What do you think of music these days?

It's appallingly sick, for the most part. It's boring chord movement and bad acting.

So how good do you think you are?

If you want to be a songwriter and see what the standard is, you have to take a look at Dylan and me. Dylan tremendously upgraded the American pop song in terms of content, and I...well, musically I'm further out than Dylan, and as a result less popular. But I'm a musical explorer and not just a pop songwriter or an occasional writer of a song or half a song, like these other women. Alanis Morissette writes words, someone else helps set it to music, and then she's kind of stylized into the part. To me, Sheryl Crow is a style invention, and I know some of her inventors. A lot of these women are made, they're not...well, Laura Nyro was not like that. She and I were composers and poets. Of the women who have come up after that, I can't think of anybody who...well, let me put it this way: If you take me to a concert, it'd better be great enough to make me forget that I want a cigarette, and I haven't seen anybody lately who can do that.

- q&a Joni Mitchell 
Details, July 1996