate space and into the icy breath of being alone’. But, he reassures us, it is only from the efforts of individuals willing to brave such complete isolation that a superior form of humanity - what he called the ubermensch, or ‘Overhuman’ - would ever emerge: ‘You lonely ones of today, who withdraw to the side, you shall one day be a people: out of you, who have chosen yourselves, shall a chosen people grow: - and out of them the Overhuman.’

Speaking at the end of a long interview first broadcast on Canadian radio in 2013, Mitchell is asked what she’s been ‘most proud of’ in her career and in her reply she says: ‘There’s one thing that I’ve been trying to bring across to people, I think, is you’re on your own. Let’s face it … And that’s what Nietzsche’s uberman was all about … You know, to remove the crutches.’ Nietzschean ideas and language pepper Mitchell’s work and public statements throughout her career, especially from the late 1970s onwards, when comments about the ‘spiritual decay’ in American society start cropping up, alongside references to an insidious, creeping ‘herd mentality’; there’s even a song on Dog Eat Dog - ‘The Three Great Stimulants’ - which is based on one of Nietzsche’s late condemnations of the composer Richard Wagner and the culture which venerated him. Mitchell draws a parallel between the ‘decadence’ Nietzsche saw all around him in Europe in the 1880s and the distracted, corrupted, ‘troubled times’ she felt she was living through a hundred years later in the U.S.A. But the core of her engagement with Nietzsche is captured in those words from the radio interview; to live out the meaning of one’s irreducible individuality without any false comforts - ‘you’re on your own. Let’s face it’ - has been her lifelong creed: ‘I was always a kind of freak in my own society - you know, I stuck out’, she said back in 1969, ‘my mother’s very conservative and was always wanting me to blend in, but I never did blend in, and I was a source of agitation to her because I wouldn’t blend in.’ Remarkably, it’s possible for us to say that this pronounced individualism, which according to her was virtually innate - both revealed and sharpened by her unlikely full recovery from polio at the age of nine - had a Nietzschean orientation before she knew it: that key guiding principle given to her by her seventh-grade English teacher - to write in her own blood - was, she later realised, adapted from Nietzsche’s challenge to writers in Thus Spoke Zarathustra: ‘Of all that is written, I love only that which one writes with one’s own blood’, and what we hear in her songs, before and after Blue, but never more so than on what she calls that ‘purest [album] of all’, is her sustained effort to take up that challenge.

* * *

Mitchell’s commitment to an individualist ethic - which she would later find reflected in Nietzsche’s Zarathustra - has manifested in various ways throughout her life. From her earliest public statements, before she had even released any records, she was identifying herself as someone who was not ‘a trend follower’, and while it has never been unheard-of for newly-emerging artists to make big claims for their originality, it was unusual for someone in her position at that stage of her career to insist, as she did, on the ‘complete and total artistic control over everything’ concerning her music, including the artwork for her album covers. There is also, from a very early point, a recurrent impulse towards solitude, particularly once she had gained a degree of fame. In early 1970, when she was making the first of many indications to retire from the music industry, she would make comments in interviews like: ‘I’m not very social. I'm a very solitary person, even in a room full of people I feel completely alone. You need solitude to make anything artistic.’

But the area in which her individualism has been seen in sharpest focus is in relation to the expectations she felt pressing on her as a woman and as an artist in her place and time. The man who gave her the surname we all know her for, Chuck Mitchell, was her first serious musical partner as well as her first husband, and, just as the story of her seventh-grade interaction with Mr Kratzmann marks the incipience of her ambition to live as an artist, her split with Mitchell - breaking up the folk-song duo they had formed and ending their marriage - is a moment she has described as the crucial necessary step in her artistic individuation: ‘I met a folksinger, Chuck Mitchell, where my name comes from. We were married in the States and I was in a duo with him … we worked for a couple of years that way. And then my work began to mature … and I began to kind of long for my own growth. I felt that I couldn't grow with him, that we would never grow together, that I had to separate myself from the duo, that I had to become an individual in order to grow. And as soon as the duo dissolved, the marriage dissolved.’

