"Sitting in a house with her guitar, in a huddle with Bob Dylan and Roger McGuinn, Joni Mitchell shows the guys chords to a new song called “Coyote,” just before diving into it, in a vivid moment in “Rolling Thunder Revue.” It’s one sustained shot, handheld, and yet it feels like watching something great being born. The richness of Mitchell’s road-hardened writing weaves with her shimmering voice and guitar. Watching Dylan’s chagrined face, listening to, watching Joni, took us back to a kindred moment in the late, great D.A. Pennebaker’s classic “Don’t Look Back,” as Dylan sings “It’s All Over Now Baby Blue” while Donovan takes it in. But this time Dylan is the humbled one."

"Sitting in a house with her guitar, in a huddle with Bob Dylan and Roger McGuinn, Joni Mitchell shows the guys chords to a new song called “Coyote,” just before diving into it, in a vivid moment in “Rolling Thunder Revue.” It’s one sustained shot, handheld, and yet it feels like watching something great being born. The richness of Mitchell’s road-hardened writing weaves with her shimmering voice and guitar. Watching Dylan’s chagrined face, listening to, watching Joni, took us back to a kindred moment in the late, great D.A. Pennebaker’s classic “Don’t Look Back,” as Dylan sings “It’s All Over Now Baby Blue” while Donovan takes it in. But this time Dylan is the humbled one."

"Each song starts and you're just like "oh, yeah! It's gonna be good". It was actually around that time when I had that room when I first played Joni Mitchell, it was one of the other records that I had there. It was a time when I'd left home, I was on my own, and it was just a record that I would have on and made me really happy; it always made me happy, it was like an instant kind of lift in the room and I just wanted to sing and dance along. It's filled with really joyous music."

"According to Malka everybody who does this chooses Joni Mitchell, so I'm staying true to type. What can you say about Joni Mitchell? For me in my life she was the first female artist. You knew this was her art. You knew this was not something some bloke had cooked up for her. She wasn't "the singer"; this was her music. This was what she was putting across. I love the confessional aspect of it. I don't know if I can quote the words exactly, but it's something like I met someone down a dirt track road, he gave me something and took my camera to sell. It's about being in Greece or something like that. It's just all so matter of fact. People who screwed her over, people who she loved- and she just wore her heart on her sleeve. That's amazing, to do that. She's not hiding anything; she's just saying what's going on. There's a line "the times when you impress me the most are the times when you don't really try". As a spotty young man, to hear a woman say that was like, well maybe some girls might like me at some point, and maybe I don't need to try too hard because they'll like me for being me. It was a piece of information I needed to hear, I think."

"My first girlfriend used to listen to Joni Mitchell, and the album that she got me into was Court And Spark. I was 15 or 16 when I first heard it, and the acoustic playing is more like a jazzy sort of thing. I found that really cool. “I love her style as a guitarist, and I love the songs on that album, too. They’re quite funny, and they put you in a certain mood, like Free Man In Paris and People’s Parties. I like it a lot more than Blue and a lot more than Hejira, and the other ones that people go on about. It’s just really good. “Nick Drake’s Pink Moon [1972] also deserves a mention as a very important acoustic album for me. Can we have it as a bonus record?"

"This would be from when I did 'Sisters Of Mercy' for the film Leonard Cohen: I'm Your Man. I was so happy to be given that song. I love Leonard Cohen; I've always loved him, grew up around that music. He is the most extraordinary lyricist, but he, as well, creates such a mood with his music. It's like nothing else. He belongs in my life as a writer and as a singer. I suppose this record, again, it's actually quite similar to Joni Mitchell; not brilliantly imaginative on my part to begin with, but just every single song is a classic. I've read bits and pieces of his poetry and he's an extraordinary poet. It's poignant, and there's humour, coupled with the pathos. He's a poet, he's an extraordinary writer and singer and beautiful man, and, what can I say? Is that enough?"

