“She is fulfilling something of a ‘goddess’ need in American rock, a woman who is more than a woman; a poet who expresses a full range of emotions without embarrassment,” the critic Jacoba Atlas wrote of her in 1970. “Her legend is beginning to obscure her work; because she is virtually without competition (Joan Baez and Judy Collins don’t have the output; Buffy Sainte-Marie doesn’t have the immediate newness), she is without comparison.” Mitchell accepted such problematic compliments.
Becoming exceptional was, for her, a form of self-protection, as the critic Lindsay Zoladz wrote in a 2017 essay on Mitchell and genius, claiming the term helped her resist dismissal and hone “a stainless steel bullshit detector.” She saw what happened to women who didn’t keep a tight rein on how the world regarded them. One of the few women singer-songwriters she named as an influence flopped, in fact, because she couldn’t smell a threat. Laura Nyro had been David Geffen’s primary passion project before he met Joni and became her guide through the music business. But he could never break Nyro to a larger audience. In Joni, he saw what Nyro could never be: a woman who could project power without terrifying people who weren’t used to that.
Not long before Mitchell’s breakthrough, Nyro held the spot she would soon occupy. She was an artist’s artist, her songs covered by many of her peers, her potential dazzling. But Nyro, whose own recordings blended soul, pop and jazz with lush and nearly uncontained abandon, took up space in ways that many listeners found intimidating. She didn’t cultivate the aura of aloofness that genius demands. It’s intriguing to read accounts of Nyro’s live performances around the time that Mitchell also gained public attention. Audiences were awed by her talent, but they also felt uncomfortable.
“Laura Nyro Overwhelms,” the headlines read. Nyro, who once said, “When I record, I’m not a human being, I’m not a woman,” nonetheless displayed the excesses always associated with women. She was too public with her emotions, too wide with her swings. Her theatrics failed to impress the throng at the Monterey International Pop Festival; one year later, Mitchell released her first album and women’s genius had a new sound, one to which more people could relate.