Most singer-songwriters aren’t blatantly anti-Christian, though there are some exceptions. Tori Amos, for example, once told Spin that she “wanted to marry Lucifer.” Others, such as Sinéad O’Connor, Nick Cave and Father John Misty (Josh Tillman), direct their criticisms more at institutional forms of religion while professing, or at least hinting, at some level of belief. Joni Mitchell falls in that camp, though her views on spirituality and traditional values are more nuanced and surprising than most of her peers.
Although there’s no shortage of romantic themes in Mitchell’s 200+ compositions, many of her songs touch on religion, social issues, and ethical conundrums.
I first listened to Mitchell in 1973. That’s when Bruce—an older, Afro-haired guy who came from California to study forestry at the University of Tennessee—introduced me to her acclaimed 1971 album Blue. It contained quirky melodies, instrumentation stripped down to little more than a piano or mountain dulcimer, and a high-pitched voice that was at once angelic, joyous, and pained.
And the lyrics! Not just highly personal, but also playful and filled with details that made each song ring true. Words were no small thing for me, having bailed from a civil engineering major at Georgia Tech to study journalism at UT. I was hooked.
Although there’s no shortage of romantic themes in Mitchell’s 200+ compositions, many of her songs touch on religion, social issues, and ethical conundrums. There are biblical references, including songs that creatively expand upon Job, the Garden of Eden, and the Crucifixion.
Having watched Mitchell’s work evolve over the decades, I agree with The Atlantic’s 2017 description of her as “one of the most cerebral songwriters in modern pop.” That profile also noted that her “relationship to the spotlight has always been deeply ambivalent.” The spotlight has continued to beckon in recent years, and the 82-year-old singer has not dodged it. Since graduating from wheelchair to cane, a frail Mitchell is still performing publicly, though it appears she’ll be reaching a much wider audience in a different way. Director Cameron Crowe (Jerry Maguire, Almost Famous), who’s known Mitchell for decades, has been working with her on a biopic that will star Meryl Streep and Anya Taylor-Joy as the older and younger Mitchell, respectively. Filming is expected to begin next year.
I hope Crowe’s movie does justice to Mitchell’s personal life. It’s complex, molded by severe health problems, serial monogamy, and more than three decades apart from a daughter given up for adoption. Her life and testimony reveal a search for social stability and holiness. That pursuit of authenticity shows an admirable perseverance to wrestle with the truth and the one who embodies it—even if Mitchell can’t quite make out his name tag.
Yearning For Eden
Roberta Joan Anderson was born November 7, 1943, to a church-going family in rural Alberta, Canada. At age nine, she was diagnosed with polio and spent months in a hospital a hundred miles from home. Barely able to move and led to believe she’d never walk again, Mitchell vowed otherwise and directed her wishes to a Christmas tree that her mother had brought to her hospital room. “I’ll make it up to you,” she recalls telling the tree, writes biographer Malka Marom in Joni Mitchell: In Her Own Words. A year later, she was walking well enough to return home—and to church, where, being “good to my promise,” she joined the choir.
“We are stardust / We are golden / And we’ve got to get ourselves / Back to the garden.”
Mitchell became disillusioned with Christianity as a child when a priest seemed annoyed at her simple queries about Old Testament stories. Then in fourth grade, a new minister arrived. “He didn’t call me a bad child when I asked him questions,” Mitchell told Marom. Instead, the pastor shared his views of biblical symbolism, including Adam and Eve as the first humans.
That interest in Eden surfaced in one of her early songs, “Woodstock,” later a hit for Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young. After questioning “a child of God” on his way to the 1969 rock festival, the narrator longs for a peaceful paradise: “And I dreamed I saw the bombers / Riding shotgun in the sky / And they were turning into butterflies / Above our nation.” The first two choruses echo that longing: “We are stardust / We are golden / And we’ve got to get ourselves / Back to the garden.” But the song’s final chorus foreshadows Mitchell’s skepticism towards Woodstock’s utopian spin: “We are stardust / Billion-year-old carbon / We are golden / Caught in the devil’s bargain.” The festival was marketed as “three days of peace and music.” Yet Mitchell later criticized what she called the “free love, free sex, free music” spirit of Woodstock.
