Joni Mitchell: 15 Great Artists Influenced by the ‘Blue’ Singer

The Purple One was a voluble fan of Mitchell. In 1985, he told Rolling Stone that The Hissing of Summer Lawns, her jazz-rock LP from a decade earlier, was "the last album [he] loved all the way through." His slow-burner "The Ballad of Dorothy Parker" (from his 1987 hit Sign o' the Times) also includes the lines, "Mind if I turn on the radio?/'Oh, my favorite song,' she said/And it was Joni singing 'Help me I think I'm falling'" – a reference to Mitchell's "Help Me," off Court and Spark.

In 2011, the celestial being known as Björk cited Mitchell's 1977 double album, Don Juan's Reckless Daughter, as an all-time favorite. In 2015, she reaffirmed her admiration. "I really love Joni Mitchell," she told Pitchfork. "I think it was that accidental thing in Iceland, where the wrong albums arrive to shore, because I was obsessed with Don Juan's Reckless Daughter and Hejira as a teenager. I hear much more of her in those albums. She almost made her own type of music style with those, it's more a woman's world."

The excitable Ms. Swift is such a Mitchell obsessive that she's devoted entire interviews to the topic. Around the release of Red in 2012, Swift sat with Rhapsody to extol her love for its immediate influence: Blue, Mitchell's seminal 1971 exploration of love in all its glory and ruin. "She wrote it about her deepest pains and most haunting demons," explained Swift, who went on to detail some tracks. "Songs like 'River,' which is just about her regrets and doubts of herself – I think this album is my favorite because it explores somebody's soul so deeply."

But while Swift has clearly taken a page from Mitchell's autobiographical songwriting, don't expect to see her in a silver-screen tribute anytime soon: In late 2014, Mitchell claimed that she had "squelched" the 25-year-old's chances of starring in an upcoming biopic.

The post-bop jazz virtuoso once raved, "One of the greatest experiences I ever had was listening to a conversation with Joni Mitchell and [saxophonist] Wayne Shorter. Just to hear them talking, my mouth was open. They understand each other perfectly, and they make these leaps and jumps because they don't have to explain anything." Hancock explained his own love for Mitchell's craft via the 2007 album River: The Joni Letters, a tribute disc that featured Leonard Cohen, Tina Turner and Mitchell herself – and bested the Foo Fighters and Kanye West to snag the Grammy for Album of the Year in February 2008.

The appreciation was mutual. "I've spent more time at jazz clubs, and I'm not a rock fan," Mitchell told Rolling Stone in 2000. "Most of the people that I hang out with have been, like, Herbie Hancock or Wayne Shorter. … White rock & roll, generally speaking, was never appealing to me. The stances of little white boys never really did it for me."

Dylan, Mitchell's longtime folk contemporary, summed up his colleague ably in Rolling Stone's list of the 100 Greatest Singers of All Time: "Joni's got a strange sense of rhythm that's all her own." Dylan has a long history of collaborating with Mitchell, including a joint performance with her and Johnny Cash in Nashville in 1969 for Cash's first TV show. "Tangled Up in Blue," the opening track on his superb Blood on the Tracks, has long been rumored to have been inspired by Dylan's zealous repeat spins of Blue.

Mitchell and Dylan have shared a tempestuous friendship over the years – though she did once refer to him as a plagiarist. Incidentally, her impression of him is pretty hilarious.

No slouch herself when it comes to conveying the turmoil of love, Raitt bows down to Mitchell. "One of the biggest obstacles I've overcome in my life was thinking I didn't deserve to be successful," she's admitted. "Artistically, I'm not as much of a heavyweight as someone like Paul Simon or Joni Mitchell, because I'm not a creator of original music, and I worried about that for years." She put this deference on wax by covering "That Song About the Midway" (from Clouds) on her 1974 album Streetlights. Raitt and Mitchell also have a mutual friend in Jane Fonda, who has posted photos of their stylish clique and offered glimpses into their intellectual dinner party discourse.

Diamond and Mitchell shared a stage at one of the most legendary gigs in rock history: The Last Waltz, the Band's triumphant farewell in 1976. Diamond, who produced Robbie Robertson's album Beautiful Noise, took the stage after Mitchell, and he'd been vocal about her talent long before then. "'Chelsea Morning' is a great Joni Mitchell song," the soft-rock mainstay once enthused. "I guess I'm partial to her lyrics because they show me a slightly different perspective on life." He also covered her breakthrough "Both Sides, Now" on his 1969 album Touching You, Touching Me.