This formative episode in her early life is the subject of ‘I Had a King’, the first song on her first album, Song to a Seagull. Using the pseudo-medieval mode briefly popular among folk-songwriters at the time - her husband is a ‘king’ who carries her off ‘to his country for marriage’ - Mitchell’s contempt for the humourless and backwards man who needed her to be his beautiful assistant is nonetheless clear: in lines like ‘He lives in another time/Ladies in gingham still blush/While he sings them of wars and wine/But … I can never become that kind’ she declares that she cannot become a woman who would be satisfied with what he is and what he would want from a wife: as she sings in the song’s refrain, ‘I can’t go back there anymore/You know my keys won’t fit the door/You know my thoughts don’t fit the man/They never can’. But a more specifically individualistic spirit is evident in the song which bookends Song to a Seagull, ‘Cactus Tree’, in which it is not just the strings attached to wifehood which Mitchell resists but any claim made on her independence by a man.

[‘Cactus Tree’]

‘I feel that’s the song of modern woman’, Mitchell has said of ‘Cactus Tree’. ‘Yes, it has to do with my experiences, but I know a lot of girls like that … who find that the world is full of lovely men but they’re driven by something else other than settling down to frau-duties.’ In his excellent 2008 book, The Music of Joni Mitchell, musicologist Lloyd Whitesell suggests that what’s happening in this song is a rewriting of the sort of Arthurian ‘quest romance’ which had been taken up by male songwriters of the time, like David Crosby in his song, ‘Guinnevere’. In the typical quest narrative, ‘it is the woman who is left behind’ while the male hero voyages onwards. This is the initial set-up in ‘Cactus Tree’ - an adventurer invites her onto his ship and presents her with jewels - but the outcome is different: the man is left bereft while she disappears without explaining or looking back. It’s no coincidence that it’s in this song where the influence of Bob Dylan is felt the strongest across Mitchell’s work. She’s said of ‘Cactus Tree’ that it was ‘Dylan-influenced in its melody … in its style. I even lengthen my ‘As’ when I sing it, because it sings better. It’s all sort of in monotone’, referencing the famous ‘Dylanesque’ vocal delivery of that period. Mitchell has often said that the frank personal perspective Dylan sings from in the opening lines to his 1965 song, ‘Positively 4th Street’ - ‘You’ve got a lotta nerve, to say you are my friend’ - opened her up all at once to the possibility of introducing into her songwriting the subjective lyrical style she had only explored in poetry up to that point. Mitchell also mentions the ‘big impression’ left on her, around the same time, by the documentary film, Dont Look Back, which covered Dylan’s 1965 tour of England and which features his notoriously hostile responses to the questions of Horace Judson, a Time Magazine writer. In this interview, Dylan expresses an absolute rejection of being categorised as either a folk or a pop singer. It’s easy to imagine this insistence on his singular artistic status chiming with Mitchell, who would make similar claims for her own uncategorizable music throughout her career, as it is with some of the lyrics he was singing at the time, like his quintessentially individualist couplet in 1966’s ‘4th Time Around’: ‘I never asked for your crutch/Now don’t ask for mine’. The warning in the final verse of Mitchell’s ‘Cactus Tree’ - ‘They will lose her if they follow’ - recalls the sort of rebuffs to needy lovers made by Dylan in songs like ‘Don’t Think Twice (It’s Alright)’ or ‘It Ain’t Me Babe’ and the image of the cactus tree itself is one of perfect self-reliance; a plant which thrives in isolation, a vision of freedom as total unattachment.

