Joni Mitchell's Trouble Child

I've given myself the task of writing about one song a week for 2024 because, well, I think it'd be fun.

Joni Mitchell's Trouble Child

Now that we've gotten the weepy melodrama out with "Same Situation", what "Court and Spark" song do we talk about? "People's Parties"? "Down to You"? "Just Like This Train"? "Just Like This Train", please??

As much as I love "Just Like This Train", I think it's best to end Joni Mitchell month on "Trouble Child", my other most favorite song on the album.

It used to be I adored the earlier half of "Court and Spark"; nowadays, I repeat "Just Like This Train" and "Trouble Child". In that sense, there's a narrative arc in the album where the character has grown out of her stale loves and is moving towards a more independent life. Whenever I'm out on the street reflecting on my life, the lyrics to "Trouble Child" will occasionally play:

Up in the sterilized room where they let you be lazy, knowing your attitude's all wrong and you got to change and that's not easy.

Oh yeah, those last two lines describe me to a T.

Then, some of my favorite lines in all of music:

Dragon shining with all values known, dazzling you, keeping you from your own.

On second glance, the lyrics probably refer to the singer's lover, who condescends to her. Up until this point, I always thought it referred to the singer herself: she, in her torpor, describes herself as a beautiful, shining dragon, and everyone would know it, if only she could get out of this malaise, which, in this "Brat" year, is very bratty and very relateable. In any case, I find the rhythm of these lines irresistible, the roaming n's of "dragon", "shining", both long-shorts, thus iambs, and those lifting l's of "all" and "values". Then in the second line, there's those spaced-out "you's", pushing the singer away further and further to the end of the sentence and therefore, metaphorically, out of thought, which effect is enhanced by the hilly "dazzling" and "keeping", also iambs.

Where is the lion in you to defy him when you're this weak and this spacey?

To tell you the truth, I realized I very infrequently use "this" as an intensifier. Good thing to keep in mind.

Anyway, here Joni, as she will do more often in "Hissing of Summer Lawns" (1975), invokes Christian imagery, as the lions of Daniel, "lion of Judah". I love it. The lines have a very comedic effect, the first line establishing a lion roaring with the o's of "lion" and "you" and the second line returning to the anemic character whose body is so worn out with the e's and a's of "weak" and "spacey".

So what are you going to do about it? You can't live life and you can't leave it. Advice and religion, you can't take it, you can't seem to believe it.

The peacock is afraid to parade; you're under the thumb of the maid. You really can't give love in this condition, still you know how you need it.

I marvel at these lines as I type them down. I do think this song has some of the best lines in music, and a large reason why they're so good is because they're so funny, but also straight-laced. As I mentioned before, Joni doesn't condescend, she's never against, she just tells it like it is: the singer is at a genuine loss in her life as to what she believes about society, about patriarchy, about organized religion. It's her opinion and it's her opinion only, and that's why her audience freaking loves her. Then there's the "peacock is afraid to parade", a taunt at herself for being so indecisive, and the impotent "you're under the thumb of the maid", a true WTF moment from the singer, expressed less in indignant tones and more bewilderment at the farce before her. Then that pitiful "You really can't give love in this condition, / still you know how you need it."

I love this song so much. I feel like it expresses me so perfectly. It expresses my doubts, my neurosis, and my desire to pick myself up and get to getting somewhere.

Then the breathtaking chorus,

They open and close you, then they talk like they know you, they don't know you; they're friends and they're foes too, trouble child, breaking like the waves at Malibu,

the one place in the song where the singer, after an inhalation of breath, summons a massive surge of energy and rouses herself from her slumber in an attempt to break herself from her slumber. You can hear the bit of aggression when Joni sings, "They open and close you", the utterances coming from her chest; then there's the "they don't know you", following "they talk like they know you", which she sings curtly, roughly, bluntly, almost rudely, a slight shove of a phrase saying "Back off". And that slight hesitation before she sings "foes", as if she's finally admitting that, yes, maybe the people surrounding her aren't the best for her. Finally, that sigh of resignation in "trouble child, breaking like the waves at Malibu", referring herself, self-deprecatingly, as the source of everyone's blame, and calming herself on the waves of the shore.

