my favourite canadian

Joni Mitchell will be inducted in the Canadian Songwriters Hall of Fame today. Although this Hall of Fame is only four years old, I'd say this honour is way overdue.

Joni Mitchell is my idol.

That doesn't mean I love all her music, although I do love a surprising amount of it, considering what a long and varied career she's had. I've listened to Mitchell since I was 11 years old, when my older sister fell in love with Blue. Often when Mitchell would try something new, I wouldn't understand it or care for it at first, only to find that in years to come, it became a staple of my collection.

But my love for Joni Mitchell - bordering on hero worship, I'll admit - centres on much more than her songwriting or musical talents, prodigious though they are. As I grew into young adulthood listening to and reading about her, Joni Mitchell became a model to me, as a woman and an artist.

Her insistence on living her life on her own terms, and on creating what she wanted, without attention to market forces or commercial pressures, inspired me - and guided me. Mitchell never wore a badge pronouncing her different or rebellious or iconoclastic. She just lived her life, and made her music and her paintings, because that's who she was.

I would never compare whatever meagre skills I possess to Mitchell's gifts, but then, what good is a role model who's just a regular person?

I've always identified Joni Mitchell as Canadian (along with Neil Young and, to a lesser extent, Leonard Cohen). But since moving to Canada, I've been surprised by the absence of Mitchell in Canadian culture. In the car, I listen to Jazz FM. They play a very wide variety of jazz - jazz broadly defined, as it should be - and they favour Canadian artists. But, to my knowledge, they play no Joni Mitchell. (I've been meaning to ask them about that, and I will.) I see Leonard Cohen's name in the news fairly regularly, along with the usual pop suspects, but rarely a word about Mitchell. I don't know why.

When Mitchell is in the media, she's usually diminished in stature. Today's Toronto Star referred to her as "folk icon". Folk! Mitchell hasn't been a folk singer in more than three decades. Well, at least they put her on the front page.

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Here's an interesting essay from the CBC website about the influence of Mitchell's Blue on some artists and listeners. It's a nice piece by a woman much younger than me, who sees Mitchell from a similar vantage point.

I never miss an opportunity to see Joni, either live or on TV. Unfortunately, I was so busy trying to get this blog straightened out that I forgot to set the VCR for the induction ceremony. If you know if it's being rebroadcast, or if for some reason you taped or TIVO'd it, please let me know.