[‘Cactus Tree’]

Perhaps the most fateful moment of collision between Mitchell’s vocation to be a singular, authentic artist and her pull to choose a life-partner, possibly, as she puts it, to ‘settl[e] down to frau-duties’, occurred just months before the recording of Blue, when, having initially agreed to marry her then-boyfriend Graham Nash, Mitchell broke off the relationship via a telegram from Crete which read, 'If you hold sand too tightly in your hand, it will run through your fingers.' Explaining her decision years later, Mitchell talked about her two grandmothers who had both had artistic inclinations, one a pianist, the other a musician and poet, and both of whom had any ambition ‘thwarted’ by the constraints of married life: ‘my paternal grandmother … never complained, she just gave … the last time in [her] life she cried she was fourteen. She cried [because she had been told] “You’re never going to have a piano” … my maternal grandmother … had an organ in the farmhouse. She played for local affairs, and wrote poetry. And she kicked the kitchen door practically off the hinges … because she was a musician stuck on a farm.’ In Mitchell’s telling, it was their example, and the conviction that she had inherited ‘the creative gene’, which meant she had to pursue an artistic career: in her words, ‘I think I had to do it for them’.

There’s much to take from this moving account of her grandmothers’ lives: firstly, the way that she identifies the artistic impulse as a fundamental expression of one’s individuality and personal freedom; and then there’s the implication that she considered the two paths of either properly fulfilling such an impulse or becoming a wife and mother to be utterly mutually-exclusive; and lastly, the palpable sense of sympathy - even solidarity - that Mitchell expresses towards these women in the background of her family history. Much to the dismay of many of her devoted younger listeners, Mitchell has consistently and repeatedly disavowed feminism, despite, as we’ve seen, the way some of the most important decisions of her life have been rooted in her awareness of the frustrations of women in previous generations. Later in her career, on at least one occasion, she has stated plainly, ‘I would have had more recognition for my musical talent were I a man’, and written songs on subjects such as violence against women and the scandal of the Magdalene Laundries in Ireland. Such positions have not changed her mind on feminism itself, however, saying in 2013, for instance, ‘I’m not a feminist … I don’t want to get a posse against men.’

Responses to Mitchell’s hostility to feminism have focussed on the way it rehearses certain stereotypes of feminists - that they’re ‘against men’, for instance - but what’s been overlooked is the way it’s often expressed as part of her broader aversion to being part of groups of any kind; in other words, it’s possible that the idea of being a member of ‘a posse’ might be at least as distasteful to her as the idea of being ‘against men’. She has always resisted group membership: of the hippies, for instance, she has said that, despite her popular perception as ‘the queen of the hippies’, she often felt alienated from ‘the hippie guard’, that she ‘could never buy into it totally as an orthodoxy’ and that she ‘always had a different perspective’, adding, importantly, that ‘an artist is a sideliner, not a joiner’. Equally, she has always resisted association with inherited collective identities such as nationality or race: ‘I’m a mutt. I belong to nothing, and sometimes that’s lonely. I don’t belong to a school of music. I don’t belong to a race. I don’t belong to a nation.’ This distancing from group identities of any kind is a symptom of her powerful commitment to a radical individualism which she herself associates with Nietzsche: ‘Nietzsche’, she said in conversation with her old friend Malka Marom, ‘is a man without a country, like me.’ As she says, such a stance is ‘sometimes … lonely’, although, as we’ve seen, Nietzsche warns that loneliness is an inevitable outcome for anyone courageous enough to live according to his principles.

