Joni Mitchell performs at The Riverboat Coffee House in Toronto, April 19, 1968.Dennis Robinson/The Globe and Mail
To love Joni Mitchell, and there are no casual Joni Mitchell fans, is to acknowledge an uncanny affinity between her music and your innermost feelings. She is our secret sharer, the songwriter who trusts us with the storms of her life, which are invariably consonant with the anguish that informs our own lives, her hard-earned wisdom passing through us and eliciting prickly shocks of recognition.
Her fans, this writer among them, have countless stories in which a Mitchell song – maybe Both Sides Now, Down to You or River – landed during some crucial life event, a roiling chaos which she transmuted into beautiful clarity. Mitchell is a confessional songwriter who has also been our confessor, the one we turn to when everything must be laid out on the table.
Mitchell, 81, is still struggling to clear the cognitive fog of her 2015 brain aneurysm. She no longer writes music, a tragedy made poignant by the spectacle of Mitchell onstage during her recent live performances; the genius at rest, frail yet regal in her throne, condemned to look back rather than ahead for the first time in her 60-year career. A mini-wave of encomiums have poured forth from middle-aged authors in a retrospective mood, eager to claim their Joni bona fides now that the Canadian musician has approached her dotage.
In his memoir Song So Wild and Blue, which explores how Joni Mitchell’s music deeply influenced his life, novelist and essayist Paul Lisicky discovers Mitchell as a beacon pointing the way out of suburban dreariness in Cherry Hill, N.J. He is dutiful and bored, but when his Grade 4 piano teacher played him Both Sides Now, an aperture opens in his brain. “It sounded happy on first listen, but on closer inspection, heartbroken at the same time,” he writes. “I hadn’t known I’d missed that feeling until I realized it was something to miss.”
Mitchell’s happy, sad music entrances him precisely because he can’t get his mind around her odd guitar tunings, the small dissonances in the harmony clusters, the lyrics that flow like conversation yet contain multitudes, stories of naked vulnerability and cruelty, edged with sardonic asides and deadly putdowns. He ignores his piano and picks up a guitar, writes liturgical music that’s published in magazines so churches can play his songs. He is very good at it, but musical proficiency is not artistry. He just can’t swerve and swing as elegantly as his hero can.
Mitchell instead becomes a spur for Lisicky to explore his art away from his guitar. He enrolls at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, reads poetry by Robert Creeley and Charles Olsen, takes up the lessons Mitchell had taught him as a suburban gay teen: make new rules, break them, then make better ones. Mitchell becomes Lisicky’s teacher; he learns the craft of writing novels by striving to create beautiful paragraphs that modulate and “change keys” like Mitchell’s songs. Lisicky’s book is touching; even when he temporarily “breaks up” with Mitchell as an adult, she remains a presiding spirit, someone to lean on and learn from.
In I Dream of Joni, Henry Alford engages with Mitchell not so much as a fellow writer (Alford is an acclaimed humorist) than as a close listener and the kind of fan who once clipped articles about Mitchell from Rolling Stone magazine and sifted her lyrics for clues to her romantic relationships. It’s how so many of us have engaged with Mitchell, whose songs can be read as an MRI of her emotional life. “Many of us feel like we are receiving Joni’s musical transmissions subcutaneously,” writes Alford, as if she is “tapping into some vestigial life force deep within us.”
For so many of us, this is no doubt true, but so preoccupied is Alford with Mitchell’s romances that his book takes on a gossipy tone, calling up familiar stories of her amours with Graham Nash, Leonard Cohen and James Taylor, her enmity toward Jackson Browne (“a mini-talent”) and Bob Dylan (“a plagiarist”). It’s fun but reductive; Alford leans too heavily on the familiar and comes up short on insight.
Music critic Ann Powers’s penetrating and nuanced analysis Traveling pulls back from Lisicky’s cloistered world and Alford’s gauzy star-gazing into a wide-angle view of Mitchell’s legacy. It’s a story of wanderlust and exploration, as the Alberta native is “discovered” by David Crosby in a Florida coffeehouse and is then spirited away to the musicians colony of Laurel Canyon in the late 1960s. Once she is ensconced in L.A., Mitchell is welcomed by a patriarchy of musical giants who recognize in Mitchell an artist “whose instantly apparent gifts” are acknowledged “as a challenge instead of a threat.”
Powers’s Mitchell isn’t a floaty, ethereal earth mother; she is inconstant, puffed up with ego, occasionally brusque and calculating. The celebrated music critic captures something more vital than Alford and Lisicky, which is Mitchell’s questing spirit, the restlessness of reinvention that powers her art. What Powers most values in Mitchell is tenderness sheathed in toughness, the stubborn ambition and forward musical vision that transports Mitchell so far beyond Laurel Canyon, into her own musical realm.
In the 1980s, Mitchell turned toward pointed social criticism and synthesizers; the albums fare poorly and she loses some of her cultural potency. Powers champions this work as the fruit of a healthy collaboration with her husband at the time, bassist Larry Klein: “Mitchell and Klein spent more than a decade on a real sonic adventure, taking chances that her most daring earlier songs clearly show she’d always wanted to take.”
While Powers shares the world’s delight in the resurrection of Mitchell’s life and performing career, she rightly mourns what the aneurysm has stolen from her music, which is the “thorniness … how it always took unexpected turns, its perfectly contained audaciousness.” By honouring the contradictions in Mitchell’s character and art, Powers brings the singer-songwriter into sharper focus than Lisicky or Alford. Mitchell is all too human, and we have all been the beneficiaries of that funky, flinty humanity.
