Joni Mitchell quotes:

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You know, I grew up listening to Joni Mitchell. -- Maynard James Keenan
I think everything Joni Mitchell did for music was big. -- Maynard James Keenan
I listen to a lot of old music, like Joni Mitchell and David Bowie. -- Sophie McShera
I would make tea for Joni Mitchell or clean her car, anything to be in the studio and watch her work. -- Sheena Easton
I was totally romanticizing the idea of Los Angeles when the Doors, Joni Mitchell, and Neil Young were hanging out there. -- Lykke Li
I've always loved aggressive, hard, noisy, yet melodic bands, and at the same time I've always loved 'Blue' by Joni Mitchell. -- Art Alexakis
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. -- Chrissie Hynde
Why would I want to sound like Joni Mitchell? I've got Joni Mitchell records, and they're great, and I couldn't possibly be that good. -- Ben Folds
Chelsea Morning is a great Joni Mitchell song and I guess I'm partial to her lyrics because they show me a slightly different perspective on life. -- Neil Diamond
Joni Mitchell seems destined to remain in a state of permanent dissatisfaction - always knowing what she would like to do, always more depressed when it's done. -- Jon Landau
As a kid, I was listening to Aretha Franklin, Etta James and hip-hop as well as music my parents were listening to, like Joni Mitchell and Leonard Cohen. -- Alanis Morissette
My friends and I took songwriting very, very seriously. My hero was and still is Bob Dylan, but also people like Leonard Cohen and Joni Mitchell and that whole generation. -- Kazuo Ishiguro
I listened to a lot of Joni Mitchell in high school. She was sort of an inspiration to me. I think she's a great lyricist, and she makes interesting choices. -- Zooey Deschanel
I'm an old-school, embarrassing Joni Mitchell fan. Her music made a hook in my soul and hasn't let go for all these years. I even sing her songs as lullabies to my kids. -- Edie Falco
My big influences are Joni Mitchell, and a lot of classical and Indian music, as well as Nina Simone and the personal blues and jazz of Billie Holiday. Other influences for me include Bjork, Nick Drake, and Sufjan Stevens. -- Yael Naim
There were bars that began to have acoustic musicians play, it was 1970: Joni Mitchell, Jackson Browne, America, The Eagles, all that kind of stuff was popular. It was very easy for me to just kind of move in and be noticed. -- Shawn Colvin
I've had mentors who were kind of the troubadour singer-songwriters, like Merle Haggard, Loretta Lynn, Joni Mitchell, Bob Dylan and Neil Young, and that's just what I've always liked - people who would talk real honestly about their lives and their circumstance. -- Jewel
You wouldn't find a Joni Mitchell on 'X Factor;' that's not the place. '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. -- Annie Lennox
I was really lost for a while in my teens. I was angry. But when I found music - Bob Dylan, Neil Young, Joni Mitchell - it was a new discovery. It was a door to this other world where I wanted to be. -- Ray LaMontagne
And for some reason, when I'm sad, I do listen to Leonard Cohen, I do listen to Joni Mitchell. I do find myself going to the music that's actually reflecting my mood, as opposed to sticking on Motown, which might actually bring my mood up. -- Glen Hansard
When the suggestion was made that I might consider doing music of Joni Mitchell, I thought it was a fantastic idea. Joni, I admire not only for her music but for her person, because she's a person that really stands out for what she believes in. -- Herbie Hancock
One of the greatest experiences I ever had was listening to a conversation with Joni Mitchell and 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. -- Herbie Hancock
One of the biggest obstacles I've overcome in my life was thinking I didn't deserve to be successful. 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. -- Bonnie Raitt
The writers that I aspire to, like Joni Mitchell and Randy Newman, they'll tell you that the work gets harder, not easier. 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. -- Christopher Cross
I have been influenced by many different artists at many different stages of my life. Starting out, it was people like Elton John, Billy Joel, Ben Folds, and Fiona Apple. As I got older I got deeper into the work of bands like the Beatles, artists like Sam Cooke, Ray Charles, Etta James, and Joni Mitchell. -- Sara Bareilles
