How have you learnt when you’re a music legend? We’re not precisely certain, however being offered with a lifetime achievement award by the prime minister of your nation might be a fairly good indicator that you’ve finished one thing proper.
That was the honour afforded to Joni Mitchell eventually night time’s Juno Awards, the Canadian equal of The Grammys, the place it was Canadian PM Mark Carney who took to the stage to sing Mitchell’s praises.
After noting that Mitchell’s songs have been lined greater than 8,000 instances, he singled out her personal ‘cover’ of one in all her earlier songs, Both Sides Now, as one in all his favourites.
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“Joni first recorded this masterpiece in 1969 and, in that version, we hear an emerging artist sing of moons and Junes and Ferris wheels; a young poet seemingly at peace with her new-found revelations about love,” mentioned Carney.
“By 2000, when Joni revisited the song, that wistful levity of youth had been replaced by the raw vulnerability of a woman who has lived and, like so many of us, finds humility in the mystery of it all. The same words. The same words brilliantly imagined by the artist to reveal the song’s enduring truth that something’s lost but something’s gained in living every day. Music [and] Canada has gained from Joni Mitchell living every one of her days.”
Carney closed by calling Mitchell “one of the greatest artists of all time.”
Mitchell then walked to the stage to obtain her award, calling Carney “our wonderful prime minister” on two separate events. “I’m so glad to be back in Canada,” she mentioned, earlier than explaining how the brain aneurysm she suffered in 2015 “changed my life for the better”.
“I went into a coma which helped me to quit smoking,” Mitchell continued, to some amusement. “My house filled up with the most wonderful nurses. I was on the road with men for years and years and years and now I live with a house full of women and I have a fantastic therapist.”
Summing up, Mitchell mentioned: “My life has changed for the better: out of a catastrophe, like a phoenix, you know, rose a better life.”
There was extra, although. In honour of Mitchell, Canadian artists Sarah McLachlan and Allison Russell sang a medley of her songs, beginning with A Case Of You and Both Sides Now. This was adopted by Big Yellow Taxi, and who ought to emerge however Joni herself, to chip in with a line right here and there. While she appeared hesitant at instances – at one level questioning if her mic was on – her contributions drew rousing cheers.
