An important look at not just Joni the artist and the intricacies of her work, but also her role for music fans over the years , especially feminist ones. I appreciated a lot of the subjects Powers grappled with here and left feeling quite enlightened and ready to dive into some Joni deep cuts I hadn’t heard in a while… 🎶

A thoughtful and reflective read on one of the most idolized singer songwriters to ever release music. I appreciated the work that Ann Powers' put into writing a fully realized portrait of Joni Mitchell, while also never trying to pin her down--simply because Joni Mitchell always seems to dance around categorization, defying anyone to canonize her as anything other than a genderless, genre-less genius.

This book makes you take your time--it brings in a lot of ideas, goes off on side roads and doesn't hold your hand about it. For the duration of my reading time I had Joni Mitchell's music on in the background, and I highly recommend doing that if you pick up this book. You hear the technical aspects in a new way, you engage with the lyrical content differently once you read Powers' historical framing of it, and it gave me a new appreciation for the music.

I also appreciated the fact that Powers does not let Joni Mitchell off the hook for her missteps, and takes the time to unpack the more (for lack of a better word) problematic aspects of Joni Mitchell. In the past I've been disappointed to see Joni Mitchell's thornier aspects glossed over, specifically her blackface on the Don Juan's Reckless Daughter album cover, and the use of that same character when she would don it for parties. I've seen the "the 1970s were a different time/her relationship with race is complicated" explanation too many times, and to have Powers address it, and bring in outside voices better suited to address it was a good thing. I cannot speak to whether or not it was enough to address the character of Art Nouveau, but it was more than I'd ever seen in the past.

"Complicated" feels like an easy out when it comes to talking about Joni Mitchell, but she's as human as the rest of us--people are complicated; our emotions and outbursts and relationships can become tangled. We can be vitriolic about the people we love, we can put others down in order to lift ourselves up, we can reject the community that fostered us from the beginning. But we can also be honest, friendly, funny, reaching out a hand with no expectation of reciprocity. Joni Mitchell is all of these things--she is a genius that has both shunned and welcomed idolization, and has been many different versions of herself over the decades we've shared with her and her music.

I won't dock any points for the typos, considering this is an arc, but I do wonder if certain passages will be reworked before official publication--specifically, the passages about Buffy Sainte-Marie. Prior to the Fall of 2023 I think these passages would be quite powerful, but post those headlines it does take you out of the book considering she is brought up in opposition to Joni Mitchell's privilege as a white singer-songwriter. There is also a passage about one of the more risqué lyrics in Coyote that loses some steam considering that, immediately after Powers' remarks on its power, the lyric in question is misquoted. Nitpicky, yes, but it did take me out of the book for a second.

But, overall, I really do recommend this book. It gave me much to think about in regard to Joni Mitchell, and made me interrogate my own relationship to her and her music.

This book does not attempt to define her, to cast her in bronze, immovable and unchangeable. It made me think about the version of Joni Mitchell I've been engaging with for years, the version of her that exists in my life, in my mind. The ways I've tried to define her, define my appreciation when others ask why I love her music so much, why her music matters. As Joni Mitchell herself once said: " If you hold sand too tightly in your hand, it will run through your fingers."

My thanks to NetGalley for the arc, and to Ann Powers for writing this thoughtful and in-depth book on Joni Mitchell.

I recieved this as an e-galley from NetGalley.

In a world of decreasing appreciation for music criticism and cultural writers- thank goodness for Ann Powers!

I have read a fair amount of biographical material on Joni Mitchell but where this book hit my sweet spot was the combination of biography, music criticism, and personal memoir that Powers wrote here.