carey - Joni Mitchell

To be back in Los Angeles and traveling everywhere by car. The options open up, then constrict themselves, over and over again. Music, carefully chosen, is the only way to make all the trips by car worthwhile, at least most of them. Sure, queue up the witch-house, the 9-song-playlist for July, what you currently deem “deep cuts”. Soon, they no longer are such, as they repeat lazily on. But it’s Cancer Season — the classic portion of July you spend back “home”. Nostalgia reigns. So we pull from the archives, see what we can scrounge up, and this time there are echoes of 2019 that dominate. Somewhere in there is Joni Mitchell’s Carey, from her album Blue from 1971. What comes with it — early morning drives to school, California fog in the spring of senior year of high school, Coldwater canyon, and the familiarity and comfort cultivated over years with my old friend, Ava. The same Ava who showed me Bob Dylan and actually got me to disagree with my father about his “nails on a chalkboard” voice, who knew the way to my parents’ old house in the Valley like the back of her hand, whose parents still eat dinner with mine every Saturday evening. Along with Bob Dylan she showed me utterly everything, and then we’d embark on discovering more together. “Carey” by Joni Mitchell came up amidst that continuous liaison, but it’s unclear from where. Me or her. Maybe together. Regardless, Joni held our hand for a time. “Carey” appeared bit by bit into my playlists and thus singing and chirping as I drove around LA, until she (Joni) took her music off of Spotify. So I let go of Carey and maybe even Joni too, as this was the main song I knew by her anyway and aside from that, her aura didn’t lead me to getting to know her as an artist for some reason. I just did not feel a need to familiarize myself.

But seasons change and I guess so did Joni’s heart, as on one of these nostalgia-fueled drives through my home “town” recently, I found “Carey” sandwiched between Yo La Tengo and Sibylle Baier in my liked songs. Timestamp: May 8, 2019. Resurrected just like that, and filling in the blanks of what turned out to be a poignant period in my memory of the past. It played for me in the car now and every chord was familiar to me, not one thing out of place. And I breathed in, out slowly, and my breath got caught on itself. Joni’s voice was for some reason more recognizable, like a voice of someone I’ve had conversations at parties with on multiple occasions, and it sounded like her words here were being specifically stated toward me. I remembered all of them and even sang them out loud to myself. My eyes moistened as I did this and I squinted, brow furrowed. Something about it picked and prodded a deep part of my psyche — specifically, the part that stores my narrative of The Past, Childhood & Innocence, and Conception of Self. A rush of memories and a hello from a past self, one whose best friend and counterpart at the time was an Aquarius with eclectic tastes. Since then, I suppose I took on that Aquarian quality (which is not hard for a Gemini to lean into anyway) — to be weird and free, thanks to Ava. For a bit, it didn’t seem like we both shared this ideal, and thus, a rift occurred. We were going to discuss this very fact the next day, and it had started to feel like I had lost her already. It turned out, to my own surprise, that this possibility (and its implications) upset me even if I didn’t admit it for a while.

So I heard Joni’s voice and I shook the tears out of me… the listening experience was one quite singular and removed from the recent way that music had been sounding to me: predictable, on repeat, automatic. But this was like I had been shaken awake, and I was urged to make “Carey” important again, and maybe even get to know Joni more than I do now. After all, she is the one speaking to me and doing it effectively.

Now of course there are mythologies built around certain female singers and songwriters. Particularly those who can play an instrument, who have long hair, and who are immortalized in black & white film, smiling charmingly and probably with teeth because they’re just so happy and loose. It’s not hard to imagine why an aura of forever-untouchable-girlhood/womanhood follows them around. I like a good amount of these artists, but it wasn’t ever really about their innate connection to being a female that drew me in, at least initially. Honestly, Courtney Love spoke to me through her sinister drawl and her commitment to being herself, not through her distillation of “female rage” or however a Pitchfork review would put it nowadays. Lana was, for me, all about creating worlds. Her ability to change, her authenticity and random aesthetic choices. The femininity of it all was always there, but it came later as a dominant factor, yet still it didn’t overtake anything else. Me and my roommate Christine simply refer to her as “our generation’s Leonard Cohen.” And speaking of the 70s…

Joni, I think, has always been one of those women who has provided the voice for … many young women who consider themselves moody and philosophical. It’s apt. Perhaps she is the woman of women who encapsulates this. For me, perhaps it reflects poorly on my view of the 70s to admit this, she had mainly been but another figure in that idyllic California canyon scene, and nonetheless a vital one, but still — just another figure. She showed up in my search (yes, on Pinterest) for images of the era, which became an obsession thanks to my foray into the writings of Eve Babitz. Joni would be pictured smiling (with teeth) in her Laurel Canyon home or on the Strip, standing next to Leonard Cohen or someone who held more weight in the catalog of my inspirations. Then listening to her most recently, she finally embodied that voice I’f enjoy listening to all those years ago while driving through foggy Coldwater canyon. I couldn’t believe how long it had been, and couldn’t believe that this was the first time it truly felt like she was exerting a meaningful influence over me. Although, perhaps it felt like she exerted such power this time around because of how much it sneakily meant to me back then. Particularly this time, that meaning came across, woman to woman. So while I am not someone who will immediately say a female artist is speaking to me through uniquely feminine facets, for one reason or another, Joni did it for me this time in July of 2024.

It could be that “Carey”, and thus Joni’s voice, is innately tethered to a longstanding female friendship of mine — one that poked at my heart. Joni gave that longing a voice. She gave a voice to being 23 but feeling already old, between two cities I call home, and to my desire to become the woman I want to be.