10 Greatest Classic Rock Songwriters

Throughout her career, Joni Mitchell was a rock artist with an emphasis on ARTIST. With each passing record, Mitchell used her songs as a way to reflect her feelings onto the rest of the world.

While many people would recognize a song like "Big Yellow Taxi," Mitchell's work goes much deeper than that one hit. A track like "The Circle Game" beautifully talks about the passage of time from an adolescent to an adult while "Woodstock" is an emotional tale regarding one of the most legendary festivals in rock history. Mitchell even has records in her discography like Blue, where she lays her broken relationship out bare in her prose. Even though it's a big hit, "Big Yellow Taxi" is also a grim reflection of how the natural elements of the world seem to be fading away due to man-made industrialization.

Mitchell seems to use words and phrases like a painter uses colors, as she gently weaves phrases together until she creates an exquisite work of poetic brilliance. As the years have gone on, the writings of Joni Mitchell have become modern masterstrokes of the rock landscape.