Joni Mitchell Sings Deep Cuts, Classics for a Thrilled Hollywood Bowl

At Joni Mitchell’s Hollywood Bowl show Saturday night, the revered singer-songwriter offered the rapt audience a first-ever live performance of…

Wait, let’s just take a time-out right there and let those words sink in. At Joni Mitchell’s Hollywood Bowl show. What were the odds? Right?… Sorry, we now return to our regularly scheduled review.

At Joni Mitchell’s Hollywood Bowl show Saturday night, the revered singer-songwriter offered the rapt audience a first-ever live performance of “The Sire of Sorrow (Job’s Sad Song),” a deep cut from 30 years ago that borrows themes from the biblical book of Job to ask God, the “tireless watcher,” “Tell me, why do you starve the faithful? Why do you crucify the saints? And you let the wicked prosper.” In an election year, the choice felt almost as much political as theological.

Following that somber, musically sophisticated number, Brandi Carlile — the unofficial emcee and enabler of the evening — made note of the song’s dark scriptural origins, then announced that the setlist was about to take a left turn. “She was worried it would make you feel sad,” Carlile said, “so she asked us to follow it up with this next one.”

Up next in the show’s divine playlist: “God Must Be a Boogie Man.” This was not one of the night’s handful of live premieres, but it did mark the first time that Mitchell was performing the delightful track from her 1979 “Mingus” album since 1983.

They say there are no atheists in foxholes, and there might not have been any in the dell tucked into the Hollywood hills that houses the Bowl, either, on Saturday night, with Mitchell returning from the nearly-dead to deliver her biggest and fullest set since she suffered an aneurysm in 2015… or, really, since she did her last tour 24 years ago, which had her last headlining in L.A. at the Greek in 2000. With all due respect to Job’s torment, it felt for a night, at least, like some Boogie Man up there must like us.

There are few shows that audiences walk into with as little certainty about what they’re going to get as this Bowl crowd did. (The two-night stand continues with a second show Sunday evening.) Since her health crisis, Mitchell has made her way back to the stage in very gradual steps. At MusiCares’ salute to her in Las Vegas in early 2022, she mostly watched from the side of the stage and just chimed in with a couple of lines near the end — so fans were shocked when, in July of that year, she made a surprise appearance at the Newport Folk Festival in a Carlile-led “Joni Jam” that had her singing lead, or sharing it, on a fair amount of numbers, while others were fronted by all-star guests. That mixed format was reprised for another show in the midst of a Carlile weekend at the Gorge in Washington state in June 2023, followed a mini-Joni Jam that served as the three-song encore to a Brandi Carlile and Friends show here at the Bowl in October of last year. Clearly, she was back, as a capable performer, in the two extended shows she’s performed in the last 27 months … but still, no one buying a ticket for this weekend’s shows really knew if they’d be getting another jam-style show or maybe, just maybe, a truly full-on Mitchell performance.

The answer was: both. Production-wise, the setting was much the same as the previous two Joni Jam shows, with a big cast of musicians and singers seated on chairs and couches around the legend’s throne. And there were two moments in which other stars did step forward to take foreground vocal turns, effectively serenading Mitchell — Annie Lennox on “Ladies of the Canyon,” and Marcus Mumford on “California.”

But if you came to hear Joni Mitchell sing her heart out, at length and in full, without really ceding the stage for more than those two cameos, that is what you got Saturday night at the Bowl, for the first time in nearly a quarter-century. It was one more incremental step on her path back to public performance, but it also felt like one giant leap for Mitchell-kind — a seemingly impossible moment in which the singer was commanding the stage for about three hours (not counting intermission) and delivering just what you might have hoped for from her at any point in her long career.

She clearly had a lot of help in getting here, and thanked Carlile once again for coaxing her out of retirement as she worked on regaining her strength. But was it Mitchell in the driver’s seat? I can only say that as I watched her sit on her throne and bop her trademark wolf’s-head walking stick around to the rhythm for three hours, as I tried to figure out what it reminded me of, it finally came to me: She looked like someone having a magnificent time manipulating a stick-shift.

Mitchell’s enjoyment was evident to the full house even before anyone caught sight of her. The Bowl’s revolving stage had to turn around to reveal the cast of players already seated in place, but as it did, the sound of the star’s laughter reverberated through the Bowl, as if she were getting a big chuckle out of riding the world’s slowest roller coaster. She continued in that mood of merriment all night — sometimes at something Carlile said or did, occasionally at her own lyrics, but mostly, seemingly, just out of the sense that maybe it’s as absurdly funny as it is wonderful to be alive and being celebrated after all that has transpired. Mitchell got a big chortle out of changing the lyrics to “Night Ride Home,” from “I love the man beside me” to “I’m pissed off at the man beside me.” In a year when women’s mirth has become an actual campaign issue, it’s fair to say that anyone who objects to the sound of Kamala Harris laughing would have been really offended by Joni Mitchell’s performance.  

