Joni Mitchell

Her recent honours in Canada triggered many retrospectives and biographical media events. The arc of her songwriting career is an interesting case study in what seems to work and what does not. She was recently approached by a ballet company, Calgary I think, to collaborate on a work based on her music and her life. She accepted but then convinced them to change the terms of reference of the project. It became a ballet on her views on the environment and the world, war etc. She wrote a bunch of new (bad) songs for it. I would have much preferred to see the original idea fulfilled. The personal often makes better art than the general when it is resonant enough. The general often ends up being generic, through the law of averages, since it must apply to many and thus it averages out emotions. Many of her best songs are about her loves and griefs, like Carey and River. I guess I am saying that writing about self can be good but it needs to be edited. The subtext is the seed, but is not necessary to know it to resonate with us. The public only found out about her decision to give up her daughter for adoption late in her career, but the imprint and the references to this in her lyrics resonate throughout many of her best songs. We did not need to know this, but I don't know if the songs would have been so powerful without that emotion behind them. Hemingway wrote that you must hold something back. That is a technique, a trick of sorts, but ultimately, there has to be something there, something personal that can become universal. The emotional load must transcend the petty somehow, and sublimate into an artistic release.

Another interpretation can be that at the start of a career arc there is a drive to push one's ego out there, a necessity in fact, so the songs about self and experience happen and the good ones survive and make it big. With time and maturity, the quality goes up, one gets better at the game of universality and the experiences accumulate and become more interesting. At the waning end, there must be a sense of overexposure, for those artists that don't get addicted to fame, and then there is the recluse phase, where universal themes become more tempting since they allow expression without self-revelation. Unfortunately, I think that unless you are Brian Eno and are interested in weird but cool stuff, the general world issue kind of stuff can be boring (not always to be fair..) and only established artists like Joni Mitchell can get it to be heard. Dunno, this is an anecdotal generalization. Must test against more data.