“People used to say to me, ‘Nobody’s ever going to cover your songs. They’re too personal,’” said Joni Mitchell in a rare interview in 2021 with Clive Davis. The earlier prediction wasn’t farther from the reality of Mitchell’s early catalog with Judy Collins, Crosby, Stills, and Nash and dozens of other artists pulling Mitchell’s lyrics by the mid-’60s through early ’70s, often before she could record them herself.
By the 1970s, Mitchell’s collaborations spanned singing backing vocals on Carole King‘s Tapestry classic “Will You Love Me Tomorrow.” Before their breakup, Mitchell and Jackson Browne collaborated with her playing electric piano on “Sing My Songs to Me” from his 1973 album, For Everyman.
Mitchell also collaborated with ex-boyfriends Graham Nash, David Crosby, and James Taylor. However, when it came to her songs, she was mostly at the pen, except for a few songs. Here’s a look at four of Mitchell’s songs that featured a co-writer or co-composer.
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[RELATED: 5 Songs You Didn’t Know Joni Mitchell Wrote for Other Artists]
1. “The Hissing of Summer Lawns” (1975)
Written by Joni Mitchell and John Guerin
Mitchell enlisted John Guerin for her seventh album The Hissing of Summer Lawns and co-wrote the title track with the jazz musician. The lyrics center around a woman who marries a rich man, lives in a mansion in the Hollywood Hills, and has all of life’s finer amenities, which feels more like prison than freedom. The “hissing” Mitchell refers to is the sprinklers over the lawns of all the affluent homes in Bel Air, where Mitchell bought a home in 1974. The cover of The Hissing of Summer Lawns features Mitchell’s house highlighted in blue, while the inside has an image of Mitchell in her pool.
He bought her a diamond for her throat
He put her in a ranch house on a hill
She could see the valley barbecues
From her window sill
See the blue pools in the squinting sun
Hear the hissing of summer lawns
He put up a barbed wire fence
To keep out the unknown
And on every metal thorn
Just a little blood of his own
She patrols that fence of his
To a Latin drum
And the hissing of summer lawns
Darkness
Wonder makes it easy
Darkness
With a joyful mask
Darkness
Tube’s gone, darkness, darkness, darkness
No color no contrast
“This record is a total work conceived graphically, musically, lyrically and accidentally, as a whole,” said Mitchell of the album in her liner notes. “The performances were guided by the given compositional structures and the audibly inspired beauty of every player. The whole unfolded like a mystery. It is not my intention to unravel that mystery for anyone, but rather to offer some additional clues.”
“The Hissing of Summer Lawns” went to No. 4 on the Billboard Hot 100 and also featured James Taylor on guitar. David Crosby, Graham Nash, and Taylor are also featured on backing vocals on the opening “In France They Kiss on Main Street.”
2. “A Chair in the Sky” (1979)
Written by Joni Mitchell; composed by Charles Mingus
When Joni Mitchell first met jazz great Charles Mingus, he was already wheelchair-bound after being diagnosed with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS) in 1976. Mitchell came to New York City because Mingus had written six songs for her to complete for him since he could no longer express his music. I was honored,” said Mitchell. “I was curious. It was as if I had been standing by a river, one toe in the water, feeling it out, and Charlie came by and pushed me in—’sink or swim’—him laughing at me dog paddling around in the currents of black classical music.”
Mitchell remembers walking into Mingus’ New York City skyscraper apartment and seeing the jazz maestro sitting in his wheelchair, facing the Hudson River view with his back to her. “The first time I saw his face it shone up at me with a joyous mischief,” she said. “I liked him immediately.” Mingus had previously heard Mitchell’s 1977 album Don Juan’s Reckless Daughter and was impressed with her segue into jazz, which expanded from albums like Court and Spark (1974) and Heijira (1976) and would extend even further with their collaboration and Mitchell’s tribute to him, Mingus.
