Joni Mitchell
The Beginning of Survival is my best album. I am very proud of it, and I am surprised at it, too. I thought some of Travelogue was a little heavy, but I don't think this is heavy.
I hate show business.
My name had gone stale, and no matter how progressive I got, it was my time to die.
Nobody understood The Reoccurring Dream, but after September 11, when we were coerced to do a national duty and go out and shop, surely people could begin to see what I was getting at.
I have one piece of music, since 1997, and I don't see it having lyrics. Where does it go in this world? So I haven't recorded it.
I think I would go further into fine arts, I think, if I were to continue.
With a painting, you don't have to go back and paint it again.
There was this mountain village in Russia where my music was getting in on some German radio station. I remember this because music used to get up to Saskatchewan from Texas. Late at night after the local station closed down.
Not to dismiss Gershwin, but Gershwin is the chip; Ellington was the block.
Ira Gershwin, shame on him. I mean, some of the writing.
Buddy Holly and the early rock 'n' roll was no lighter than the way I play. It's very minimal.
You know, Neil Young is singing Rock n' roll will never die, and Neil never rocked and rolled in his life. I mean, he rocked, but he didn't roll. He has got no swing in him.
My life came down to being a granny and watching a lot of television.
I conceived in art college at the age of 20, near the end of term.
The coming of the kids hasn't come out in my art yet.
I don't like to make fluffy little songs, but now I want to make some light songs.
I find a lot of poetry to be narcissistic.
In terms of fiction, I'd rather go out and have a good time than read a book about someone having a good or bad time.
I don't like being too looked up at or too looked down on. I prefer meeting in the middle to being worshiped or spat out.
Americans have decided to be stupid and shallow since 1980.
My first four albums covered the usual youth problems - looking for love in all the wrong places - while the next five are basically about being in your 30s.
My individual, psychological descent coincided, ironically, with my ascent into the public eye.
The considerations of a corporation, especially now, have nothing to do with art or music.
I lost my daughter at 21. I had to give her up because I was broke, no place to take her, no money to take her. That was very traumatic.
My goal as a writer is more to comfort than to disturb.
I'd had a rough childhood.
The thing that gave me the most pain in life, psychologically, and it gave me tremendous pain psychologically, is man's disrespect for nature.
If I'm censoring for anyone, it's for my parents. They are very old-fashioned and moral people. They still don't understand me that well.
I do have this reputation for being a serious person.
I'm a very analytical person, a somewhat introspective person; that's the nature of the work I do.
People used to say nobody can sing my songs but me - they're too personal.
I'm a method actress in my songs, which is why it's hard to sing them.
What I do is unusual: chordal movements that have never been used before, changing keys and modalities mid-song.
I couldn't see passion as a bad thing.
I came through folk music simply because it was easy to get into it.
For the first time in my career, I'm working in a fine-arts arena, so I'm finally getting some intelligent reviews.
Eventually, with success, I started to feel more and more isolated - like I didn't have a community of artists.
I'm a Buddhist.
America is in a runaway-train position and dragging all the world with it. It's grotesquely mentally ill.
When I began experimenting, people weren't ready for it. Once it's in its second and third generational stages, people can accept it.
I sing my sorrow, and I paint my joy.
I get the same charge from juxtaposition of colors as I do from juxtaposition of chords.
Van Gogh was impulsive.
I believe that I am male and I am female.
I see bodies as individual things.
I have always thought of myself as a painter derailed by circumstance.
I'm irresponsible to my career in order to paint. Because painting is obsessive. I forget to eat. I forget to sleep.
I come from pioneer stock, developers of the West, people who went out into the wilderness and set up home with nothing but a pair of oxen.
I thrive on change. That's probably why my chord changes are weird, because chords depict emotions. They'll be going along on one key and I'll drop off a cliff, and suddenly they will go into a whole other key signature. That will drive some people crazy, but that's how my life is.