Joni Mitchell Endured a Year Where She Couldn’t Stop Weeping: ‘Like My Guts Were on the Outside’

Joni Mitchell’s confessional style of music was groundbreakingly honest, going beyond soul-baring and exposing her heights and heartbreak for listeners to pick at. It makes sense, then, that some of her best work was born from a period of vulnerability. Mitchell explained that she quit music and went through a time where everything made her cry. She was in this emotional state when she wrote her album Blue.

Joni Mitchell briefly quit music early in her career

Though she’s had a lasting career, Mitchell quit music when she was 27. She was sick of fame and wanted to remove herself from it.

“I quit for two years. This was at a time when, like I told you, money and success, somehow or other, seemed distasteful to me,” Mitchell said in the book Joni Mitchell: In Her Own Words by Malka Marom. “It seemed out of proportion to what I had done.”

She shared that while sometimes she did feel that she deserved the success, she swung between the two attitudes.

“I remember being incredibly grateful when people wanted to talk to me, or to tell me they liked my music,” she said. “Later on, I didn’t want to hear it, and I didn’t want praise or criticism. I couldn’t handle either one of them.”

She went through a period of time where she constantly cried

During her hiatus from music, Mitchell said she couldn’t stop crying.

“I hadn’t cried for years, but at that time I cried all the time. They walked on the moon, I cried. Everything made me cry.”

She said that seeing a portable organ in the window of a Salvation Army nearly brought her to tears. She ran into the shop and asked to buy it, but it was for display only. This caused Mitchell to sob.

“She finally took pity on me and sold me the goddamn thing,” she said. “That was the year I burst into tears. I cried all the time.”

Mitchell believes that the constant crying was a kind of illness that her mother eventually got.

“My mother thought I was being a wimp, and she was giving me buck-up advice,” she explained. Later in life, she was walking through the supermarket and started crying for no reason. She also had it, milder than this. She called me up and apologized.”

Joni Mitchell wrote ‘Blue’ during this raw emotional time

Though she’d retired from music, Mitchell said the constant crying helped sharpen her insight.

“I’d just look at a person and I’d know too much about them that I didn’t want to know. And because everything was becoming transparent, I felt I must be transparent, and I cried.”

She dreamt about sitting on stage with a women’s tuba band. In the dream, she was “a plastic bag with all my organs exposed, sobbing.”

This sense of brutal transparency helped her write her album, Blue.

“That’s how I felt. Like my guts were on the outside,” she said. “I wrote Blue in that condition.”