Reckless Daughter is the Portrait of Joni Mitchell. There were a lot of things that I didn't know about her that I learned after reading this book - that she survived polio, she had a bad 1st marriage, Graham Nash proposed to her. Her mother said to her, "Don't have kids when you get grown" (solid advice, I think, but it kind of showed how her mother felt about having her) Crosby, Stills, & Nash were formed in her LIVING ROOM. (How awesome is THAT!?). She was rumored to be suicidal after she broke up with Jackson Browne. (She wasn't.) In addition to being a musician, Joni is also an artist - and in her eyes she is an artist first, then musician. This book really makes you feel like you are really, really getting to know Joni and I thoroughly enjoyed reading it.

I received a free e-copy of this book in order to write this review, I was not otherwise compensated.

Reckless Daughter is a biography of legendary songstress Joni Mitchell that seamlessly combines biographical details with analysis of her lyrics and her musicianship. For those of us who grew up with her music, but never bothered to learn the biography, it was quite interesting to learn that she grew up in Canada, had polio as a child before widespread application of the Salk vaccine, had a child out of wedlock at a young age who she gave up for adoption, and other details. Many of these things appeared in our affected her music. " Little Green" being an ode to her daughter. And, her use of so many altered and open tunings being a function of her polio-injured left hand (the fretting hand). And for all those couples who have argued over whether "Both Sides Now" was really Judy Collins song or a Joni song, here's what really happened. And, of course, the stories about how Crosby, Stills, And Nash started and which of them Joni dated and how she missed Woodstock to appear on Dick Cavett. A truly fascinating read and I especially appreciated the focus on the musicality rather than endless summaries of tours and setlists that you find in so many rock biographies. The last third wasn't quite as interesting to me because the music of hers I am familiar with is the late sixties and early seventies, not the later material.

Honestly, I wasn't brought up with the music of Joni Mitchell (just like my father born in 1943). The only notable song was Big Yellow Taxi. And yet, countless artists acknowledged the inspiration drawn from the Canadian singer-songwriter. That was the reason for me to pick up Reckless Daughter: A Portrait of Joni Mitchell by fellow music critic David Yaffe who followed her life.

By the time Blue was released in 1971, she had survived polio and a bad first marriage. She had given up her daughter for adoption and recently fended off a marriage proposal from Graham Nash. The biography shows an endless flow of lovers that come and go, Mitchell being in control almost all of the times. An overwhelming wealth of clever lyrics, open guitar tunings, and chord progressions led to a steep career move in the music industry and ten revealing albums. Once hot and happening, she collaborated with jazz musicians to stay on par, faced Madonna's reign in the 80's, her guitar-based songs versus full bands playing glam rock, post-punk, and cheesy pop songs.

David Yaffe's work is also open about the drug abuse, chain-smoking, and sexual activities of Miss El Lay. The book's composed of the notes taken at dozens of in-person interviews with Joni Mitchell up to her post-2015 recovery from a brain aneurysm, liner notes, and insights in almost every song written by Joni Mitchell. A peek behind the scenes of the music industry, Friends and former lovers like Joan Baez, Judy Collins, Leonard Cohen, David Crosby, and Larry Klein add to the flavor of this extensive (544 pages) retrospective.

This would have been a much better book if the author hadn't been so obviously in thrall to his subject. A good biographer certainly needs to either like or at least be invested in the person he or she is writing about, but to be too enamoured leads to bias and a general feeling that the subject can do no wrong. I soon found Yaffe’s fawning attitude irritating to say the least. However, the facts are there, plus an analysis of the work and I certainly learnt much about Joni Mitchell that I didn’t know before, so overall I felt that this was a reasonably successful exploration of the woman and her music and one which on the whole I enjoyed.

Of course everyone knows Joni Mitchell, but how much do we actually know about her? In my case, I knew some of her songs, but I was not that familiar with her albums or her personal life and I jumped at the chance to find out more about her. I am glad I did. This is a really well written biography, which is hung on the skeleton of her excellent discography and fleshed out from there.

