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More than words: All Joni Mitchell wants is true love....
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Have you ever loved a song to the point of ridiculousness but no matter how hard you try, you just can’t understand the lyrics? What was the artist thinking when writing your favorite tune? More Than Words, a weekly column, will help to delve a little deeper…
All I Want, Joni Mitchell (Blue, 1971)
Listed at number 30 on Rolling Stone’s list of 500 Greatest Albums of All Time, Blue, the fourth album written and released by Canadian folk-singer and songwriter Joni Mitchell, was heralded as her largest success.
Based on Mitchell’s personal relationships, travel and life experience, Blue made the top 20 on the Billboard Album Charts. Referring to the personal nature of the album, Mitchell said during an interview with Cameron Crowe, "At that period of my life, I had no personal defenses. I felt like a cellophane wrapper on a pack of cigarettes. I felt like I had absolutely no secrets from the world and I couldn't pretend in my life to be strong."
“All I Want”, which has since been recorded by 59 other artists (www.jonimitchell.com), was the first song featured on Blue, yet surprisingly, it almost didn’t make the album at all. An older song was removed to make room for it.
Mitchell has suggested that “All I Want” is based on her personal journey to bring love back into her life when she felt as felt it had been lost.
“In the state I was at in my inquiry about life and direction and relationships, I perceived a lot of hate in my heart. You know ‘I hate you some, I hate you some, I love you some, I love you when I forget about me’ (lyrics from “All I Want”). I perceived my inability to love at that point. And it horrified me,” said Mitchell in a 1979 interview with Rolling Stone.
Throughout the song, Mitchell struggles with paradox and contradiction – she hates her lover, she loves her lover and subsequently, she feels lonely and confused. All she wants is the fairytale, she wants to be in love and to embrace happiness, but she hasn’t quite got it together.
“All I really really want our love to do, is to bring out the best in me and in you too. All I really really want our love to do, is to bring out the best in me and in you. I want to talk to you, I want to shampoo you. I want to renew you again and again. Applause, applause -- Life is our cause. When I think of your kisses, my mind see-saws. Do you see -- do you see -- do you see, how you hurt me baby. So I hurt you too, then we both get so blue.”
One of the most poignant lyrics is “I love you when I forget about me” which suggests that Mitchell can focus on being happy when she forgets about what she really wants and just settles for what she has.
“The song is about happiness, and about ‘perfect’ love (or love to strive for), but it's also about striving for both of those things in an unhappy, imperfect relationship. It sounds like the relationship she is in is not how it used to be. They hurt each other, and she wants it to get back to how it used to be. She loves him so much that her ‘mind see-saws’ back and forth about her feelings, but it's to the point that she feels that ‘I love you when I forget about me.’ She can only love him if she forgets how awful he makes her feel sometimes and vice versa. She just wants it to be a happy, healthy relationship again,” Songmeanings.
In 1997, Mitchell was inducted into the Rock And Roll Hall of Fame and ten years later in 2007, she released her 17th studio album, Shine.
“Sad, spare, and beautiful, Blue is the quintessential confessional singer/songwriter album. Forthright and poetic, Mitchell's songs are raw nerves, tales of love and loss (two words with relative meaning here) etched with stunning complexity,” Jason Ankeny, AMG.
*More Than Words is a weekly column. If you liked this column, you may also enjoy – War Pigs, Message in a Bottle, Buffalo Soldier, Purple Haze, I am The Walrus, Riders on the Storm, White Room, Wear Your Love Like Heaven, Could Have Lied, Go Your Own Way, Sweetest Thing, Smells Like Teen Spirit.
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