Listen to beautiful music. Be touched by art. Cry with strangers.

Seeing Joni Mitchell. Open yourself to music. Unapologetically experience joy.

What is it like to have your life changed by music? There’s a moment in the movie Amadeus that tries to answer that. In the scene Antonio Salieri — portrayed as a jealous rival of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart¹ — is now an old and bitter man reminiscing on his life. He’s remembering rummaging through some of Mozart’s sheet music during a moment of envy. Salieri is rifling through the folio of music when, suddenly, his body freezes. He begins to sightread. Mozart’s music overtakes him. We hear in his head a flute rising above the plucking of a harp, followed by the orchestra and the strings uniting under the flute. SWISH, he flips the pages; the 29^th symphony, the strings playing at allegro moderato back and forth. SWISH, a concerto of two pianos pitter-pattering and talking to each other. SWISH, The Great Mass in C. Minor², a lone soprano singing the Kyrie Eleison, her voice warbling. Close your eyes. Listen. She is standing at the front of the altar. The voice is hugged by the acoustics of the marble and wood until, suddenly, it isn’t. The voice gathers in an orb and begins to slowly levitate. With each eleison, it floats higher. The orchestra and the choir gather underneath it like a cloud, holding the voice, slowly drawing it upwards, the music shines like a benediction in front of stained glass.

Salieri, when he hears the voice, is beyond envy. He slips into awe. His furrowed face slackens. A smile spills across his lips. Every single part of him is at peace. He says, admiringly,

“It was clear to me, that song I had heard… had been no accident. Here again was the very voice of God.”

The voice of God! Some music moves us so profoundly that it feels otherworldly, crafted by beings beyond us. We hear these voices and think, ‘wow, I am alive, and just heard this music, and somehow I am even more alive now’. I imagine that everyone has their own list of musicians who approach that voice, who have strung some deep string within us. Some of those for me are Thelonious Monk, Freddie Mercury, Bowie, Amy Winehouse, Leonard Cohen, Cobain, Hendrix, John Prine. All of those musicians are sadly dead. A dwindling few others are hanging on. I saw Paul McCartney many years ago. Hearing tens of thousands of people singing Hey Jude in unison will make you believe in big God-like things. A withered soul will begin to reopen. But beyond that, I had never seen any of my favorites on the stage. Until this past weekend.

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What better place for a religious experience than California? California, land of thousand-year-old trees, fairytale lands in the middle of suburbia, the endless pursuit of bodily perfection. I got into some perfectly good trouble in California. I felt the Pacific run across my toes. I spent little to no time online. There is no time for online when you’re on a pilgrimage. Sorry, Silicon Valley, but you cannot compete with sunshine, and love, and family, and living deliciously, and the voice of God.

California. What better place is there to see Joni Mitchell? Joni; a legend. She would probably resent being an icon on some person’s spiritual quest — she is far too grounded in real life for that. But how else to describe her? If you are musician, or into music at all, there will be a time when you first approach Joni Mitchell’s art, and the sheer force of the work will likely suck you in and leave you a different person. It happened to me. I was in middle school. I had dabbled in cello. My clarinet was not exactly ideal for picking up the cute goth girl who rotated through a wardrobe of Grateful Dead t-shirts. What better instrument to try than guitar? So I tried. I was not very good.

Somewhere along the journey I stumbled across Joni Mitchell. It was a slow build. I was and still am a boy, cynical and flawed. I heard the cheery chords and thought ‘this is nice, I guess’, nothing at first beyond that. ‘Chick music,’ I thought before returning to Call of Duty. But there was something so perfect in the chords. I had never heard anything like it before. I listened and re-listened to A Case of You, in a trance at the opening and the way the guitar bends around the lyrics. And then her voice. Sublime. She is building slowly up to something and then she breaks through, the lyrics peaking with ‘Ohhh Canada’, that ‘a’ in Canada sung with stupendous soul, like she is reaching across time and space for home. A shudder ruptured through me. It was like my body had been turned into a guitar pick, the strings reverberating over my bones, my stomach a sound hole, something deep within me rising and unfurling. Life changing. The voice of God.

Imagine that happening, but hundreds of times across a whole oeuvre. Listen to her album Blue ten, fifteen, two hundred times, and the album will expand which each relisten. Each song will richen. I went back through Blue while writing this letter, and there was a certain point where I didn’t even want to write anymore. All I wanted was to fall into this music, to be changed and held by the tracks. Blue could be played in my brain every day, and I’d probably never get bored. That is perhaps what’s so unique about Joni Mitchell and the other greats who reach her heights: the music is so breathtaking and all-encompassing that it seems to contain the whole world. You will never want to leave it. It becomes part of you. It is beautiful, but slightly terrifying artistically. Why dabble in grey lines on a screen when a single song is bursting with every single color imaginable? This was part of Salieri’s dilemma in Amadeus. Mozart was such a monumental talent; he had reached the voice of God. What was the point of composing songs that would never compete with a Mozart symphony?

Amadeus is a cautionary tale: don’t deal in envy. It will get you nowhere. It is easy for me to say, maybe; I am not really a musician. I will never compete with Joni Mitchell professionally. I would never want to; what’s the point? Not everything is a battle. We don’t have to be the most talented, the cleverest, the most accomplished. Sometimes good is good enough. I have crossed the point in my life where I can see, every day, that I will not last forever, and that many things I love won’t last, but at least I will have been able to read great books, and see beautiful things, and fall in love with wonderful people, and dance to beautiful music. I will have lived on the same planet as Mozart and Joni Mitchell.