On Mingus, the majority of the tracks were composed by the musician and Mitchell including “Sweet Sucker Dance,” “The Dry Cleaner From Des Moines,” a new version of his 1959 song “Goodbye Pork Pie Hat,” and another collaboration, “A Chair in the Sky”:
The rain slammed hard as bars
It caught me by surprise
Mutts of the planet
And shook me down for alibis
I’m waiting
For the keeper to release me
Debating this sentence
Biding my time
In memories
Of old friends of mine
In daydreams of Birdland
I see my soul on fire
Burning up the bandstand
Next time
I’ll be bigger!
I’ll be better than ever!
I’ll be happily attached
To my cold hard cash!
But now Manhattan holds me
To a chair in the sky
With the bird in my ears
And boats in my eyes
Going by
“Time never ticked so loudly for me as it did this last year,” said Mitchell of working on the collaborative album with Mingus. “I wanted Charlie to witness the project’s completion. He heard every song but one—’God Must Be a Boogie Man.’ I know it would have given him a chuckle. Inspired by the first four pages of his autobiography, ‘Beneath The Underdog, on the night of our first meeting – it was the last to actually take form, two days after his death.
3. “Lakota” (1988)
Written by Joni Mitchell and Larry Klein
On Mitchell’s 13th album Chalk Mark in a Rain Storm, jazz musician and producer and then-husband Larry Klein co-wrote three songs with her—”My Secret Place,” “Snakes and Ladders,” featuring Don Henley, and “Lakota.” The latter track was a tribute to the Lakota people and the Wounded Knee Occupation of 1973 when Native American activists occupied the town of Wounded Knee on the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation in South Dakota.
I am Lakota
Lakota
Looking at money man
Diggin’ the deadly quotas
Out of balance
Out of hand
We want the land
Lay down the reeking ore
Don’t you hear the shrieking in the trees?
Everywhere you touch the earth, she’s sore
Every time you skin her, all things weep
Your money mocks us
Restitution, what good can it do?
Kenneled in metered boxes
Red dogs in debt to you
I am Lakota
Lakota
Fighting among ourselves
All we can say with one whole heart
Is we won’t sell
No, we’ll never sell
We want the land
The lonely coyote calls
In the woodlands, footprints of the deer
In the barrooms, poor drunk bastard falls
In the courtrooms, deaf ears, sixty years
You think we’re sleeping but
Quietly, like rattlesnakes and stars
We have seen the trampled rainbows
In the smoke of cars
Chalk Mark in a Rain Storm also featured Willie Nelson on “Cool Water,” Tom Petty and Billy Idol on “Dancin’ Clown,” and Peter Gabriel on “My Secret Place.”
On August 16, 1988, the Lakota Sioux marched to Mt. Rushmore to hold a rally seeking to recover federally held lands in the Black Hills that they said were illegally confiscated from them by the government back in 1877. They invited Mitchell to march with them and speak. She and Klein brought along a Super 8mm camera and documented the moment.
4. “Yvette in English” (1993)
Written by Joni Mitchell and David Crosby
By the early ’90s, David Crosby wanted his ex Mitchell to produce a song on his next album. She didn’t care much for taking on that role and suggested they write something together instead. Both sent lyrics to one another via a fax machine and wrote “Yvette In English,” a story of two strangers meeting at a cafe in France.
He’s fumbling with her foreign tongue
Reaching for words and drawing blanks
A loudmouth is stricken deaf and dumb
In a bistro on the left bank
“If I were a painter,” Picasso said
“I’d paint this girl from toe to head!”
Yvette in English saying
“Please have this
Little bit of instant bliss”
[RELATED: 2 Songs Joni Mitchell Wrote About David Crosby and Their Short-Lived Relationship]
“Yvette in English” was featured on Crosby’s 1993 album Thousand Roads. A year later, Mitchell also included “Yvette in English” on her 1994 album Turbulent Indigo.
Photo: Jack Robinson/Getty Images
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