Joni Mitchell 1994 Live Performance: “The Magdalene Laundries”

In this 1994 broadcast of The Dini Petty Show, Joni Mitchell performs “The Magdalene Laundries” live in the Toronto studio — just Joni and her guitar, straight to camera, in the year she released it on Turbulent Indigo.

The song is her quiet, furious account of the Magdalene laundries: the Catholic institutions where Ireland confined so-called “fallen women” in unpaid labour for decades. She sings it in the first person, as one of them. It is one of the most unflinching things she ever wrote, and putting it on daytime television — unaccompanied, with no framing and no apology — is a decision that says as much as the lyric does.

In 2026 the story it tells is back in the headlines as survivors are finally granted redress, which makes a full solo performance from 1994 something more than an archival curiosity. This is the song being introduced to a general audience three decades before the institutions it describes were formally reckoned with. There is no arrangement to soften it and no introduction to prepare anyone for what the lyric is about, which appears to have been the point: she simply plays it and lets the room work out what it has just heard.

It comes from the same visit as her long-form conversation with Petty about the price of her independence, and from the artist who returned to the stage at Newport and the Grammys after the 2015 aneurysm, and 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.