The other evening, as part of a pledge drive, one of the local public radio stations played a 90-minute program on the career of Joni Mitchell. I only heard the last half, coming in around "Mingus," but I didn't need to hear the first half to know the difference between the soaring, heart-breaking beauty and amazing range of Mitchell's early voice, and the monotonous quality and paltry range of her later years. In a couple of tracks from her last, 2007 album, it's clear she has less than an octave of range and barely enough breath to croak out a short phrase. Even more awful was her speaking voice in interviews over the last ten or fifteen years -- hoarse and scratchy, sounding like every one of her sixty years and then some. Rarely photographed without a cigarette, in a classic case of cutting off one's nose to spite one's face, she smoked two packs a day for fifty years, thus achieving her stated preference that she be not a pop singer but a painter.
I have a friend who was a dancer for many years until an injury put an end to it; but she did not hasten the end of her career by riding in cars without a seatbelt or pursuing a hobby as a downhill ski racer. It seems utterly stupid to do that to yourself, but strangely, it seems even the most brilliant people aren't happy being themselves. Seen as another in a long line of artists whose drug habits destroyed their careers, Mitchell is in good but sad company, and there was no real reason to think that the amazing insight and lyrical talent she demonstrated as a songwriter meant that she was above this type of self-sabotage.
technorati: Joni Mitchell
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