Life | Music

I Sang Happy Birthday to Joni Mitchell

My lady of the canyon

I grew up listening, singing, and playing my guitar to Joni Mitchell tunes. She was my generation’s Taylor Swift. My go-to mentor when things in life went blue and sank into despair. My ferrywoman, who guided me past the “dizzy dancing” clouds of illusion — holding my hand as I wished for a river to skate away on.

Life was bearable with Joni — bearable when I watched the graphic horror of the Vietnam War in my living room. Vietnam opened up the gateway for news to cover violence and suffering on national television. To this day, I don’t know if this is a good thing as I still recall the images of body bags of young men returning home and lined up in rows at the airport, wondering if one of them was our neighbor John.

The times were and are a-changin’, and as a young girl growing up during Anti-War Protests and social and political divisions in the United States, Joni’s clear, innocent voice helped me escape the crumbling dreams and unquenchable “hunger” of humanity.

In her first album, Song To A Seagull, I found solace and companionship and I embarked on a heroine journey with Joni, searching for some light amidst the dark confusion. Life was not only bad in society but in my home as well. The only way to survive was to join “Michael from Mountains,” on his existential quest for a higher purpose and understanding of life.

I heeded Joni’s call to adventure, a bittersweet journey of becoming and self-discovery.

I was on Campbellian counterculture trip for peace and enlightenment and instead ended up raped in a field of orange blossoms by the age of twelve.

The world was never the same again. Yet, I finally understood what Joni meant by the “ups and downs,” and “wins and losses” in life. I understood the rhapsody of dying roses and crying strings. I understood loneliness and vulnerability.

I trembled in the crevices of “sinking sand,” praying for someone, something to show me the way past my broken soul and the malevolent clouds that clung to me.

I played my guitar. I wrote bad poetry. I sang Joni Mitchell songs.

I wanted my life to be bright and cheery like a Chelsea Morning beaming with “butterscotch” kisses pirouetting through “yellow curtains” and rainbows beaming across the wall.

When Joni released her album Ladies of the Canyon, in 1970, I was wearing colorful wampum beads, gypsy shawls, and reading Kahil Gibran’s The Prophet. My introspective search for meaning became my raison d’etre.

I was a self-proclaimed transcendentalist and hated the paving over of nature to build a road or, worse yet, a hotel or parking lot. Joni inspired me to protest the building of the Ritz Carlton in Laguna Beach. She helped me to see life from both sides, to understand that we are all held “captive on the carousel of time,” where “painted ponies go up and down,” and the only damn thing we can do is “look behind from where we came” and keep holding on and spinning around in this blasted circle game.

Then came my favorite album, Blue, which connected my personal dots of melancholy and ennui. Joni’s songs were ink on a pin tattooed on my being, filling in those empty black spaces dragging me down.

Then college happened, then law school, then more and more grad school, kids and more kids, divorce, death, life!

Life happened, Joni.

Life happened and I put my music and guitar away while you experimented with Jazz, Jazz fusion, and pop rock.

And for a time, I lost contact with Joni except when I heard an occasional song on the radio or when my daughter played one of her albums on the record player.

We have a lot of time to make up. So when I heard Joni was playing on October 14, along with Brandi Carlile & Friends at the Hollywood Bowl, I had to go. Had to have her part of my life for the few short years remaining.

And like Joni, Carlile gave us, the audience, permission to feel all that we were feeling and weighing us down in our hearts, the good and the bad.

“There’s no elegant way to describe the fear and anxiety and anger that we’re all feeling about the devastation in the Middle East,” Carlile said.

We should also never underestimate the power of 16,000 collective souls, 16,000 people desperately wanting peace and non-violence. (Carlile)

And then we all sang “Shine,” and unraveled the paradoxes of living in dark places on this crazy planet. We came together as one collective consciousness as we understood that somehow, some way, we must let our little lights shine over this crazy mess of humanity.

We need to shine on Israel and Gaza, Israelis and Palestinians, mothers and children, Frankensteinian science, families tucked in for the night and bombs dropping at their doorsteps, on young rape victims and lousy rape laws, on survival migrants, and mass shooting incidents in an ordinary day in America.

And yes, I sang Happy Birthday to Joni Mitchell; I cried all the way through it because Joni, my mentor, my lady of the canyon, is turning 80 on November 7.

To my Dear Lady of the Canyon, May you continue to bless us with your music and provide us a soundtrack for our remaining years of life.

Mary Cappelli is a lifelong Joni Mitchell fan and knows every song by heart.