David Yaffe does an excellent job bringing Joni to life; her music is disected with passion and her personal life is told with compassion and honesty, not holding back on the sadness and anger life sometimes brought her. The book is written based on interviews conducted with Joni herself and many of her lovers and fellow musicians. It gives various perspectives on certain situations, which definitely gives it more integrity.

I really enjoyed reading this tale of a prairie girl who dreamed of another life and made it big. She may not have become quite the star she had envisioned she would become, she may have become out of tune with the changing world around her, but she remains a 70s icon and her music is still loved by millions.

This biography paints a vivid portrait of brilliant songwriter, who still deserves to be listened to. I certainly will.

This book really celebrates the unique talent of Joni Mitchell, someone who conjures the true hippie spirit of the 60’s & 70’s, a singer that is quintessentially and synonymously the voice of the folk hippie scene.

A simple prairie girl from Canada emerges when she picks up the guitar and discovers her raw untapped talent. She’s the real deal. A true talent with soul in her heart and voice. She’s strong but also fragile. She’s not always portrayed perfectly. There are vulnerabilities which you can hear in the lyrics in her music, the loss of giving her child away as a young unwed girl giving her plenty of fodder to harness her emotions into lyrical genius. There’s her trail of failed relationships with men, often musicians many she had working relationships with, members of her band and other prominent musicians of the time, David Crosby, Leonard Cohen, Jackson Browne to name a few. She had a habit of keeping past lovers in her life many years after the failure of the relationship even those that were painful breakups. It was interesting to find out that Joni was not part of Woodstock, a sore point as she was appearing on the Dick Cavett show instead. Her manager thinking that would be more advantageous, how wrong that would prove to be. I loved reading about the background stories of the albums and the inspiration that created them, and also discovering her own musical inspirations. It was hard reading how this former glory girl of her time fails to make musical connections with newer audiences the 80’s being an epic fail for Joni, prompting a long absence from music, Joni becoming disgruntled with the whole music industry. The book rounds out with the decline of her health, a survivor of Polio as a child she had ongoing health issues, in later stages her health made touring difficult and she secluded herself to conserve energy and then becoming more of a recluse, eventually she suffered a brain aneurysm rendering her an invalid but amongst that there are glimmers of the old Joni there. A true pioneer woman of her generation paving many to follow in her footsteps.

This ‘intimate look’ at Joni Mitchell is interesting though not very probing. Although it is well constructed there are some periods that feel skirted over to avoid any real controversy. Not saying that there is anything in her life that would lead to controversy but it does suffer from a “friend” writing a biography than an impartial writer.

The book is interesting and informative and if you have a casual interest in the singer songwriter than this biography is for you. If you are a lifelong fan, then you probably will not learn anything new to bear your teeth into. Working as a love letter to the artist, there is a lot of self-analysis coming from the writer rather than the artist herself. The text often gets bogged down with the author’s point of view and although the biography sometimes suffer from these personal insights.

Overall this is an adequate biography and though it is a very biased version of Mitchell’s life, it should be adequate enough for the average fan or someone who knows very little about the free spirited artist. If you are a diehard fan, you may want to look elsewhere.

I wasn't sure what to expect from Reckless Daughter. There are an awful lot of terrible showbiz biographies around, so as someone who has loved Joni Mitchell's music for nigh on half a century now I approached this with some trepidation – but it turns out to be very good. Yaffe's style is readable and pretty straightforward and although it's a little over-written in places for my taste I never found that intruding too badly and I found the whole thing an enjoyable and fascinating read.