Mitchell was hardly the first to suggest that each of us is “golden,” “a child of God” who has innocently wandered from Edenic bliss. Nevertheless, the release of “Woodstock” on her third album, Ladies of the Canyon in 1970, was well-timed. It came early in the New Age movement, whose self-glorification and squishy religiosity is still with us. The Woodstock festival was a turning point, leading to “a decade of basic apathy where my generation sucked its thumb and then just decided to be greedy and pornographic,” Mitchell told biographer Michelle Mercer, in Will You Take Me As I Am. Blue’s title cut lists “acid, booze and ass, needles, guns and grass” as the sad hallmarks of that era. But her disappointment with the youth culture’s embrace of hedonism outlasted that one decade of apathy.
Lovers Lost
Much like her early relationship with the religious establishment, Joni Anderson’s relationship with the educational establishment was also strained. Her creativity did not mesh with the overly structured system, she told Mercer. She “went into rebellion in the second grade” and dropped out by the twelfth.
“Well, there’s a wide, wide world of noble causes / And lovely landscapes to discover / But all I really wanna do right now is / Find another lover.”
In 1963, when she was nineteen, Anderson enrolled in the Alberta College of Art to study painting. With fellow art student Brad MacMath, she had a daughter, Kelly, in 1965. Anderson, struggling to support herself after MacMath left the relationship, gave Kelly up for adoption. Anderson left art school to pursue music. She and folk singer Chuck Mitchell performed together in Toronto before moving to the United States and getting married in 1965. Following their 1967 divorce, Joni Mitchell moved to New York City, then to California in 1968. There, her career took off, as did her love life. Romance and its addictive nature appear in songs like “Song for Sharon” (Hejira, 1976). Torn between her desires for independence and companionship, and recounting her romantic past, her dreams, and the advice of friends, Mitchell sings, “Well, there’s a wide, wide world of noble causes / And lovely landscapes to discover / But all I really wanna do right now is / Find another lover.”
And so she did. Many of her lovers, like James Taylor, Graham Nash, and Jackson Browne, were well-known in the music world. In 1976, Rolling Stone crudely called Mitchell, who lived in Los Angeles’ Laurel Canyon neighborhood when it was home to many popular musicians, the “Queen of El Lay” and published a diagram to illustrate her romantic and creative partners. What appears to have been her longest romantic relationship was with bassist and sound engineer Larry Klein. They married in 1982 and divorced in 1994.
A ‘Reckless Daughter’ Struggles
The intricacies of romance show up in many Mitchell songs, but most clearly in “Don Juan’s Reckless Daughter,” the title cut from her 1977 album. The six-and-a-half minute song explores the interplay of carnal desire and a higher nature by comparing it to lovers with complementary traits. It does this by using imagery drawn from Carlos Castaneda’s books about Don Juan Matus, a Mexican shaman. (Originally marketed as non-fiction, the books sold more than 8 million copies by Castaneda’s death in 1998, and are now widely considered fiction.)
A “split-tongue spirit” sees two forces as “snakes along the railroad tracks” and “eagles in jet trails.” But even with this vast separation, there is integration (“coils around feathers and talons on scales”). For Mitchell, this combination produces internal struggle: “Behind my bolt-locked door / The eagle and the serpent are at war in me / The serpent fighting for blind desire / The eagle for clarity.” As the song progresses, though, the dichotomy becomes more palatable; Mitchell realizes that opposing attributes like “self-indulgence to self-denial” can be conflated in individuals and intimate relationships: “There are rivets up here in this eagle / There are boxcars down there on your snake / And we are twins of spirit / No matter which route home we take / Or what we forsake.”
The tension of snake and eagle being “at war in me” is reminiscent of Paul’s hyper-awareness of sin’s wrestling with righteousness in Romans 7:21-23: “So I find it to be a law that when I want to do right, evil lies close at hand. For I delight in the law of God, in my inner being, but I see in my members another law waging war against the law of my mind and making me captive to the law of sin that dwells in my members.” If you interpret the song’s internal struggle from a Christian perspective of carnality (“blind desire” vs. “clarity”), then Mitchell’s take on the outcome is far from Paul’s redemptive resolution. The unredeemed nature might be charmed by the “twins of spirit” idea, but the godly nature—freedom in Christ from “the law of sin”—rests on severing that twinship.