Speaking of the election… The legend was not shy about making her feelings known. (Feelings which should have come as a surprise to exactly no one on hand.) Singing the topically minded “Dog Eat Dog” deep into the second set — giving it a live airing for the first time since 1985, the year the album of that same name came out — she followed the lyrics’ reference to “snakebite evangelists and racketeers and big wig financiers” with an addendum: “…like Donald Trump.” After the song wrapped up, she noted: “I wish I could vote. I’m a Canadian. I’m one of those lousy immigrants.” In case anyone doubted where she stood, she finally blurted it out: “Fuck Donald Trump.” This resulted in a standing ovation.

The generous 27-song evening was divided into halves, each of which had its own personality, and a partially different set of musicians. The first set was the one that had truly hardcore Mitchell heads dropping their jaws with thoroughly unpredictable song choices. The second was the more overtly crowd-pleasing set… and not in any derogatory sense, because it’s not as if the super-fans ecstatic over the obscurities that dominated the first half suddenly started balking when they heard “Big Yellow Taxi” and “A Case of You” in the second.

That first half had a slightly more intimate set of players, though it was still a significant ensemble by most standards, with the vocal duo Lucius providing choral vocals from the nearest couch, SistaStrings chipping in to augment the choir as well as provide string arrangements from a slightly further perch, and longtime Mitchell favorite Mark Isham adding grace notes on trumpet and soprano sax. The Hanseroth Twins played guitar and bass, Blake Mills and Robin Pecknold shared still more guitar duties, Jacob Collier held down the initial keyboard work, and Abe Rounds was on drums. For Part 2, additional guests came in that turned it into more of the Joni Jam seen in Newport and the Gorge, with Marcus Mumford adding percussion, Celisse and Dawes’ Taylor Goldsmith on guitar and vocals, Allison Russell on vocals… and a couple newcomers to the public Joni Jams, Jon Batiste and Rita Wilson, joining the batallion on keys and backing vocals, respectively.

Aside from a couple of moments in the first 15 minutes when Mitchell sounded like she was still finding her voice, she sang full-throatedly and, for what her range is now, spectacularly. There are moments in a show this career-encompassing where the vocal ensemble is going to have to carry some weight in moments of a song that was written for Mitchell’s higher, ingenue voice, like “Raised on Robbery.” In a few cases, Carlile floated in and out with a higher part that complemented the lowered range Joni was singing in, as if Mitchell’s older and younger voices were doing a delightful duet with one another.

But what was remarkable — and maybe a little bit surprising even if you’d been fortunate to catch one of the rare previous Joni Jams — was how reliant this performance was on Mitchell’s solo voice, for however much expert support she got from the cast. The songs taken from parts of her career when she’d already developed a more mature voice, in the ‘80s and ‘90s, work especially wonderfully now that she has found her way back into performance. Hearing her sing her way through all eight minutes of “Come in From the Cold” now could or should count as the highlight of anyone’s concertgoing year — with or without the angelic, interstitial curlicues added by Carlile that take the number to an even more transcendent level.

What Carlile adds musically as a background vocalist — or featured descant singer, really — can’t be undervalued. And right up there alongside “Come in From the Cold” as a highlight was the penultimate “Shine,” a latter-day Mitchell song that is Carlile’s personal favorite out of an overwhelming catalog, with good reason. It’s an epic protest song and an epic gospel song, all at once — deeply cynical about the world, from its politicians to its petty traffic offenders (which always gets a laugh) — but Joni sounds like she actually means it when she asks the light to shine on the unjust as well as the just. And what an amazing gift it is that the world (or a small, select part of it) gets to hear a song that great, and that undervalued, revived in 2024. Following “Shine,” the closing group-sing of “Circle Game” almost felt anticlimactic… aside from the fact that it’s, like, one of the most moving songs ever written.

Just as much as with the complementary vocal parts, Carlile also serves an invaluable role in these Joni Jams in the part she was really born to play: Mitchell’s hype man. She generally refrains from laying it on too thick, but sometimes she just can’t help herself. “I don’t want to freak anybody out,” Carlile blurted out right after the third song wrapped up, “but YOU JUST LISTENED TO JONI MITCHELL SING ‘HEJIRA’!” Back-announcing doesn’t get any better, or more bluntly appropriate, than that.

Joni Mitchell & the Joni Jam setlist, the Hollywood Bowl, Oct. 19, 2024:

Set 1
Be Cool
Harlem in Havana (live premiere)
Hejira
Cherokee Louise
Coyote
Carey
The Sire of Sorrow (Job’s Sad Song) (live premiere)
God Must Be a Boogie Man
Sunny Sunday
If I Had a Heart (live premiere)
Refuge of the Roads
Night Ride Home
Both Sides Now

Set 2
Big Yellow Taxi
Raised on Robbery
California (sung by Marcus Mumford)
The Magdalene Laundries
Ladies of the Canyon (sung by Annie Lennox)
Summertime (Gershwin cover)
Come in From the Cold
A Case of You
I’m Still Standing (Elton John cover with rewritten lyrics)
Dog Eat Dog
Amelia
If
Shine
The Circle Game