James Taylor

On 7 December 2015 the Kennedy Centre Honours were awarded to Carole King, George Lucas, Rita Moreno, Seiji Ozawa and Cicely Tyson. King sat by the White House Christmas tree during the afternoon reception wearing her medal and laughing as Barack Obama recited the most familiar of her thousands of song lines: ‘You make me feel like a natural woman.’ Obama grinned: ‘I think I just became the first president ever to say that... It sounded better when Aretha said it.’ That evening the tribute to King as a singer-songwriter included performances from James Taylor and the cast of the Broadway spectacular Beautiful: The Carole King Musical and concluded with an astounding performance by Aretha Franklin of ‘(You Make Me Feel Like) A Natural Woman’.

What makes Joni Mitchell’s music special? The lyrics alone put her on 20th-century music’s Mount Rushmore, alongside her cultural mirror Bob Dylan and her brief lover Leonard Cohen. But for me it’s her phrasing, her tunings and her sense of time. Decades on, her music remains endlessly surprising. Think a line is going in a certain direction? Think again, as Mitchell bends it away; or shifts key; or arcs her voice into its celestial sphere, only to suddenly plummet, like a plane in turbulence. And yet the swerves feel somehow right, inevitable.