David Yaffe knows his stuff and covers the whole of Joni Mitchell's life in interesting but not excessive detail. He has known Joni personally for a long time and has spoken to her extensively for this book. He has also spoken to a very wide variety of others who know her from childhood friends to musical collaborators and the friends of older age; what seems like a genuine picture emerges of a stunningly talented musician who, partly as a result of formative experience is tough, thoroughly individual, headstrong and self-reliant. As a woman, this has brought her a good deal of criticism over the years, but thank heavens she is who she is because it has enabled her to create and record a body of work which is among the finest of all musical creations of the last half century, in my view. Yaffe doesn't skate over her less personable sides; he obviously likes and admires her very much but this is never a hagiography and it seems to me to be a pretty balanced portrait which thinks seriously about how Joni's life experience may shaped her and her music, but– praise be! – doesn’t go in for excessive speculative psychologising.

Part of the genius in Joni Mitchell's lyrics is that they are so often plainly intensely personal, but they speak to me of things in my own experience, often very indirectly but with great poignancy. Learning more about the experiences which gave rise to many of these songs is fascinating to me, and only intensifies their significance. Many, many years after I first heard and loved Little Green, I remember her revealing that it was about being forced by circumstance to give up her beloved baby for adoption. Even after those decades, it gave it an added poignancy which I have felt ever since. I'm not sure that there are revelations here which had quite the same impact on me, but it has certainly enriched my understanding and enjoyment of a lot of Joni's music.

The word "genius" is very over-used about artists of all kinds, but I think it may be justly applied to Joni Mitchell who is one of the very greatest of all songwriters and performers. I think this is a biography which is worthy of its subject and I can recommend this to any Joni Mitchell fan - which, let's face it, ought to be everybody.

(I received an ARC via NetGalley.)

I was never a fan of Joni Mitchell but I have always found her fascinating. This biography was a well written and vivid document of a legendary woman and artist. I have learned more about her and more specifically about her music that has interested me to give her music another go.

Let's be clear. Joni Mitchell is NOT the greatest female singer-songwriter of all time. She's NOT one of the most influential female guitarists of all time. She is NOT one of the most important female artists of all time. She is quite clearly one of the greatest singer-songwriters, guitarists and recording artists of all time, full stop. Adding on her gender to that praise is to limit the scope of her remarkable accomplishments. Writer David Yaffe knows this well. He knows even better that the whip-smart, prickly Mitchell would rightly take offense by such a designation. (I loved an interview where the reporter blithely suggested even Mitchell was probably sick of hearing covers of "River" on every holiday music album of the last 20 years and she responded tartly that's called a standard and that being a standard used to be thought of as a good thing.) Yaffe has delivered a serious full biography that tells of her childhood and proceeds album by album through an illustrious career. He is clearly in Mitchell's corner but not afraid (or not too afraid) to clearly lay out when Mitchell may have been in the wrong or holding a grudge unnecessarily. She may be her own worst enemy in her private life but she was equally uncompromising in her music and that's what matters. Mitchell isn't within a mile of the boorish or hateful behavior or Miles Davis, Pablo Picasso and other artistic peers (she doesn't have many) but she's clearly a handful. But so what? Genius makes its own rules, even if it doesn't excuse them. All that said, the book is dutiful more than fun, if only because her private life wasn't so much fun. Without ever reducing songs to certain people and places and times (be it David Geffen's inspiration on "Free Man In Paris" or Mitchell's inspiration on Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young's "Our House"), Yaffe certainly details the real-life context to songs that have transcended "Oh, that was about the time I fought with..." to become classics. As an ardent fan, I enjoyed the seriousness of purpose. And I doubt a better biography will come along. But unlike Dylan's memoir (which stands outside his music as its own strange thing) or Springsteen's book (which informs our appreciation of his music, especially the early years) this book is a good addendum. It adds zest to the list of musicians who played on her albums since we appreciate more fully who they are and how they served Mitchell's vision. But her real testament is the music and happily this book sends you back to album after album, realizing anew what an amazing body of work she has produced. -- Michael Giltz

https://booknormblog.com/2017/10/12/book-review-reckless-daughter-a-portrait-of-joni-mitchell-by-david-yaffe/

Posted on October 12, 2017 by Norm Sigurdson
Book Review – Reckless Daughter: A Portrait of Joni Mitchell by David Yaffe