As many listeners have noted, loneliness threads itself through Mitchell’s songs from the very start but it comes into particular prominence in her albums in the first half of the 1970s. From the opening words on Blue - ‘I am on a lonely road’ - to the entirety of Hejira, her concept album based on the long drives she did across the country in late 1975 and early 1976, and which convey, in her words, ‘the sweet loneliness of solitary travel’, it’s a theme she returns to constantly. While in interviews she makes clear that she fully accepts loneliness as ‘one of the dues you pay’ in the pursuit of a singular artistic vision, what we find in her songs is something more like what Whitesell calls her characteristic ‘dialectical way of thinking’, in which a dilemma is presented with no obvious resolution offered, or what she has described as the ‘almost schizophrenic’ habit in her songwriting, in which ‘you lay out a case and argue with yourself about it … with no conclusions.’ It’s typical, for instance, to see her present two equivalent demands on her - like ‘loving’ and ‘freedom’, in the song, ‘Help Me’ from 1974’s Court and Spark. In that song, it’s a state she shares with the person the song’s addressed to: ‘We love our lovin’/But not like we love our freedom’, a conclusion which suggests that, in this case, the pull of ‘freedom’ is the stronger of the two, although the preceding lines cast doubt on that: ‘Help me/I think I’m falling/In love with you/Are you going to let me go there by myself/That’s such a lonely thing to do’. In ‘Same Situation’, also on Court and Spark, the clash of dialectically opposing urges is presented just as starkly, although in this case, the desire for freedom is more specifically pinned as her artistic vocation: ‘With the millions of the lost and lonely ones/I called out to be released/Caught in my struggle for higher achievements/And my search for love/That don't seem to cease’. Mitchell places her own personal dilemmas within the context of much wider loneliness: she’s just one of ‘millions of … lost and lonely ones’. Earlier in the song, she more explicitly presents a picture of a disenchanted world, floating adrift from meaning: ‘With heaven full of astronauts/And the Lord on death row/While the millions of his lost and lonely ones/Call out and clamour to be found’. It’s worth remembering that Mitchell has insisted that, even at her most personal and apparently confessional, she has always intended her songs to have resonance and relevance to a public audience: ‘I've … used the songwriting process’, she has said, ‘as an investigation of self, self-analysis of sorts, but not just for the sake of spilling my guts or taking off my clothes, so to speak, in public. … I wanted to create a persona that was actual … so that if I had any insight … to pass on since I had a public voice I felt I better be presenting something nourishing and useful.’ In 1974, asked about the prevalence of loneliness in her songs, she replied: ‘I suppose people have always been lonely but this, I think, is an especially lonely time to live in.’ There’s an intuition here that her own commitment to a demanding personal ethos of individualism and its accompanying toll of loneliness might, at this point, in the heart of Wolfe’s ‘Me Decade’, have been mirroring the experiences of many around her. The anthropologist Louis Dumont, in his account of the origins of individualism, has said that while ‘individualism is the cardinal virtue of modern societies’, it ‘is perpetually and irremediably haunted by its opposite’: what he calls the ‘collective’ or ‘holistic’ understanding of human society, in which meaning is understood relationally; a person’s life only having meaning as it relates to other people’s lives. On ‘Amelia’, the second song from Hejira, Mitchell captures something of the haunting inverse of the individualist credo.

[‘Amelia’]

The aviator Amelia Earhart was one of the most famous Americans of the 1930s: she was the first woman to fly solo across the Atlantic and, in July 1937, attempted to become the first female pilot to fly around the world. Leaving Lae Airport in Papua New Guinea, having completed the bulk of the circumnavigation, Earhart’s ‘Electra’ aircraft vanished somewhere over the Pacific Ocean, leaving no physical trace of Earhart or her plane, despite an extensive search effort and subsequent investigations. It’s this flight Mitchell thinks of when she spots ‘six jet planes/leaving six white vapor trails’, as she’s driving across the desert. Instantly, she makes a connection between those six ‘flying engines’ and her musical vocation: ‘It was the strings of my guitar’. ‘In this song,’ she has said, ‘I was thinking of Amelia Earhart and addressing it from one solo pilot to another … sort of reflecting on the cost of being a woman and having something you must do.’ But she also sees it as an augury of something, seeing in the six parallel vapour trails ‘the hexagram of the heavens’, a reference to the six stacked horizontal lines, variously broken and unbroken, which compose the figures of the I Ching, the ancient Chinese divination text Mitchell loves and often cites. The first hexagram of the I Ching, and the only one composed of six unbroken lines, is named the ‘Hexagram for the Creative Heaven’, and though the meaning of any given hexagram is always elliptical and open-ended, the emphasis in the names given to it - ‘force’, ‘the creative’, ‘strong action’ - makes it clear what sort of significance it would have held for Mitchell: her powerful creative calling, the ‘something [she] must do’. What then to make of the song’s refrain: ‘Amelia, it was just a false alarm’?

