(Once there, interestingly, she tells the story behind “Our House” and sings a snippet of that ode to domestic bliss by Nash instead of a Mitchell track.) Rebecca Pearson’s love of Joni Mitchell is well-documented on This Is Us, and a recent episode featured the aging housewife who once tried to make it as a musician herself listening to Clouds (“I would spend hours staring at this album artwork, reading all the sleeve notes,” she tells her adult son) before tracking down the Laurel Canyon home Mitchell shared with Graham Nash and geeking out over it. On Six Feet Under, Claire catches her mother timidly singing along to “Woodstock” and sees another side of the woman with whom she so frequently bickers, realizing they may share some common ground after all. More often, however, we see moms onscreen interacting directly with Mitchell’s music. Naturally, by the final act, Kevin has hurt himself (moms are always right about that kind of thing), and when he gets home, he wants nothing more than to be soothed and tended to by his mother, but instead she gives him the distance he demanded earlier and leaves him to lick his own wounds before we cut to old home movies of her smiling and playing with him as a toddler while Mitchell’s “The Circle Game” reminds us that “we’re captive on the carousel of time / We can’t return, we can only look behind from where we came.” Sometimes the singer-songwriter’s work does all the talking - soundtracking a wrenching moment like the end of The Wonder Years‘ “Mom Wars” episode, which is centered around Kevin Arnold butting heads with his mom after she tries to stop him from playing tackle football. Moms depicted in pop culture adore Joni Mitchell. It goes beyond just a favorite song, though. But most moms have a favorite Mitchell song.” Though, in sound, she barely qualifies as rock - rock has a prerequisite danger, a certain swagger that polite Canadian Mitchell exhibited little of. As Jody Amable wrote in a piece for Vinyl Me, Please that declared “It’s Time to Establish the Mom Rock Canon,” “As the most obvious entry point to the wider mom rock canon, moms almost listen to Joni Mitchell out of obligation.
#AMERICAN MASTERS JONI MITCHELL TV#
Rarely do we see moms in movies or on TV talking about the music they love, and yet when we do, there’s one artist who seems to be the overwhelming favorite nothing signals that “Mom’s about to have a moment” onscreen quite like a well-placed Joni Mitchell song. “Dad rock” can signify a certain level of dorkiness, but there’s still an amount of taste and cultural engagement implied moms, on the other hand, are left out of the conversation entirely, expected to exist as some sort of weird, scolding foil to rock itself - furrowing their brows and yelling “ don’t take drugs” at us from the car window when they drop us off at the show. By now, “dad rock” has become a cliche, but despite the fact that rock itself would probably be very different had a generation of teen girls not embraced the Beatles the way they did 60 years ago, the “mom rock” classification hasn’t exactly taken off in a similar fashion.
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