It's amazing how widely tastes can vary among humans. Joni Mitchell's voice has always touched something deep inside of me. I could listen to her sing around the clock - I love her voice so much.
As a musician myself, I was always awed by her prodigious musical genius. Her guitar work and songwriting were some of the best of the lot during her heyday. She more than held her own against most of her contemporaries, many of whom were ardent fans themselves.
I have to agree...Joni Mitchell is musical genius. And her vocals were always perfect. Night Ride Home album — excellent!
I loved her early work so very, very much. When I was younger and my voice had range, I sang her songs over and over throughout the 70s, and staged some of them. She told stories. But the woman has a soul sickness that has never gone away, and after awhile I could no longer listen to the yearning, mourning, suffering and so on, regardless of the musical virtuosity which was and is unrivalled in the auteur category. But I must admit, when I heard her reprise rendition of "Both Sides Now" in the 2003 film Love Actually, her years-later voice deepened and roughened by decades of cigarette smoking, I was destroyed to sobbing. It was the background music in the scene where Emma Thompson, playing a happy mom, discovers that her husband played by Alan Rickman was cheating on her. It is Christmas Eve, so she wipes her tears and puts on a brave face for the children. Devastating; and would not have been nearly so if not for Joni's ragged voice and my memory of how it used to be. Hit me like a truck.