[‘Amelia’]

In the song’s middle verse we have its most simple, most unambiguous line: ‘I wish that he was here tonight’. She wraps the hurt of missing someone up into ‘the road’, that richly multivalent symbol of freedom, escape and discovery: the place she pursues her - distinctly Emersonian - intention not to rely on the words of others - the ‘people’ who ‘will tell you where they’ve gone’ and ‘where to go’ - but to establish understanding for herself, asserting that ‘till you get there yourself you never really know’. But in this quest, this ‘solo’ flight, the precedent of Earhart seems not to inspire Mitchell so much as haunt her: ‘A ghost of aviation/She was swallowed by the sky/Or by the sea like me she had a dream to fly’. In this light, Earhart’s dream of flight is seen as both tragic and foolish, ‘like Icarus ascending’, alluding to the man who tried to fly by attaching feathers to himself with beeswax which melted when he flew too close to the sun, causing him to fall into the sea and drown, historically understood as the very emblem of hubris. It’s an accusation she levels squarely at herself in the next verse.

[‘Amelia’]

We get the clearest description of her single-minded pursuit of artistic greatness in this verse than we do anywhere else in her songwriting: the metaphor of great height in ‘I’ve spent my whole life in clouds at icy altitudes’ should, I think, be seen alongside her ‘search for higher achievements’ in ‘Same Situation’ but I suspect there’s also a reference here to the ‘clouds’ in ‘Both Sides, Now’, the song which was substantially responsible for making her career when it became a hit for the folk-singer Judy Collins, and which Mitchell recorded herself and included on her 1969 album, Clouds. This pursuit has, of course, been an acutely solitary one: ‘maybe’, she wonders aloud, it’s meant that she’s ‘never really loved’; we might even hear an echo, in those ‘icy altitudes’, of Nietzsche’s ‘icy breath of being alone’. And she comes very close to calling the whole enterprise folly: she is now proud Icarus, ‘looking down on everything’, only to be brought low by the pull of another human being: the ‘beautiful foolish arms’ which Icarus flaps hopelessly in the previous verse transform into the gravitational force which causes her downfall: ‘I crashed into his arms/Amelia it was just a false alarm’. But what is the false alarm here? In the previous verse, it sounds like she’s saying it’s the ‘dream to fly’ which is false, which has led Earhart, and subsequently Mitchell, into ruin; here, it seems as though she’s decided it’s him - his siren song - which has led her astray. The two forces acting on her - and the two possibilities for interpretation - are ultimately maintained in perfect dialectical tension: no conclusion is reached except the next stop along the highway, which is, in an even clearer allusion to an earlier song of hers, ‘the Cactus Tree Motel’. That old symbol of her self-reliance and of her resolution to live without attachments is here referenced sardonically, a resigned acceptance that she will - because she must - keep living this way. And what we find, right in the middle of the near-decade between ‘Cactus Tree’ and ‘the Cactus Tree Motel’, is the album, and the song, which registers these tensions in their most raw, most transparent form.

* * *

The first Appalachian dulcimer Mitchell ever owned was probably sold to her in late 1969. She took it with her on her trip to Crete in 1970, sending a postcard back to Joellen Lapidus, the woman who had made the instrument, to tell her how much she loved it. Despite certain similarities to the guitar, the playing technique for the dulcimer is very different: it’s laid across the lap of the player, who sounds the strings by strumming horizontally back-and-forth across them with one hand and making the chord shapes by pressing downwards onto the frets with the other. The introduction to ‘A Case of You’ is played with less sensitivity and fluency than it would have been if Mitchell had been playing one of her more familiar accompanying instruments like the piano or the guitar, and this faint clunkiness lends the opening music a workaday, informal quality, which functions as a skilful misdirection from the emotional intensity about to follow, inviting us into the world of the song simply and unassumingly. There’s a notable absence of some of Mitchell’s distinctive harmonic manoeuvres, such as her frequent habit of switching abruptly between unrelated keys. In ‘Amelia’, for instance, there are a number of these unprepared harmonic movements, like that of F to G major at the start of every verse. Whitesell calls this device ‘modal mixture’, and has calculated that ‘out of 152 songs written or co-written by Joni Mitchell, only twenty-two are in one pure mode with no modal mixture’. ‘A Case of You’ is one of those twenty-two: the chord changes, with one crucial exception, follow standard harmonic practice within the key established at the beginning. There’s even the presence of features which - relative to the rest of her output - correspond surprisingly closely to conventional pop-songwriting: the dulcimer introduction forms an eight-bar riff which is repeated at regular points through the song, and the principle harmonic structure underpinning the verse, in which we start in the tonic major, and shift steadily through the chords which form over the steps of a descending bassline, has been a staple of sad, reflective post-breakup songs from Elvis Presley’s ‘Always On My Mind’ to Adele’s ‘Someone Like You’.

