Brandi Carlile says Joni Mitchell will play a headline show in Washington next June
According to Brandi Carlile, Joni Mitchell’s gradual return to the stage may soon include her first headline show in 23 years.
The revelation came during Carlile’s appearance on The Daily Show, as Pitchfork reported, with the artist telling host Trevor Noah that Mitchell would be taking to the stage in Grant County, Washington next June. Carlile will perform her own show in the city on Friday June 9, taking to the stage at the 27,500-capacity Gorge Amphitheatre – during her interview with Noah, she dropped the news that Mitchell will play the same venue the following night.
If true, it’ll be Mitchell’s first headline show since June 2, 2000, when she capped off her full North American tour in Camden, New Jersey. She’s since performed a handful of one-off sets at festivals and other events – five in total, two of which took place year. Her first public performance since 2013 came at a benefit gala for MusiCares, where she was bestowed with their 2022 Person Of The Year award.
July then saw Mitchell performing a surprise set at the Newport Music Festival – which she last appeared at in 1969 – delivering a 13-song “JONI JAM” set that featured Carlile on the tracks ‘Carey’, ‘A Case Of You’ (for which Marcus Mumford was also welcomed out) and ‘Big Yellow Taxi’. Also in her interview with Noah, Carlile revealed that Mitchell had been hosting these jam sessions in private for several years, forming part of her recovery from a brain aneurysm suffered in 2015.
Mitchell herself opened up about her endeavours to re-learn the guitar in a recent interview with CBS Mornings. She explained that her ability to play guitar was one of the skills she lost following her aneurysm, saying of her progress: “I’m learning. I’m looking at videos that are on the net, to see where to put my fingers. It’s amazing… when you have an aneurysm, you don’t know how to get into a chair. You don’t know how to get out of bed. You have to learn all these things again. You’re going back to infancy, almost.”
In August, Mitchell received an honorary doctorate degree from the Berklee College of Music. She was honoured at a private event in Santa Monica, where she said in her acceptance speech: “Well, luckily I’m too old to get a swelled head! I wish my parents were alive. My mother in particular would be really proud of this because she wanted me to go to college. I went to art school and I quit after a year. She thinks of me as a quitter. So to see this achievement would be really impressive to her. I wish I could share it with her.”
The following month, Mitchell released the latest instalment of her archival release series: a box-set of her albums issued on Asylum Records between 1972 and 1975.
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Ellie Robinson
NME