However, the song isn’t so much about sin and righteousness, or romantic compatibility. It’s not about any extreme being better than its opposite, as in other dualities it hints at, like instinct vs. reason or safety vs. risk. You might say it’s an ode to yin/yang harmony. As Wikipedia describes the ancient Chinese concept, opposing yet complementary forces “form a dynamic system in which the whole is greater than the assembled parts and the parts are essential for the cohesion of the whole.”
In that sense, the lyrics partly echo Ecclesiastes 7:16-18. While these verses certainly don’t endorse a licentious “snake” spirit, they do point to a balanced perspective unthrottled by extremes, including religious legalism:
Do not be overrighteous, neither be overwise—why destroy yourself? Do not be overwicked, and do not be a fool—why die before your time? It is good to grasp the one and not let go of the other. Whoever fears God will avoid all extremes.
Culture’s Moral Tailspin
In a broader sense, Mitchell’s eagle/snake dichotomy offers a look into the emerging ethos of the 1960s and 1970s.
On the eagle side, the era saw a new hunger for enlightenment, especially among the youth counterculture. This included the Jesus Movement, as well as various beliefs and organizations that would fall under the umbrellas of the New Age and Human Potential movements. These included Eastern religions and practices like transcendental meditation, a fad in the early 1970s. (I was at Georgia Tech when, having abandoned my Catholic upbringing, I took an off-campus class in TM. Turned out meditating on my assigned mantra always put me to sleep. I gave it up.)
“I found myself in a musical culture that I could not relate to at all.”
As for the carnal snake spirit, its presence became evident to Mitchell as she moved beyond the honeymoon phase of her stardom. Considered among the best of the emerging female singer-songwriters, she joined Bob Dylan’s Rolling Thunder Revue in 1975 only to discover that the tour of leading musicians was a heady mix of big egos and plentiful drugs. As Mitchell told Mercer, “It was really maxed-out insanity. I could only take so much before I needed to dry out myself.”
In retrospect, the Revue, which Mitchell left in January 1976, exemplified the decadence that came to dominate rock music and American culture as a whole. Society “was getting sicker and sicker and more delusional by the day,” she said in a 2004 interview on NPR’s Fresh Air with Terry Gross. Mitchell’s expectations for adulthood had been to “secure your family and your faith or whatever the backbone of your family life is,” and with any remaining energy, turn outward. “I had no family at my nucleus, so I just stretched out into the community.” That outreach included songs that addressed the environment, AIDS, overpopulation, misogyny, materialism, “holy war,” and the exploitation of Native Americans.
“It concerned me, the direction morally that America, especially as the leader of the free world, was taking, and especially within the context of my industry,” she told Gross. Rock music, “naughty but nice” when she was a teen, “still had joy in it.” Later, the beat “became more warring and more funereal.” Rock’s presentation of women, she said, “became more hostile and aggressive and ultimately explicit whoring … out and out pornography for pre-teeners. Finally I found myself in a musical culture that I could not relate to at all.” Mitchell, who had reunited with her daughter Kelly in 1997, realized the message of her lyrics “was kind of to the world that she [Kelly] was in.”
Job and Suffering
Mitchell’s disappointment in failing to establish a family, including her separation from Kelly, spanned decades. Likewise, her physical suffering didn’t end with her childhood polio. In 1995, she began battling post-polio syndrome in which polio symptoms return, and in 2009, said she was suffering from a condition known as Morgellons disease, a rare skin condition resulting in rashes, sores, intense itching, and sensations of stinging or crawling insects.
It’s a rare secular song that’s not only based on the Bible, but also sheds light on it without injecting a saccharine message.
In 2015, Mitchell was hospitalized with a brain aneurysm and required rehabilitation to re-learn how to walk and play guitar. Her impromptu appearance at the 2022 Newport Folk Festival marked her first public performance in nine years. Others followed, including “Joni Jam” concerts hosted by longtime supporter, singer-songwriter Brandi Carlile, and most recently, a performance at the Los Angeles FireAid Benefit Concert this past January.
Given her experience with physical setbacks and interest in spiritual themes, it’s not surprising that Mitchell wrote a song about Job. “The Sire of Sorrow (Job’s Sad Song)” (Turbulent Indigo, 1994) riffs on Job’s complaints. Though the lyrics never progress to Job’s deliverance, the chorus captures his passionate dialog with God: “Oh, you tireless watcher! / What have I done to you? / That you make everything I dread and everything I fear come true?”