Its placement within the album’s sequence of songs is important: it’s the penultimate song on Blue, and so comes after we’ve experienced the bulk of the record’s emotional and musical journey, including its most openly distressed and despondent moments, such as the title track, which uses a highly idiosyncratic song form, and the song which directly precedes ‘A Case of You’, ‘River’, which incorporates the melody of ‘Jingle Bells’ in its introduction before reharmonizing it in a different key in its coda. Taken together, the more conventional musical qualities heard in the first section of ‘A Case of You’ construct a particular rhetorical stance: they indicate a putting-aside of pretence or elaboration; the layers of the onion have been peeled back, this is the ‘Real Me’.

[‘A Case of You’]

The lyric opens with a memory of an argument between Mitchell and the person the song is addressed to, taking place, we’re told, ‘just before’ their final separation: he tells her, “I am as constant as the Northern Star”, which draws an exasperated response from her: “Constantly in the darkness, where’s that at? If you want me I’ll be in the bar.” At the bar, shrouded in ‘blue TV screen light’, she draws a map of Canada which morphs, as she’s drawing it, into a picture of her lover’s face. Knowing what we now know about Joni Mitchell, there are two details here which might strike us as surprising. ‘I am constant as a Northern Star’ is a quotation from Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar, but there’s also something of Nietzsche’s image of the self-contained individual who lives entirely according to principles they have established for themselves: ‘a star thrown out into desolate space’. Mitchell is derisive: ‘Constantly in the darkness, where’s that at?’ In a reverse of what might be expected, it seems to be her lover’s insistence on his self-containment which irks her, and although her hostility here may simply be directed at the pomposity of a man who quotes Shakespeare in quarrels with her, it feels more like an example of the particular form of irritation which is triggered by the secret recognition in another of a quality she herself possesses. The second surprise is the prominence given to ‘Canada’, mentioned twice, with emphasis added the second time by its coinciding with the entry of James Taylor’s guitar and Russ Kunkel’s percussion. As we’ve heard, Mitchell has expressed that she considers herself to be ‘of no nation’ but, of course, on a literal level, this isn’t true; she was born and lived the first twenty-two years of her life in Canada, retaining citizenship there permanently after her move to the United States. This song is one of only three across the whole of her output in which Canada is mentioned; its appearance here is easily the most spotlighted. Taylor, in the absence of a bass guitar, provides the roots of the chords implied by the dulcimer: the instrument which grounds the musical texture enters at the very moment Mitchell sings of Canada, her place of origin, and in fact she does so by echoing - both lyrically and harmonically - the first phrase of Canada’s national anthem: ‘Oh Canada’. This allusion interrupts the metre of the song: it inserts a 2/4 bar into the regular succession of 4/4 bars, and, while a reference to her country’s national anthem in the context of a song about a defining heartbreak is an example of Mitchell’s tendency to mix humour into moments of great sadness, the musical foregrounding of the phrase, and the full-throated delivery she applies to it, suggest that something significant is being indicated here, something which only becomes clear when we see the musical parallel formed between the ‘Canada’ bar and the only other instance of a 2/4 bar in the song, one which follows the same harmonic pattern, the ‘case of you’ in the song’s chorus:

[‘A Case of You’]

