At the 65th Grammys held in February of 2023, pop star Harry Styles took the stage in a sparkly top and cream-colored jacket to accept the most coveted award of the evening: Album of the Year.
“I don’t think any of us sit in the studio thinking [or] making decisions based on what is going to get us one of those,” he said, holding the gold award slightly aloft. “This is really, really kind and I’m so, so grateful.”
The album in question was called Harry’s House, and it also took home awards for Best Pop Vocal Album and Best Engineered Album, Non-Classical. Not surprisingly, it had also landed the No. 1 spot in both the U.S. and Styles’ native U.K.
READ MORE: 10 Things You May Not Know About Joni Mitchell
By then, Harry’s House had been out in the world since May of 2022, and though, quite obviously, the album’s title pointed to Styles’ own name, fans of another solo artist had almost immediately recognized a correlation. “Harry’s House” is also the name of a song from Joni Mitchell’s 1975 album, The Hissing of Summer Lawns, a release that both confused and delighted listeners and critics at the time with its highly experimental, quasi-jazz vibe. It received a good deal of negative reviews, and yet earned Mitchell a Grammy nomination for the Best Female Pop Vocal Performance.
In “Harry’s House,” Mitchell sings about a failing marriage that’s made all the worse by a shroud of capitalistic greed. This kind of wealth was something Mitchell had considered quite often and seriously then, having made enough money with her music to realize how little of a difference it can make.
Listen to Joni Mitchell’s ‘Harry’s House’
“I’m still searching for meaning and purpose,” she said to the journalist Malka Marom in 1973. “You know, people have a funny idea that success, that luxury is the end of the road. That’s not the end at all. As a matter of fact, many troubles begin there. They’re just of a different nature. I’ve had the experience of poverty, middle class, now extreme wealth and luxury, and that’s difficult too. I live in a beautiful place, like it would be a dream place. Many a day I walk through it and don’t see anything.”
Was the titling of Styles’ Grammy-winning album an homage to the Mitchell song of the same name? The short answer is: we cannot say for sure, given that Styles has never outright admitted to such a thing. However, there are plenty of clues that suggest it anyway.
Harry Styles Is a Major Joni Mitchell Fan
One thing to know about Styles is that he is an open student of many who came before him, including but not limited to Fleetwood Mac, David Bowie, Elton John and Mitchell.
At one point while at work on his 2019 album Fine Line, Styles got heavily into Mitchell’s 1971 release, Blue.
“I was in a big Joni hole,” he explained to Rolling Stone then. “I kept hearing the dulcimer all over Blue. So I tracked down the lady who built Joni’s dulcimers in the ’60s.”
That lady is named Joellen Lapidus and it was she who sold Mitchell her first dulcimer. Decades later, Styles came along and bought one that Lapidus, who names all the dulcimers she makes, called the Crying Seahorse. She’d built it back in the late ’70s.
“It had a seahorse on the peghead with tears coming out the side, because at that time I’d had a very bad experience with unrequited love,” she recalled to The Telegraph in 2019. “It’s a beautiful instrument.”
You can hear Styles playing the dulcimer prominently on Fine Line‘s “Canyon Moon,” a clearly Mitchell-inspired tune.
Listen to Harry Styles’ ‘Canyon Moon’
Not too long after that, Styles was invited via Brandi Carlile to one of Mitchell’s famous “Joni Jams” held at her home in California — impromptu gatherings featuring Mitchell’s friends of varying ages and eras of music held for the sheer purpose of fun and musical camaraderie.
“I did go to her house for like a, she had a Christmas carol sing-along one time and I was invited by the wonderful Brandi Carlile and it was very fun,” Styles recalled in 2022 (via Billboard). “I wasn’t gonna sing anything, and then Brandi kind of volunteered me to sing ‘River,’ which was one of the more nerve-wracking moments in my life. Singing ‘River’ in front of Joni Mitchell. But it was pretty special.”
And in February of 2020, Styles performed a cover of Mitchell’s “Big Yellow Taxi” for the BBC Radio 2 Breakfast Show, which you can watch below.,
In 2022, Styles was once again interviewed by Rolling Stone, but he took a moment to ask his interviewer her thoughts David Crosby’s newest album. Crosby, of course, was a longtime friend of Mitchell’s, and the name of that album was For Free, titled after the Mitchell song of the same name which Crosby covered on the album.
Joni Mitchell’s Personal Response
None of these anecdotes amount to the exact conclusion that Harry’s House was purposefully given the same name as Mitchell’s song, but they sure do point in that direction. For Styles, the title was also meant to speak to a valuable lesson he’d learned after a crazy few years of working in the music industry and traveling the globe as a major celebrity.
“I realized that that home feeling isn’t something that you get from a house; it’s more of an internal thing,” he told Better Homes & Gardens in 2022. “You realize that when you stop for a minute.”
And yes, word did get back to Mitchell. “Love the title,” her official X account wrote when the album was announced.
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Gallery Credit: Allison Rapp
