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Album Art

Track: California
Artist: Joni Mitchell
Album: Blue

Artist Bio

Joni Mitchell Image

Name: Joni Mitchell
Spotify Genres: folk, singer-songwriter, folk rock
Followers: 1,591,407
Popularity:

65/100

Biography

Canadian musician, singer songwriter and painter. Born on November 7, 1943, in Fort Macleod, Alberta, as Roberta Joan Anderson. In June 1965, she married [a3568909] and she kept his name when they divorced early in 1967, upon which she left for New York City and its folk music scene. (She had already begun singing in small nightclubs in her native Western Canada and then Toronto.) In New York, she quickly achieved fame first as a songwriter (e.g. with Chelsea Morning, Both Sides Now or Woodstock) and then as a singer in her own right. After David Crosby had discovered her playing in Florida, he introduced her to his folk rock friends in Los Angeles and its Laurel Canyon scene, where Mitchell will find a home. Early 1968 she is recording her debut LP for Reprise in Hollywood, and by the time of her third album she has her first gold album. Mitchell rose above the folk idiom and had pop hits such as Big Yellow Taxi (1970), Free Man In Paris and Help Me, the last two from 1974's best-selling Court And Spark. Mitchell's distinctive harmonic guitar style, and piano arrangements all grew more complex through the 1970s as she was deeply influenced by jazz, melding it with pop, folk and rock on experimental albums like 1976's Hejira. She worked closely with jazz greats including Pat Metheny, Wayne Shorter, Jaco Pastorius, Herbie Hancock, and on a 1979 record released after his death, Charles Mingus. From the 1980s on, Mitchell reduced her recording and touring schedule but turned again toward pop, making greater use of synthesizers and direct political protest in her lyrics, which often tackled social and environmental themes alongside romantic and emotional ones. Mitchell is also a visual artist. She created the artwork for each of her albums, and in 2000 described herself as a "painter derailed by circumstance." Mitchell stopped recording over the last several years, focusing more attention on painting, but in 2007 she released Shine, her first album of new songs in 9 years. In 2020, Mitchell started [l1930164], a series of releases containing previously unreleased material from her personal vaults, along with box sets of the studio albums. She was inducted into the Songwriters Hall of Fame and Rock And Roll Hall of Fame (Performer) in 1997. Blue, her starkly personal 1971 album, was voted #30 in Rolling Stone magazine's 500 Greatest Albums Of All Time list of 2003. See also [l285067].

Source: Discogs

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Release Cover

Release: Joni Mitchell - California
Year: 1971
Genres: Rock
Styles: Folk Rock

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Source: MusicBrainz

LYRICS

Sitting in a park in Paris, France
Reading the news and it sure looks bad
They won't give peace a chance
That was just a dream some of us had
Still a lot of lands to see
But I wouldn't want to stay here
It's too old and cold and settled in its ways here
Oh, but California
California I'm coming home
I'm going to see the folks I dig
I'll even kiss a Sunset pig
California I'm coming home

I met a redneck on a Grecian isle
Who did the goat dance very well
He gave me back my smile
But he kept my camera to sell
Oh the rogue, the red red rogue
He cooked good omelettes and stews
And I might have stayed on with him there
But my heart cried out for you, California
Oh California I'm coming home
Oh make me feel good rock'n roll band
I'm your biggest fan
California, I'm coming home

Oh it gets so lonely
When you're walking
And the streets are full of strangers
All the news of home you read
Just gives you the blues
Just gives you the blues

So I bought me a ticket
I caught a plane to Spain
Went to a party down a red dirt road
There were lots of pretty people there
Reading Rolling Stone, reading Vogue
They said, "How long can you hang around?"
I said "a week, maybe two,
Just until my skin turns brown
Then I'm going home to California"
California I'm coming home
Oh will you take me as I am
Strung out on another man
California I'm coming home

Oh it gets so lonely
When you're walking
And the streets are full of strangers
All the news of home you read
More about the war
And the bloody changes
Oh will you take me as l am?
Will you take me as l am?
Will you?