I started playing guitar and writing songs when I was 15. I think what mainly sparked my interest was just the fact that I grew up listening to Cheryl King, Joni Mitchell, and James Taylor, and was just always inspired by that sort of organic art, and organic songs and just very natural songwriting that came out of some of those artists. -- Kate Voegele
No Joni Mitchell 8 track tapes in my car. -- Al Yankovic
It's [Joni Mitchell's "A Case of You"] been one of my favorite songs for my entire life. -- Jane Monheit
I grew up listening to Joni Mitchell's version of "A Case of You." My mom was a huge Joni Mitchell fan. -- Cheyenne Jackson
I've been watching a lot of Joni Mitchell YouTube clips and I can't believe her transformation from this folk singer in Canada. -- Zooey Deschanel
A young female essayist saying they're influenced by Joan Didion is like a young female singer-songwriter saying they're influenced by Joni Mitchell. -- Meghan Daum
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." -- Chrissie Hynde
Definitely I grew up listening to Joni Mitchell, and I think she is a wonderful writer, so she is probably part of me. -- Jane Siberry
On first listening, Joni Mitchell's 'Court And Spark,' the first truly great pop album of 1974, sounds surprisingly light; by the third or fourth listening, it reveals its underlying tensions. -- Jon Landau
My parents are music fans, even though neither of them play an instrument. I was exposed to their record collection, so I love everything from Joni Mitchell to Bruce Springsteen. -- Gabrielle Aplin
When you love a song so much you have to sing, you know how you feel - it releases something in you that resonates as true, whether it's James Brown or Joni Mitchell. -- Bonnie Raitt
I produced her first album, and I was breaking up with her at the time. That was not comfortable. Falling in love with Joni Mitchell is a bit like falling into a cement mixer! -- David Crosby
I was raised in Topanga Canyon. It's an eclectic community up in the Santa Monica mountains. A lot of musicians lived there - Joni Mitchell, Neil Young - as well as artists and craftspeople. -- Inara George
I've always associated consciousness with artists like Bob Marley or Joni Mitchell or Bob Dylan. You know, artists that really talked about what was going on in the world and really artists that are timeless. -- Will Ferrell
My main influences are pop and folk music - Bob Lind, Neil Young, Joni Mitchell, Bob Dylan, the Motown collection, The Zombies, Elliott Smith, and a ton of 70's AM radio hits. I love powerpop too. -- Greta Salpeter
I love Radiohead, which most people don't expect, and I listen to everything from Stevie Wonder to Steely Dan, Carole King, The Beach Boys, The Kinks, Beyonce Knowles, Vampire Weekend, The Beatles, Joni Mitchell, Burt Bacharach, and Paul Simon. -- Eliza Doolittle
I grew up in the '70s, and I hear in my own stuff a lot of what I grew up listening to, which is to say I hear a lot of Billy Joel, Paul McCartney, Carole King, Joni Mitchell and Stevie Wonder. -- Jason Robert Brown
I was inspired by people like Joni Mitchell and Carole King and Stevie and "Storytellers." People that could really change the world with their lyric, no matter who sung the song, they had still been the source of that message. So that's what I really aim for. -- Emeli Sande
I remember my father playing me Same Situation when I was a nipper, and saying how nobody since has done melodies as well as Joni Mitchell. I concur. The thing that most affected me was just her resonance, and that is something she must have been born with. -- Laura Marling
Leonard Bernstein was probably the most significant formative influence on me - he was such an encompassing musician. I spent my teenage years absorbing him, and my other interests stemmed off of that. Bernstein led me to Sondheim and to Gershwin, and Sondheim led me to listening to Joni Mitchell. -- Jason Robert Brown
There really are two different schools of songwriting-American and Canadian. It's interesting. You guys have this history of guys like Paul Williams and Jimmy Webb, and they're different than Neil Young and Joni Mitchell and Leonard Cohen. All those weird voices come out of Canada. That's because it's so cold here we can hardly open our mouth. We get much less light in Canada. No wonder the writing's dark. -- Fred Eaglesmith

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