Judgement Of The Moon And Stars

"Creating art when you are misunderstood, strange, different, and alone."

“You've got to shake your fists at lightning now
You've got to roar like forest fire
You've got to spread your light like blazes
All across the sky
They're going to aim the hoses on you
Show 'em you won't expire
Not till you burn up every passion
Not even when you die”

– Joni Mitchell, “Judgement Of The Moon And Stars,” from the album “For The Roses” (released on November 21st, 1972 – 50 years ago this month)

There’s a lovely fan video of this song by YouTube member feythdemacedo. You can find the lyrics above at the 3:40 mark, after a long instrumental bridge:

Much like this song’s subject, Ludwig van Beethoven, who – as esteemed conductor and composer Leonard Bernstein chronicled in a 1954 television broadcast – grappled with a variety of unsatisfying approaches to the beginning of his Fifth Symphony, until he settled on the iteration that was “right as rain,” Joni herself struggled with the lyrics to this verse:

From within the footnotes on JoniMitchell.com’s lyrics page for this song: “Joni's handwritten lyrics, a work in progress. At one point, the title of the song was "Letter for the Deaf Master"”

A verse, that is, which offered passionate advice and encouragement to Beethoven from across a span of 160 years, as though he and Joni were contemporaries – and friends.

(As an aside, it’s startling to see these extraordinary lyrics written in blue ball-point pen on 3-hole filler paper, as though it were a routine grade school assignment.)

In the Steve Hoffman Music Forums in 2018, Forum resident “Parachute Woman” shared David Yaffe’s observations from his book, Reckless Daughter, on how Joni approached her writing of “Judgement of the Moon and Stars.” Yaffe believed that “Joni identifies with a man too raw and wild for this world,” as well as one “whose ability to hear is denied him at the peak of his powers.” (An identification which, even if indirectly, could have intensified when Mitchell suffered a brain aneurysm later in life and had to completely relearn how to play the guitar.)

“Parachute Woman” then both echoed and deftly riffed on Yaffe’s take, with a last word on the emotions underlying this song’s lyrics:

“This is a song about Joni as much as it is about Ludwig. She identified with him. It is about creating art when you are misunderstood, under appreciated, strange, different and alone.”

That leads to another question: how did Mitchell find inspiration in Beethoven’s life, among so many contemporary and past musical influences from which she could have drawn – and come to identify with him – at this particular time in her songwriting career?

An answer can be found in the 50th anniversary retrospective on her album “For The Roses” by music journalist Allison Rapp.

Front cover of Joni Mitchell’s album, “For The Roses” (1972). (See this Wikipedia page for copyright info.)

At least twice in her life, Mitchell “ran away with honor” from the midst of chaotic events, in order to regroup, reflect, and gain perspective.

At one such time, Joni took off on a cross-country road trip, during which she wrote the songs that would appear on a later album, “Hejira” (released in 1976). And in another, during which she wrote the songs on “For The Roses” (1972), Rapp points out that “she sold her Laurel Canyon home and fled California in favor of her home country of Canada, taking up residence in a small stone house located on British Columbia's Sunshine Coast. Celebrity had hit Mitchell hard and physical isolation appeared the only refuge.”

During that self-imposed exodus, “Mitchell [said she] bought and read “every psychology book I could lay my hands on,” from Jung to Freud. One publication stood out in particular, Beethoven: His Spiritual Development by J.W.N. Sullivan.”

““It was all about his struggles, and self-doubts and his worries about how his work was being received and what it all meant on a deeper level and, of course, about his going deaf,” she told the Star. “At the time, that's just what I was thinking about too. How am I going to get back in the saddle [in the aftermath of her critically-acclaimed album “Blue” (1971)]? And what about the audience? Would you still love me if you knew what I was really like?””