6. Joni MitchellNight Ride Home

I can’t really do a list without her work. I don’t listen to her as much as I used to at all, but she was very important to me as a writer growing up. If I look at her body of work, that’s how I would like my life to be. Out of all her songs, there are some that I have returned to a lot in the last 10 years, one is ‘Come In From The Cold’, another other is ‘Nothing Can Be Done’, which is a beautiful analysis of a point of argument of between two people – for a long term relationship it’s a really helpful song. There’s a lot of her work that is just incredibly helpful. Sometimes I don’t particularly adore a lot of the production… so I’m here, like ragging on Joni Mitchell. I don’t listen to her, I don’t like the production, but it comes down to a sense of songs being helpful to you, songs carrying you through to other things. She taught me so much about song structure and metaphor, and I feel like I’ve kind of moved on, but Night Ride Home is a very beautiful album. It’s under-looked, because a lot of people are obsessed with her 60s youth, but I love the maturity of her voice and her perspective most of all, especially as I get older. When all else fails, return to what you learned from Joni Mitchell: ‘write about what you know, what is happening in your life right now’. She made me a songwriter.