“I’m frightened by the devil,” sings Joni Mitchell in “A Case of You” (a song she wrote about her then lover Leonard Cohen). “And I’m drawn to those ones that ain’t afraid.”
Those lines kept coming back to me while reading David Yaffe’s engrossing and comprehensive new biography Reckless Daughter: A Portrait of Joni Mitchell.
Yaffe presents Mitchell as always seeking normality and stability but being inevitably drawn to unstable and destructive people (especially men) and chaotic situations.
Many of her lovers were drug addicts but she remained abstemious until later in life. Some of her lovers were abusive – emotionally and physically – yet although she is a strong-willed woman she took the abuse and disrespect.
Despite her many famous (and famously mismatched) relationships she never lost her desire for domesticity and order.
Yaffe, a professor of Humanities at Syracuse University and the author of a book about jazz and a book on Bob Dylan, does an excellent job of presenting Mitchell in all of her complexity. He had two long interview sessions with her, one in 2007 and one in 2015. He also interviewed many of the key participants in her life.
Clearly a Joni Mitchell fan, Yaffe often sympathizes with his subject but isn’t seduced by her. He frequently quotes Mitchell’s version of events, followed by other people’s recollections and lets the reader decide where in the middle the truth might lie.
He is aware of Mitchell’s dual personae as flowerchild and someone difficult to deal with.
“With her golden hair, her joking, her miniskirts, and, of course, with the soprano end of her three-octave voice, Joni could seem so sweet, so girlish. But if she needed to bust balls, she would find a way to do it,” he writes of her at one point.

Much of Roberta Joan Anderson’s early life was spent in rebellion against her conservative parents, but when she finally left home in Saskatoon and moved to Calgary to attend art school she found herself to be the conservative one, both artistically and sexually.
She felt that she was the only virgin in the Alberta College of Art and Design and decided to be more like the wild students she admired. She became pregnant (“right out of the chute” she says) after a brief fling with a friend.
She moved to Toronto and met Chuck Mitchell, forming a folk duo with him. They married and she hoped he would help raise the child but it didn’t work out and Mitchell gave her daughter up for adoption.
“Chuck Mitchell was my first major exploiter, a complete asshole,” Mitchell tells Yaffe with characteristic bluntness.
Mitchell’s musical career grew in the late 1960s and into the 1970s with her ethereal image in direct opposition to flamboyant women rock stars like Grace Slick or Janis Joplin.
Her first major TV appearance was on was on the final day of the Woodstock Festival, on The Dick Cavett Show.
With her usual cautiousness she had skipped appearing at Woodstock in fear that she wouldn’t get back in time for the show, but she still managed to write and debut the song “Woodstock” on the Cavett show. The song would become the Festival’s unofficial anthem.
The 1970s were Mitchell’s halcyon years, with a string of memorable albums – Ladies of the Canyon, Blue, Court and Spark, The Hissing of Summer Lawns, Hejira and Don Juan’s Reckless Daughter.
Yaffe sums up her appeal in this period as “men fell in love with her and women felt like she was singing their secrets out loud.”
Mitchell’s later career alienated many of her fans with its excursions into jazz and electronica, but it also has many admirers. As Yaffe shows, Mitchell was always in complete control of her artistic output and there came a time when widespread popularity was not a factor in her choices.
Mitchell has had many health problems in recent years. She developed a serious cocaine addiction and continues to smoke four packs of cigarettes a day. She had a recurrence of symptoms of the polio she suffered in childhood.
She has also diagnosed herself with a painful skin condition known informally as Morgellons Syndrom, which is not recognized by the medical community who regard it as a delusion.
In 2015 she suffered a brain aneurism which has left her with impaired short-term memory.
Yaffe’s Reckless Daughter is a deft and balanced accounting of the life of a very complex subject whose music formed the aural backdrop for a generation of Baby Boomers. He is also knowledgeable and judicious about that musical output itself. He has done very well with a difficult task.
If Mitchell herself is healthy enough to read it, she may even be pleased by it, but you never know.

