Joni Mitchell and Neil Young

Joni Mitchell & Neil Young
Photo from The Last Waltz, 1976

Joni Mitchell and Neil Young both hail from Canada, grew up musically in Toronto and later went on to become celebrated singer-songwriters around the world. Their musical intersections over the years have been both productive and fascinating.

From Joni Mitchell's introduction to the song "Circle Game" on the album "You Can Close Your Eyes" as being inspired by Young's "Sugar Mountain":

Mitchell: "In 1965 I was up in Canada, and there was a friend of mine up there who had just left a Rock'n'Roll band in Winnipeg/Manitoba near where I come from on the prairies to become a folk singer a la Bob Dylan, who was his hero at that time, and at the same time there were breaks in his life and he was going into new and exciting directions.

He had just newly turned 21, and that meant in Winnipeg he was no longer allowed into his favorite hangout which is kind of a teeny-bopper club and once you're over 21 you couldn't get in there anymore, so he was really feeling terrible because his girlfriends and everybody that he wanted to hang out with, his band could still go there, you know, but it's one of the things that drove him to become a folk singer was that he couldn't play in this club anymore. But he was over the hill.

So he wrote this song that was called "Oh to live on sugar mountain" which was a lament for his lost youth. And it went like this... [sings a few verses].

And I thought, God, you know, if we get to 21 and there's nothing after that, that's a pretty bleak future, so I wrote a song for him, and for myself just to give me some hope. It's called The Circle Game."

On Joni Mitchell's album HEJIRA, Neil Young played on the harmonica on a couple of songs.

In The Band's final performance "Last Waltz" concert at the Winterland in San Francisco, Mitchell and Young sang together on the song "Helpless" making for one of the film's many highlights.


Portrait by Joni Mitchell
From Rolling Stone magazine, 1975

More on other artists who have worked with Neil Young.