The musical echo of ‘Oh Canada’ in the key phrase of the chorus - ‘a case of you’ - is not the first time Mitchell has set up a link between the country she comes from and the song’s addressee: as we’ve seen, the ‘map of Canada’ frames the sketch of his face. In the emotional logic of the song, drawing Canada seems to be her response to their argument, taking place in the ‘blue TV screen light’, with its suggestion of coldness and isolation. The moment is, I think, a very rare admission of homesickness on Mitchell’s part: it is an acknowledgment of her origins and of the pull she feels - however momentarily - towards them. Contrary to principles of self-creation, her origins - in this case, Canada - represent something she cannot change about herself, and this is the significance of the connection she makes between them and the person she’s singing to: it raises the possibility that, in her life, he may constitute something equally irrevocable. And this link offers a clue to the meaning of the concluding line of the chorus - ‘I could drink a case of you and still be on my feet’ - which appears at first to be a paradox: what would it mean to remain sober after drinking a whole case of a substance which is something like ‘holy wine’?

[‘A Case of You’]

There’s a section in Nietzsche’s 1881 book, Daybreak, where he gives us his description of the ideal relationship between two people: it would, he says, be a ‘kind of neighbour-love … different from that of the … anxious will to please … a gentle … relaxed friendliness … as though they were gazing out of the windows of their castle, which is their fortress’. Here, it seems, might be a route out of the quandary of loneliness that individualism seems to present: people can still relate to each other without compromising on the principle of self-reliance as long as the integrity of their individual selves remains absolutely impermeable. Using less militarist language, it’s a view Mitchell herself seemed to subscribe to in a 1974 interview, when she said, ‘love is two people who can be together but stand independently of one another. I really believe maintenance of individuality is so necessary to what we would call a true or lasting love.’ At the beginning of the second verse of ‘A Case of You’ she references that key expression of her individuality - her artistic vocation - in terms which remind us how solitary it has required her life to be: ‘I am a lonely painter/I live in a box of paints’, but this boundaried state - her life within the ‘box of paints’ - is immediately put under strain: she is ‘drawn to’ others, and specifically those who are able to counterbalance something she struggles with within herself: ‘I’m frightened by the devil/and I’m drawn to ones who ain’t afraid’. As we approach the second chorus, it becomes clear that Mitchell has set up the principle of her pursuit of art in order to contrast it - dialectically - with the opposing force of her irrepressible pull towards others: part of the pathos of - ‘love is touching souls/surely you touched mine’ - is in the fact that she sings it just after she has pictured herself in her carefully-maintained, walled-off solitude. And how does she know he has touched her soul? Because ‘part of you pours out of me/In these lines from time to time’. In her ‘lines’ - her poetry, her art, the paramount expression of her individuality - is the unmistakable trace of another; she has written in her own blood but what pours out is not a self as a pure, indivisible element but as a compound, fused with the presence of someone else.

[‘A Case of You’]

That steadily descending harmonic pattern which ‘A Case of You’ shares with other melancholic love songs like ‘Always On My Mind’ and ‘Someone Like You’ maps quite naturally onto metaphors of sinking; as a trope, it captures something of the idiom ‘my heart is sinking’, perhaps with the realisation, in these songs, of the ultimate finality of the relationship’s end. But Mitchell triples the sinking effect by including a further two equivalent descending patterns, halfway through the verse and at the chorus. 

The principle of sinking takes on a further role in Mitchell’s song through its affinity with the various liquids mentioned in the lyric, namely wine and blood: we sink, as it were, from the three verses - which in different ways all assert the distinctness of their two selves - into the three choruses, in which some sort of mingling has taken place: he’s in her blood because, we’re told, she has tasted him, like wine; she knows his taste, both bitter and sweet. The idea of being intoxicated by someone, of being ‘drunk in love’, is a commonplace of love lyrics but that, crucially, is not what Mitchell is saying here: she would be sober - still on her feet - if she drank a case of him. The effect of this wine must involve a different kind of transformation, one only explained by the adjective she uses to describe it: ‘holy’.