Now my favorite lines of the song:

So why does it come as such a shock to know you really have no one? Only a river of changing faces looking for an ocean.

They trickle through your leaky plans - another dream over the dam - and you're lying in some room feeling like your right to be human is going over too.

EAT YOUR HEART OUT BOB DYLAN. (I kid, I kid.)

I don't know if I can express how beautiful her dream-like imagery is here, her attempt to express her frustration in vivid, painterly terms, which works so well from the comedic standpoint of her character pseudo-psychoanalyzing herself. Who has written such lines as "Only a river of changing faces / looking for an ocean"? That beautiful scene of the people in the characters' memories flowing through her life, only to surge and disappear into an impenetrable fortress of dam, and then to return to the warm room "where they let you be lazy", only to end in the wry observation that the character is really given no right to be herself? I love these lines. I love these scenes. And I find these things beautiful most of all because they're real, they serve the purpose of expressing the character's feelings, they're not images for images' sake. This is what expression is; our interior lives have so much depth to them that we need to use all of the paint of the world to display them to other people, to make them understand.

Well, some are gonna knock you, and some'll try and clock you. You know, it's really hard to talk sense to you, trouble child, breaking like the waves at Malibu.

This song speaks way too much to me. It's the guidebook for extremely polite people to resist and stand up for themselves, even when they're too passive or too indifferent to just get rid of all the naysayers. It's a song about a world that at every turn attempts to deny you your individuality and, rather than react with anger, a sure-fire way of losing that same sense of self, enduring all the same, with a smirk too. It's the ultimate "I'm good for myself, even if I'm not good" song. For an artist who seemed to never think much about other people's idea of "adulthood", this is a song about growing up, growing out of disillusionment, and growing into one's self and one's acceptance of the world.

Let's end Joni Mitchell Month (featuring SZA) with a little bit of introspection. I love "Hejira" (1976). "Blue" (1971) is also great. I am cynical about her earlier work, "Clouds" (1969) and "Ladies of the Canyon" (1970), as I fear they're "hippie shit". I have not heard "For The Roses" (1972). That covers basically all of her most renowned work; everything succeeding "Hejira" has a mixed reaction.

As much as I love Joni, I'm not sure if I'll ever go through her entire catalogue. What's sorta disappointing is that Bob Dylan and Leonard Cohen have hits evenly spread throughout their career, but retrospectives on Joni tend to put her best work within her first decade. This of course could be an issue with music journalists themselves, who tend to empathize more with youth and naivete (like, "Songs of Leonard Cohen" as Cohen's best, "Hunky Dory" as Bowie's best? C'mon). That being said, after sampling them, Joni's later work feels less cohesive, less things-going-on, but, then again, that could be a misread.

So I said when writing on "The Boho Dance", the beginning of Joni Mitchell Month: "Joni Mitchell is my favorite songwriter - with an asterisk". I don't know if she will always be my favorite. But even of all of the songwriters I admire and love, Joni has a better track record. Four insanely good albums. Leonard, who is closest, has just two or three I really love ("New Skin for the Old Ceremony" (1974), "I'm Your Man" (1988), and "The Future" (1992)). Joni also encapsulates highs and lows; though she has been very, very sad, she's also optimistic, she wants to see life through. She's the true wanderer of the roads.

That may be why Joni hasn't really caught on. She's your favorite musician's musician, but she clearly has not entered the acclaim of Dylan (which is funny, because post "Blood on the Tracks" (1975) Dylan enjoyed no such fame; his mythologizing began ... in the late '80s, I believe, with the Never Ending Tour?). Bob sings about structures and institutions; Joni sings about herself. You don't win Nobels singing about yourself, you don't even win Pulitzers for that. Which is to say: that's why she's everyone's favorite, and fuck them. She's the people's poet, damnit, she's not some state-sponsored seer, meant to be reappropriated to fit someone's message. The truly great artists are vagrants, and they find their pockets full of prose.

I think this is just me growing old, and me developing my own voice. I no longer have that intense infatuation for her, that she speaks for me and that her lines say more about me than I'll ever say about myself. I doubt she'll be my favorite forever because I can't be the same person forever. But that's a good thing. Her voice raised mine. I owe her a lifelong debt. Whether I'm 30 or 40 or 50, I'll always return to these records to find this timeless human.