Joni Mitchell 1994 Live Performance: “Moon at the Window”

In this October 17, 1994 broadcast of The Dini Petty Show, Joni Mitchell closes her visit not with her new album but with a quieter, older song: “Moon at the Window,” just Joni and her guitar, straight to camera. Choosing it over anything from Turbulent Indigo is the first interesting thing about the performance.

The song is the closing track of her 1982 record Wild Things Run Fast, and it takes its title from a Zen poem — a thief breaks in and takes everything, but he cannot take the moon at the window. Mitchell turns that into a song about how to keep caring without being crushed, about what is still yours when everything else has been lost. She rarely played it live, which makes a full solo reading of it a genuine rarity.

Three decades later it reads differently again. After the 2015 aneurysm she was told she might not survive, and her return to the stage at Newport and the Grammys, a song about what a thief can never steal is no longer an abstraction. The same guitar tuning she spent her career inventing around is doing the work here, unaccompanied, on a daytime programme — which is roughly the least protected setting a song this interior could be given.

This performance comes from the same visit as her long-form conversation with Petty about the price of her independence, and from the artist who comes home to Canada for the 2026 Juno Awards. Unseen since its original 1994 broadcast, this master tape has been meticulously optimized and preserved via the official archive of The Dini Petty Show.