The Women Who Inspired Joni Mitchell To Pose Nude on Her Album (And the Reason Why It Didn’t Make the Cover)

Joni Mitchell has expertly subverted trendy ideologies, styles, and pitfalls not because she never took the time to learn them but specifically because she paid such close attention to them. Despite the naïveté her crystal-clear soprano might have suggested back in the 1960s, Mitchell was hardly a clueless ingénue. She was and always has been a highly intelligent, perceptive, witty, and biting kind of creative, which is why her music is so good at cutting as much as it soothes.

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But with that keen sense of awareness comes the knowledge that sometimes, the best thing to do in the face of a changing current is to follow its lead. One such shift in the tides occurred in the 1970s, when sex became less of a subtle innuendo and more of a front-and-center selling point in the musical world. Women began using their sexuality in a physical way, graduating from wistful, lovelorn lyrics to scantily clad photographs, both of which can evoke the same idea, albeit in starkly different ways.

Mitchell certainly noticed. “I remember when [this increased sexualization] was kind of starting,” the Canadian singer-songwriter said in a 2022 interview with Elton John. She cited photographs of Linda Ronstadt in her underwear or Carly Simon’s provocative album cover for Playing Possum. “I thought, ‘Oh, God, do we got to do this?’” So, she joined in.

Joni Mitchell Almost Had a Nude Album Cover, but David Geffen Stopped It

As Joni Mitchell saw more of her female contemporaries lean into this hypersexualization trend, she decided not only to jump on the bandwagon but to head straight for the conductor’s cab. During her 2022 interview with Elton John, Mitchell said she “decided to just be naked on my record [and] get it over with.” The record in question was her fifth studio album from 1972, For The Roses, which included fantastic cuts like “You Turn Me On, I’m a Radio” and “Blonde in the Bleachers” (the latter of which, interestingly, became a sort of anthem for Stevie Nicks).

Although Mitchell originally planned to have a photo of herself, nude, facing away from the camera, on the cover of For the Roses, Mitchell’s manager, David Geffen, talked her out of it. Per Mitchell’s website, “Geffen suggested that [Mitchell] wouldn’t like ‘Only $4.99’ slapped across her a**” and that she “opted for the neutral photograph that was eventually released.” The nude photograph still made the physical album, but it was only featured on the inside cover.

Speaking of ass-adjacent animals, another version of the For The Roses album cover featured an illustration Mitchell drew of flowers coming out of a horse’s behind. Mitchell opted to use that particular image for her billboard on Sunset Boulevard instead.

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