You could hear her before you could see her: a throaty, rat-a-tat laugh — ha-ha-ha-ha — drifting through the cool canyon air.
Seated in a gilded armchair near the center of a circular rotating stage, 80-year-old Joni Mitchell spun slowly into view Saturday night at the Hollywood Bowl like someone who’d just heard a joke at a party. She laughed again as she took in the crowd before her: 17,000 or so fans assembled for her first headlining gig in her adopted hometown since the near-fatal aneurysm in 2015 that almost killed her. And she did it again as the dozen musicians surrounding her revved up the opener of what would turn out to be a three-hour performance.
The tune was the slinking “Be Cool,” its message a bit of laid-back life-coaching: “Charm ’em / Don’t alarm ’em,” Mitchell sang, her long hair in two pigtails beneath a jaunty beret, eyes twinkling behind a stylish pair of tinted glasses. “Keep things light / Keep your worries out of sight.”
Ha-ha-ha-ha.
This sense of play has been crucial to Mitchell’s return, which began with the so-called Joni Jams she began holding with the aid of singer Brandi Carlile as she recovered from the aneurysm at her home in Bel-Air. In 2022, she blew minds when she took the Joni Jam public with an unannounced performance at the Newport Folk Festival; last year she played a similar show at the Gorge Amphitheatre in Washington state. Along the way she’s picked up various high-level awards and commendations, including the Library of Congress’ Gerswhin Prize for Popular Song, which you’d be tempted to think has felt something like revenge for an artist with a famously complicated relationship with the rock ’n’ roll establishment.
Yet at no point since she reemerged has Mitchell, whose songwriting set a new template for the poetry of personal expression in the early 1970s, appeared to be doing any of this comeback-ing for anyone but herself. She’s not performing again to redress a music-industry grievance or even to right the historical record; she’s performing again because clearly it brings her pleasure to do it.
Indeed, one of the things that struck you about Saturday’s show — the first of two sold-out Joni Jams that mark Mitchell’s first full concerts in Los Angeles in more than 20 years — was how un-crowd-pleasingly it was programmed. Backed by Carlile and an expansive cast of players that included Annie Lennox, Jon Batiste, Jacob Collier, Blake Mills, Rita Wilson and Robin Pecknold, Mitchell did as many deep cuts as hits, skipping some of her best-known songs, among them “Help Me” and “Free Man in Paris,” in favor of thorny late-era selections like “Harlem in Havana” and “The Sire of Sorrow (Job’s Sad Song).”
“We got a jam-packed show for you guys tonight full of songs that you are not expecting to hear,” Carlile said at the outset — certainly one way to sell an idea likely to terrify a casual fan. A little later, Carlile asked folks if they were ready for a sing-along — the response was exuberant — before joining Mitchell in singing “Carey,” from her landmark 1971 LP “Blue”; Mitchell also did that album’s “California” as a duet with Marcus Mumford and “A Case of You” in a rendition that showcased the grain in her once-unblemished voice.
She performed a pair of familiar covers as well: the Gershwin standard “Summertime,” which Carlile correctly said she “sang the s— out of,” and Elton John’s “I’m Still Standing,” for which she tweaked some of the lyrics as she did when John and Bernie Taupin won the Gershwin Prize this year.
Yet the heart of Saturday’s concert (which was filmed by multiple cameras) was Mitchell’s more searching and complicated work from the ’80s and ’90s: “Sunny Sunday,” “Night Ride Home,” “The Magdalene Laundries,” “Dog Eat Dog,” “Come in From the Cold.”
After “Dog Eat Dog,” a dreamy yet percussive soft-rock song about “snakebite evangelists and racketeers and bigwig financiers,” Mitchell said she wished she could vote in the upcoming presidential election. “I’m Canadian,” she added. “I’m one of those lousy immigrants.” Then, repeating an exclamation from someone in the crowd, she said, “F— Donald Trump,” to a roar of approval from the audience.
Ha-ha-ha-ha.
Even (or especially) at their bleakest — as in “Cherokee Louise,” a reminiscence from Mitchell’s childhood in Saskatoon of a friend’s sexual abuse — it was fascinating to watch her perform these knotty songs about power and cruelty and desire as though the lesson of her success was to keep pushing the bounds of her creativity. Fascinating to hear too of course: For all the ways in which Mitchell is identified with the folky acoustic guitar, the smokiness of her singing at this age is framed beautifully by Mills’ electric playing; Collier was essential as well on piano, not least during a stunning “Both Sides Now” that found a kind of ecstasy in surrender.
To end the concert, Carlile told the audience that “getting to serve Joni’s ambition tonight is probably one of the proudest moments of all of our lives,” which was a precise and moving way to describe the role of the Joni Jammers: not polishers of an agreed-upon legend but facilitators of a still-unfolding vision.
Even so — people, they like hits.
“What do you think, Joni?” Carlile asked as Mitchell took a glug of pinot grigio. “Think they’ll sing another one with us?”
“‘Circle Game,’ you wanna sing along?” Mitchell said, as easy as a breeze. “Mmkay.”