[‘A Case of You’]

While the theology of the Holy Communion in Christianity has always been complex and contentious, the essential principle is clear: receiving the sanctified bread and wine is an act which catalyses a profound union between the individual believer and both God and the rest of the church. St Augustine underlined the ‘coming-together’ aspect of communion by pointing out that wine itself is the result of a process which transforms separate elements into a single new substance: ‘Remember, friends, how wine is made. Individual grapes hang together in a bunch, but the juice from them all is mingled to become a single brew. This is the image chosen by Christ our Lord to show how, at his own table, the mystery of our unity … is solemnly consecrated.’ And for those Christians who believe in the doctrine of transubstantiation, the idea of substances changing into something wholly different is made literal: during the ceremony, the holy wine becomes Christ’s blood; by drinking it we are transformed into a state of unity with him and all believers. Drinking this type of wine changes us but not as a temporary, chaotic departure from our ‘real’ self but as a permanent, fundamental transformation, and it’s this kind of process which is being indicated by the recurring assertion in the choruses of ‘A Case of You’: drinking this ‘holy wine’ has precipitated a permanent change in her; it has transformed her into what she is. This is why, despite what sounds like sensible advice given to her by the woman in the final verse: ‘stay with him if you can/but be prepared to bleed’, she cannot accept it: ‘but you are in my blood’. Mitchell expertly weaves this principle of a transformation into a state of unity by subjecting her own lyric to a transformation: the first two choruses start with: ‘You’re in my blood like holy wine’ which becomes the more emphatically intermingled ‘you are in my blood, you’re my holy wine’ in the third. We can also see it in her musical choices: in the melodic structure of the song’s refrain - ‘I could drink a case of you and I would still be on my feet’ she starts with the pointedly regular and on-the-beat phrasing of ‘I could drink a case of’, then applies not only a remarkable melisma to the ‘you’ but a different melisma in each chorus, becoming wilder each time, before returning, always, to a long, steadying tonic note on ‘my feet’. The melody, symbolically, embodies the paradox at the heart of the lyric: it only seems as if the impact of the ‘you’ the song is addressed to has destabilised her: in fact, the self she is left with after this relationship is a new substance, a her which is an inextricable mixture of him and her. The permanence of this transformation is underlined by the final musical gesture of the song. The only chord change in the whole song which does not follow conventional harmonic practice is the final one, moving the music into an entirely new key. As the song’s final chord, it has no harmonic function except itself, and it is to leave us with the sense that we have come through the musical processes of the song to end as something permanently different, something new.

The poem the phrase ‘love is touching souls’ is adapted from is ‘Love-Song’ by the German modernist poet, Rainer Maria Rilke, and, like ‘A Case of You’, it’s also a reflection on the intermingling of individual selves which takes place when one encounters another: ‘How shall I hold my soul so it does not/touch on yours’, Rilke wonders, and uses a musical metaphor to express the paradox of separateness: ‘all that touches us, you and me,/takes us, together, like the stroke of a bow,/that draws one chord out of the two strings.’ He asks - ‘On what instrument are we strung? And what artist has us in their hand?’ - and has no answer except to marvel at the mystery of it: ‘O sweet song’. What does happen, exactly, in a song? There’s a clip of Mitchell performing ‘A Case of You’ at the 2023 Newport Folk Festival. She is visibly frail, having suffered an aneurysm which nearly killed her in 2015, and it’s the folk singer Brandi Carlile who takes most of the main vocal responsibilities, but the performance is exhilaratingly and movingly elevated when Mitchell, her voice now well over an octave deeper than when she first recorded the song, joins her in harmony. When I start singing, a vibration of air particles which begins in my vocal chords travels almost instantaneously across the air between me and you and into the outer and inner parts of your ear. If you then take the deeply instinctual step to join in, the process, of course, is doubled, our two songs occurring simultaneously as one song, such that it’s impossible, on the molecular level, to tell one from the other.

[‘A Case of You’]

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Thank you for listening to this series of the Secret Life of Songs which was produced by Paul Wierdak and written and presented by me, Anthony, who performs under the name ‘sky coloured’. If you’ve enjoyed it, please consider rating and reviewing it wherever you get your podcasts.