Joni Mitchell Considered This Singer Songwriter Her Only Female Contemporary

“I’m sick of being lumped in with the women,” said Joni Mitchell in a 1998 interview. Mitchell was discussing how she despised being grouped alongside other women artists, including some of her earlier peers. Though Mithcell had great admiration for artists like Billie Holiday and Edith Piaf, along with others, she believed everyone’s music—particularly her own—was individual and stood out among the rest.

Mitchell also resented being called a “female folk singer” and detested being called”Confessional.” Along with fellow singers and songwriters, Mitchell’s songs were being compared to some “confessional” authors, including Sylvia Plath and Anne Sexton, whom she felt no connection to whatsoever.

“I have nothing in common with them,” said Mitchell.

“When I read ‘confessional style’ in print, there’s something in the tone of the way it is delivered that is kind of insulting, like you’ve flashed in a public place or something, when in fact you are attempting to illuminate the human condition,” added Mitchell. “I feel when somebody calls me a confessional songwriter that they’ve missed the point. There’s too much emphasis put on the artist and not enough on the art. I prefer to be like the ‘Wizard of Oz,’ where you just see what I’ve created and I’m invisible.” 

Videos by American Songwriter

[RELATED: The 1965 Bob Dylan Single That Was a “Revelation” to Joni Mitchell]

“I looked to her and took some direction from her.’

Despite Mitchell’s disdain for comparison, there was one female New York City singer-songwriter whom she admired enough to be “lumped in” with.

“Laura Nyro, you can lump me in with, because Laura exerted an influence on me,” Mitchell said. “I looked to her and took some direction from her. On account of her, I started playing piano again. Some of the things she did was very fresh. Hers was a hybrid of black pop singers, Motown singers, and Broadway musicals, and I like some things also from both those camps.”

Of Nyro’s third album, New York Tendaberry, Mitchell added, “Beautiful record, beautiful.”

Laura Nyro

Born in Bronx, New York, on October 18, 1947, Nyro was a self-taught musician, playing piano as a child. Partly inspired by her father Louis, who was a piano tuner and jazz trumpeteer, and the poetry she read as a yougn girl, Nyro also became immersed in her mother’s music collection, everything from classical composers like Claude Debussy and Maurice Ravel to Billie Holiday and Nina Simone and started writing songs at the age of 8.

“I’ve created my own little world, a world of music, since I was five years old”, Nyro told Billboard in 1970. “I was never a bright and happy child.”

After being connected to record producer Artie Mogull through her father, Nyro released her debut album, More Than a New Discovery in 1967 and two of her most well-known songs, Stoney End,” which went to No. 6 on the Billboard Hot 100, and “Wedding Bell Blues,” followed by Eli and the Thirteenth Confession in 1968, and New York Tendaberry a year later.

Shortly after releasing her debut, in1967, Nyro performed four songs—”Wedding Bell Blues,” “Poverty Train,” “Eli’s Coming,” and “Stoned Soul Picnic”—at the Monterey Pop Festival, and believed she had bombed her performance and heard “boos” from the audience and left the stage in tears.

Nyro recalled the moment as a turning point in her career and carried the negative experience with her throughout her career.

“I learned from Monterey that I was a formidable musician, but I had to get my s–t together,” Nyro was quoted as saying in Michele Kort’s 2003 book Soul Picnic: The Music and Passion of Laura Nyro.

From 1968 through the early ’70s, several also artists had hits with their covers of Nyro’s songs, including the 5th Dimension with “Stoned Soul Picnic,” “Sweet Blindness,” “Save the Country,” “Blowing Away,” and “Wedding Bell Blues.” Three Dog Night also covered Nyro’s “Eli’s Comin’,” while Peter, Paul and Mary and Blood, Sweat & Tears released their renditions of “And When I Die.” Barbra Streisand also covered Nyro’s “Time and Love,” “Hands off the Man (Flim Flam Man),” and “Stoney End.”

In 2010, Nyro was posthumously inducted into the Songwriters Hall of Fame and into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame two years later.

Listening back to the original footage of Nyro’s Monterey performance 30 years later, producer Lou Adler said he made a surprising discovery.

“What we did hear is somebody saying, ‘Laura, I love you, I love you, I love you,’” said Adler. “And we called her [Nyro] and asked her if she would come in and listen to it. She said she would, and she died before she had a chance to really come in.”

Nyro died in 1997 at age 49 from ovarian cancer, the same age her mother passed away from the same illness.

Photo: Michael Ochs Archives/Getty Images