My takeaway from this “Sad Song” is that following God can involve pain, senselessness, and abandonment that might last, well, all of your life. And it’s OK to yell at God about that. It’s a rare secular song that’s not only based on the Bible, but also sheds light on it without injecting a saccharine message. Christians who have suffered for years—physically, mentally, spiritually—can believe that God is surely able to heal, but also, for reasons beyond our understanding, may choose not to.
Unresolved ‘Internal Conflict’
“I’m interested in the prophets of all religions,” Mitchell told Gross, “but the religions themselves don’t make any sense to me.” Her worst offender is Catholicism. The title song on 2007’s Shine, for example, urges listeners to “let your little light shine” on many dark corners, including Wall Street, science, war… and the church: “Shine on the Catholic Church / And the prisons that it owns,” she sings. “Shine on all the churches / They all love less and less.”
Topping her “prisons” list would be Ireland’s Magdalene Laundries, which operated from the late 1700s to the 1990s. Run mostly by Catholics and the state, they were intended to divert women from prostitution, though their scope expanded to include unmarried mothers and others. Mitchell wrote “The Magdalene Laundries” (1994’s Turbulent Indigo) to lament the women subjected to near-slavery. The song also reflects her own pain concerning the “traumatic” time surrounding Kelly’s birth, telling Hot Press “that’s why I could identify with the women who were sent to Magdalene Laundries in Ireland.”
“Basically there’s kind of a mystical thread that runs through my life, and I could write a really interesting book just about how mysterious life is.”
Mary Magdalene herself makes a cameo appearance, with a subtle reference to the laundries, in the opening lines of “Passion Play (When All the Slaves Are Free)” (Night Ride Home, 1991): “Magdalene is trembling like washing on a line / Trembling and gleaming / Never before was a man so kind / Never so redeeming.” Part of the song is told from the viewpoint of Zacchaeus, the short tax collector who climbs a tree to get a look at the reputed messiah (Luke 19:1-10). Zacchaeus acknowledges that he is “a sinner of some position” and wonders, “Who in the world can this heart-healer be, this magical physician?” And later, “Oh, climb down, climb down, he says to me / From the middle of unrest / They think his light is squandered / But he sees a stray in the wilderness / And I see how far I’ve wandered.” Then “Enter the multitudes / The walking wounded / They come to this diver of the heart.” Finally comes a jolting snapshot of how the “heart-healer” was mistreated: “Oh, all around the marketplace / The buzzing of the flies / The buzzing and the stinging / Divinely barren and wickedly wise / The killer nails are ringing.”
The end of each chorus suggests the eventual termination of the Magdalene Laundries: “Who you gonna get to do the dirty work when all the slaves are free?” The question goes unanswered. What’s a listener to make of this remarkable account? Did Mitchell ever recognize, as did the contrite Zacchaeus, a “magical physician”? Someone who might have healed her body’s afflictions, or healed her heart from the failed romances and the decades apart from her daughter? Did she glimpse in the gospel a path “back to the garden”?
That such questions linger is business as usual for Mitchell, whose publicist did not respond to my interview request. A Wall Street Journal review of her 2024 biography, Traveling, by NPR music critic Ann Powers, refers to “the central theme of Ms. Mitchell’s greatest songs.” In Powers’ words, that theme is “an expression of internal conflict that’s fully evident but never resolved.”
Never resolved. Some of Christ’s followers walk with a faith that’s as anchored as an ancient oak, even in hard times. It’s resolved. I identify with folks like Mother Teresa, those who walk in a faith that on good days we’d call firm, yet still shrouded in doubt and mystery. Still others are elsewhere on—or off—that spectrum.
Mitchell told Mercer that if she wrote a memoir, it would not be “very much about all the songs, the music business. That’s like a dream. Basically there’s kind of a mystical thread that runs through my life, and I could write a really interesting book just about how mysterious life is.”
Mitchell has yet to write that book, though her lyrics and interviews highlight the thread that she’s so diligently pursued. In addition to the beauty of her songs that have touched countless listeners, her legacy will be a vivid example of an artist’s quest for truth. Perhaps she would echo the U2 song: “I still haven’t found what I’m looking for.” But some others following the thread, when it crosses the gospel path, by the grace of God will indeed find what they’re looking for.