The frontman for Tool, A Perfect Circle and Puscifer may cut a scabrous post-metal figure onstage, but his musical influences trace back to the elegiac poetry of Mitchell. Years ago, when asked by MTV's Kurt Loder about the music he loved in his youth, Keenan replied succinctly, "Joni Mitchell. I think everything Joni Mitchell did for music was big. I was really influenced by her." His appreciation for melodicism – a staple of his bands' squall – is further elaborated in another Mitchell shout-out, this one from 2006: "I grew up listening to Joni Mitchell. The melody is what I gravitate to – and it's my job to listen to what's happening when those guys [in Tool] go down these staccato, rhythmic, insane mathematical paths. It's my job to soften it and bring it back to the center, so you can listen to it without having an eye-ache."

The funk-soul icon has covered Mitchell tracks many times, from "Ladies Man" (on the 2007 album Funk This) to "Hejira" (on shelved Mitchell tribute compilation). She's also gone on the record with her admiration of Mitchell's artistic honesty and business acumen. "I think women have definitely made progress since when I started in the business," she said in 1999. "Joni Mitchell was certainly a pioneer in many ways. I think the progress has been made with women being able to make music independently and maintaining a lot of freedom of expression in their art."

In a 2011 interview, the Eurythmics iconoclast took a swipe at televised talent competitions while lauding Mitchell – a pretty efficient move, all told. "You wouldn't find a Joni Mitchell on X Factor; that's not the place," she told Absolute Radio. "X Factor is a specific thing for people that want to go through that process – it's a factory, you know, and it's owned and stitched-up by puppet masters." She then said of Mitchell, "She was writing these extraordinary songs with this extraordinary sort of commentary, poetic, special way, and this voice and this incredible playing. As soon as you heard the first chord and her voice … I thought 'I want to do that.'"

Summer has been vocal about her appreciation of Mitchell's emotive songwriting. "One of my greatest frustrations was having people telling me what to say in my music," she told Billboard in 1999. "I grew up in the rock & roll era, and I was influenced by everything from Aretha Franklin to the Rolling Stones to theater to Bonnie Raitt to Joni Mitchell. I have no desire to do music that bores the living crap out of me. Whether or not the audience gets the music is not the issue. I won't make a certain kind [of] record unless it's what I feel I'm about at the time."

The singer-songwriter nods to Mitchell in her own folk-pop instrumentation and keening soprano, and she even penned an incisive essay on her hero for Rolling Stone's list of the 100 Greatest Artists of All Time. "I remember a friend in high school playing me 'A Case of You,' from Blue," she wrote. "I could tell that Joni was a painter by the way she wrote lyrics. She describes smells and sounds and uses fewer words to transmit more feeling. Her melodies are about shapes. The singing lines are slow, steep plateaus."

Jewel also touched on Mitchell's command of her femininity: "Joni had an edginess that not many women expressed then. Joni Mitchell never made a big deal out of being a woman. She had such a strong sexuality, but she didn't feel the need to deny that part of her in order to be taken seriously. She also didn't play it up – although many of her songs are about sex."

Bareilles recorded a lovely cover of "The River" in 2008 and clearly kept tabs on the beloved artist: She was one of the first musicians to tweet out support for Mitchell after her hospitalization in March 2015. "Fiona Apple and Joni Mitchell are two of my most favorite role models," Bareilles had previously said. "As you can tell by that, I'm a junkie for great lyrics."

Most praise Mitchell for her open-hearted lyrics and nimble, affecting vocals, but Chrissie Hynde was quick to call out Mitchell's other, underrated gift. "She's a fuckin' excellent guitar player," the Pretenders singer told Rolling Stone. "I don't know any guitar player, any of the real greats, who don't rate Joni Mitchell up there with the best of them." (Clearly, Mitchell's music prompts a passionate side of Hynde: She famously brawled with Carly Simon at a 1995 Mitchell concert in New York.)

The "Sailing" crooner has consistently voiced respect for Mitchell's ironclad work ethic. "The writers that I aspire to, like Joni Mitchell and Randy Newman, they'll tell you that the work gets harder, not easier," he's told the press. "And they set that bar for us where we're always striving to do something better than the last time, whether it's the next song or just the next line." Over the years he has continued to offer praise. "Joni's made so many amazing records over the years," he said in 2009. "People who didn't follow Joni's work, it's their loss, because she only got more and more brilliant."