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California. A white bandshell. Terraces of seats rising up the slope. Wrinkled hippies wearing red berets, black berets, purple berets, friends passing wine back and forth over the seats, old couples drinking merlot straight from the bottle. Out there is the Hollywood sign. The tops of the hills are orange and caramel colored. Just a little green in the bushes. A girl with flowers in her hair twirls around. Young couples pose for selfies in front of the stage. People sporadically chatter and ask things like, ‘how will she sound?’ Less than ten years ago, Joni Mitchell had a severe brain aneurysm. She could not sing, or play guitar, or walk, or talk, but she has slowly built herself back up to tour form. She supposedly retaught herself how to play guitar by watching old performances of hers. 80 years old. Doing that. Incredible. I could not do such a thing at age 30.

But still. You know. Will it be the same Joni? The Joni that I know is twenty years old, sun-blonde, wrangling songwriting masterpieces out of every wrecked relationship. She is now sixty years older, and grey, and her voice is raspier than the California gold of her youth. A memory returns of seeing Bob Dylan playing in Seattle fourteen years ago. He is a legend, a great, he is Bob Dylan. But he sounded terrible. I couldn’t listen to Bob Dylan for a very long time afterwards. It was that bad. So would it be like that for Joni? Can a person stomach seeing their icons slowly collapse?

The orange slides up the hills, the Hollywood sign disappears, the canyon is dark. Lights paint the clamshell dark blue. In the middle of the clamshell the stage rotates, people hold their phones. And there she is. Joni Mitchell. Sitting in an armchair, the band and singers sitting on couches and chairs all around her. Her concerts no longer resemble the great-person shows of a lone figure bathed in a spotlight at the front of the stage. Her stage is meant to look like a room. Someone placed a small lamp next to her chair. They call her concerts now a ‘jam’. It is like all of these great musicians — Joni Mitchell, Brandi Carlisle, John Batiste, Marcus Mumford, Annie Lennox — are chilling in a living room, messing around on their instruments, and we are all flies on the proverbial wall. Applause. Applause. So much applause. And then drums, guitars, and finally Joni’s voice, raspy but distinctively Joni and beautiful. All of the fears fall away.

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California. The question: which song is your favorite? An impossible question. I had my list, but it changes with each new song in the set. Joni times Night Ride Home just for moonrise. “Once in a while / in a big blue moon / There comes a night like this,” as the nearly full moon peeps over the hills, people turning towards the moon and being spellbound. Refuge of the Roads, “There was spring along the ditches / there were good times in the cities / Oh, radiant happiness / It was all so light and easy,” people swaying and dancing in their seats as if hypnotized, as if everything wrong was fixed. Both Sides Now, a forever favorite of mine, first recorded by Joni in 1969 with her cheery sunshine voice, re-recorded in 2000 with the wear of age. “I’ve looked at love from both sides now / from give and take and still somehow / It’s love’s illusions that I recall / I really don’t know love at all.” Neither do I, Joni. Big Yellow Taxi, c’mon, a classic, but she adds a line that’s not in all of her recorded versions, “Late last night / I heard that screen door slam / and a big yellow tractor / took away my house, pushed around my land,” oh, Joni, the tractors pushing people off of their land. Timely as ever. Even Shine, “Oh let your little light shine / Shine on Vegas and Wall Street, place your bets / Shine on all the fishermen with nothing in their nets / Shine on rising oceans and evaporating seas,” and all of the tens of thousands of people holding their camera lights aloft in the dark. When Joni sees the lights, she tells everyone to face one another. ‘Look and see how beautiful you are,’ she says. That is Joni Mitchell.

Pilgrimage. That is my word, and the word of the woman sitting behind me. “That was, like, transcendent,” says a young man to his friend. They are both shocked. We are all. We don’t have the precise language in the moment to articulate how it feels. All that comes to mind are big words, for big feelings. They are all cliches. They are all true. Before the concert I wondered; what’s the point? Not just for the concert, but for many things. I’ve been waking up in the mornings with this sinking, funny feeling that things are quickly sliding backwards. Despair that is pointed in no specific direction, that only exists to feed off of itself. But then: this. The half-orb of blue, the thousands of people swaying, the old couples holding hands and singing love songs, the field of lights dangling in the air, the women hugging and kissing, the mothers and sons sharing a hug. Beautiful art. Wonderful music. The voice of God.

California. Joni sings California. When the lyrics reach ‘California’, her head slowly tilts back. Every part of her is poured into the vessel of the lyrics. “California, I’m coming home,” the voice reaches so high. It does not just approach the vocal strength of her youth; it somehow transcends it, begins to lift from the stage. My jaw drops, and I mutter to myself, silently, ‘My God’. The voice persists all the way to A Case of You. All the way, from “Oh Canada,” to “Oh you’re in my blood like holy wine / You taste so bitter and so sweet / Oh, I could drink a case of you, darling / And I would still be on my feet / Oh I would still be on my feet.” Joni Mitchell, sitting in her armchair, laughing, singing, the voice rising far beyond the stage, through both sides of the clouds, somehow, even now, still on her feet.

1. Though Amadeus is an awesome movie, they did Salieri dirty. There’s really no evidence that Salieri held any jealousy or ill-will towards Mozart! The movie goes out of its way to portray Salieri as a mediocre courtier, but he was an accomplished (and interesting) composer in his own right! Anyways, maybe this is a lesson: if you’re an artist, avoid the geniuses. You’ll just end up in their future biopics as a lesser version of yourself :/ Okay, but back to Mozart now.

2. I actually put together this clip of part of the Kyrie. Listen to it if you want, it’s… amazing…

(Mozart: Mass in C Minor, K. 427 "Grosse Messe", Arleen Augér · Symphonieorchester des Bayerischen Rundfunks · Leonard Bernstein)