"I was only about 13 when I heard it and it was another one that I played a lot in my bedroom. There was a trilogy of females, which was Joni Mitchell's Blue, Kate Bush's Hounds Of Love and Bjork's Debut that I discovered when I was 12 and obviously had a huge impact on me. But Joni Mitchell, for me, her voice is like an instrument, the same as Bjork's - I just loved hearing a woman's voice that sounded so free and was doing weird things to my brain, pulling it around. How do you even talk about something like this? You just end up saying a load of cliches! There's songs like 'River' and 'Blue' and I didn't know anything really as a 13-year-old about California and Laurel Canyon and the psychedelic 60s and what had happened to everybody, the disenchantment they maybe felt later on. I didn't really understand the background of that, yet there was this woman coming out of my speaker, her feminine energy and her freedom, her expression, her unapologetic rawness, again, and the beauty and competence, and weird tunings, it all completely made sense to me. It all sounded like this amazing place that smelt like pine trees and had golden, yellow sunshine and long hair and tapestries and curtains and cats and guitars. I thought: "What is this place that this woman is talking about?" Actually it's just this universe inside of her, she's like this amazing building full of beautiful things, so complex and so deep and intellectual. I just think she's fully competent on so many levels! I was listening to Carole King, Tapestry, at the time, and that's another beautiful record, but Joni Mitchell's is just emotionally more complex. It was meandering and had movements and parts to it and her voice would soar. There's that bit where she's saying, "hell's the hippest way to go, I don't think so but I'm going to take a look around it": there's that onset of disenchantment, where she's sick of this bullshit, and Joni Mitchell's so good at seeing through the bullshit - it's not this throwaway, idealistic, hippy kind of thing, she's always burrowing a little bit under the surface. As a young girl, hearing women talk about travelling, going on an aeroplane, missing California, being in Paris, seeing some guy playing guitar and writing a love note on a napkin to her. It's like good life experience, listening to that through someone else."

"I chose Both Sides Now because it was reworkings of some of her songs, and I only came across it after watching a documentary on the radio. It brought me to some songs I'd never heard before but then I fell in love with, such as 'A Case Of You', which is just amazing. I think it really made me revisit her lyrics. There's something about taking your songs and revisiting them and yet still being true to the songs - many others have tried to do it, but sound shit. Hers were equally as beautiful. So I chose that record as a fulcrum in my Joni Mitchell journey, as I first liked her more almost obscure albums, those that were in my parents' collection, such as Chalk Mark In A Rain Storm and Dog Eat Dog, and then I found Blue, The Hissing Of Summer Lawns and Court And Spark. But I like this album because it took me there, and as an artist, it shows the measure of her songs. Where she can make that sort of record and still make me want to hear the others, and love them too."

"Roberta Flack speaks to me in that same way that Melanie speaks to me. She's such a beautiful songwriter and composer and pianist and I don't think she gets enough credit either. She's such a beautiful songwriter and she's, to me, up there with Joni Mitchell. She covers 'Hey, That's No Way To Say Goodbye' by Leonard Cohen so beautifully. And that piano part, I think it's a minor key, it's a small part that's been sampled by Lil' Kim and I think Notorious BIG. It's so subtle and I don't think you would notice it unless you loved that record. It's so good. It's also so curated perfectly from start to end. I am no spring chicken and making the new album, it was my first record where the Spotify playlist was what mattered the most, and it's really difficult because that beauty in curating the song-list and what comes where, really thinking about it, and the titles of the tracks, that mood, is gone. It's all gone. No one cares about albums anymore. The labels want you to put the songs that they've chosen to be singles first and before you would never put the single first. Ever. First Take is very visual. I can see it in my head."

"She’s a later discovery, a totally obscure person. I was reading about her just to prepare for this, because I’ve been listening to this record for ages, and on Wikipedia it said that somebody gave a copy to J Mascis and he gave it to someone to release it. I didn’t realise that at all, that he brought it to some record label’s attention, but that’s a record that I’ve been listening to a long time, it’s a really beautiful record I think. I have chosen Songs of Love & Hate by Leonard Cohen and Ladies of the Canyon by Joni Mitchell but this record is right in that same period of beautiful singer/songwriter records. They’re not band records, they’re personal records, they’re kind of like somebody’s journal or notebook. Those records always felt like a window opening into somebody’s life where you kind of spent an hour or forty five minutes of someone telling you about their life and the different things they see and the different ways they look at the world and if it resonated with you it became this… I just thought that Sibylle Baier was in the same canon as all those albums from that period that made an impression on me. Like early Dylan or a Nick Drake record or something. Colour Green is just as powerful for me."