Reckless Daughter: A Portrait of Joni Mitchell by David Yaffe,
Farrar, Straus and Giroux HarperCollins Canada, 448pp.

Well researched. Learned a lot about Joni Mitchell that I didn't know.

This was a very in depth and super researched book about Roberta Joan "Joni" Mitchell, documenting her life going back to the beginnings on the windswept plains of Saskatoon, Saskatchewan, Canada. Considered by ROLLING STONE magazine to be one of the best singer-songwriters of our time, she's also a painter who has put some of her works on her album covers. There were romances with many musicians, Leonard Cohen, David Crosby, Graham Nash, and James Taylor to name a few during the earlier years. She was around during the times when many artists were getting started in NY and then out in LA in the 60's and 70's and knew and met many of those who became popular artists, when times were changing in music and in the world.

"They paved paradise And put up a parking lot"

"I've looked at life from both sides now From win and lose and still somehow It's life's illusions I recall I really don't know life at all."

"We are stardust, we are golden, We are billion year old carbon, And we got to get ourselves back to the garden."

The book talks about all of her albums, the songs on them, the writing of the songs...and does spend time on technical details and terms about writing, playing and recording, things that unless you're more involved in the making of it, you may not be familiar with. Some of that made my eyes glaze over and I could have done without. The book closely follows the progression of her musical evolution through the albums and the years as her tastes and styles changed as she meets different people along the way, and tries different styles of writing and playing and just trying to enjoy life and love.

An ARC was provided by NetGalley and the publisher for an unbiased review.

Short Takes

Reckless Daughter: A Portrait of Joni Mitchell by David Yaffe
(Pub. Date: October 17, 2017)

Liner Notes to a Life

Back in the day, before albums became CDs, my favorite part of getting a new album was the liner notes. Pulling off the shrink-wrap, putting the yet scratch free disc on its spindle, and settling in to read the backstory of the artist and the songs, liner notes gave the music a context. Reckless Daughter is the liner notes to Joni Mitchell’s life.

While chronological in structure, the book, like liner notes, is not quite a biography but closer to a hagiography. Written with immense love and admiration while short on critical analysis, its true nature is acknowledged in the use of “portrait” in the title. Yaffe provides the context for everyone of Joni’s twenty seven studio, live, and compilation albums and virtually every song on them. Over a period of ten years he interviewed more than sixty people – friends, husbands, lovers, musicians, and producers, as well as multiple interviews with Mitchell. The result is an intimate, almost gossipy, map of Mitchell’s transition from folk to pop to rock to jazz and beyond, becoming what AllMusic described as “the most important and influential female recording artist of the 20th Century” and Rolling Stone called “one of the greatest songwriters ever.”

For those who desire insider knowledge, Yaffe provides a treasure trove. Did you know that “A Case of You” was written for Leonard Cohen and that its lyric “But be prepared to bleed” was told to Mitchell by Cohen’s mother in an attempt to warn her? Truly, best liner notes ever.

I was surprised at the lukewarm review Kirkus gave Reckless Daughter: A Portrait of Joni Mitchell. https://www.kirkusreviews.com/book-reviews/david-yaffe/reckless-daughter/
I thought the book was excellent; the author documents everything with extensive personal interviews, including speaking with Mitchell herself. There were names from the music world I had to look up, but I think readers who are “music geeks” would appreciate the many references to music and its seminal figures. Yes, there was information about her personal life, but it was presented in a matter of fact way, rather than as salacious gossip. The author’s main focus was her music and how it evolved, so to me the subtitle “Portrait of Joni Mitchell” was more accurate than simply calling it a biography.

Joni Mitchell is an interesting singer and an interesting person; this is not a very interesting biography. The prose is pedestrian, the pacing uneven and the chronology not infrequently unclear. That said, its simple style and Mitchell's sheer charisma will carry the reader through the worst.