On Ann Powers on Joni Mitchell
“Traveling: On the Path of Joni Mitchell”—it’s a life’s illusions we recall, with cameos by Judee Sill and Karen Dalton. Plus: Me on Tayor Swift in the Guardian
I’ve been bursting for months to tell everyone in detail about the new book by my dear friend, NPR music critic Ann Powers. Traveling: On the Path of Joni Mitchell (Dey Street Books) is out next week, so that day has finally come.
In fact Ann and I will be discussing it today (Monday, June 3, 5 pm ET), along with our longtime groupchat-trio partner, the New York writer and critic Jody Rosen, in the online Popular Music Books in Process series, which I help organize. Get the Zoom link by emailing froyster@depaul.edu. Also, if you’re in the Toronto area, Ann is visiting in two weeks, June 17, for a conversation conducted by the very excellent Tabassum Siddiqui at the TPL reference library—info and reservations here. She may be making other appearances nearer you.
ALSO: If you’re more a 2020s person than a 20th century one, I have some comments in Dorian Lynskey’s new Guardian feature analyzing the historic nature of Taylor Swift’s world conquering run.
But let’s get to the book itself: Joni Mitchell is at once one of the most written-about artists in pop history—she’s only “neglected” if your basis of comparison is the white male so-called rock gods of her 1960s/70s generation—and somehow still one of the most elusive. Part of what I love about Traveling is that Ann never pretends she’s not on the train of a huge paper trail, including full-fledged (if faulty) biographies.
Instead she seizes that opportunity to do something beyond biography: to trace her own travelogue through the thematic implications of Mitchell’s life and work, picking through the almost obligatorily intense feelings Mitchell draws out of both fans and musical peers, and the way her flaws are downplayed despite what they might illuminate. Mitchell was always (maybe still is) at once dramatically exemplary of social currents and resistant to them, inside and yet apart.
Ann’s writing invites us to take a break from overwhelmedly loving Joni Mitchell (help me, I think I’m falling!), the better truly to see and hear her. From all sides now. Though the book is by no means radically experimental (or at least much less so than Ann initially envisioned), it offers an alternative to both the conventional biography and the recently popular genre of critical memoir—to be reductive, the “how my life/philosophy/gender was transformed by Middlemarch/Mariah Carey/Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles” bookshelf. I know that formally Traveling points directions forward for my David Berman book, as Jody tellsme it does for his just-announced work on Taylor Swift, and as it should for musical and critical biographies in general.
One source of its achievement is that Ann did not begin as a fully devoted Joni-head. The proposal came as a challenge from an editor. Like anyone with ears and a broad musical awareness, of course Ann appreciated Mitchell. She loved many of the songs. But she’d grown up seeing capital-J “Joni” as too idealized to identify fully with, too much the lithe, long-tressed, anointed genius-princess of Laurel Canyon. Not like the outsiders, punks, and underdogs Ann was drawn to. I was a little surprised by that myself. Perhaps because by a quirk of library borrowing my first favourite Mitchell album was Mingus, perhaps because I was hyperaware of Mitchell’s Canuckitude, I always saw her as a border-crosser on a journey full of evolutionary sidesteps, even missing links. But Ann’s kind of wariness is a rich starting point for any such investigation, compared to the credulity of the pre-converted. It’s a viewpoint and a voice for the project.
That degree of distance helps Ann approach old topics in new ways: The received tale of Mitchell’s childhood polio (as well as Neil Young’s), and the question of how much that “made” her an artist. The bohemian geography of her travels: we’ve all talked about Yorkville and Greenwich Village and Laurel Canyon, but what of Coconut Grove, Florida? The way white hippie songwriters wrote about childhood and innocence. Mitchell’s musical dialogue, even vicarious debate, with “the boys” of the L.A. scene in song. And whether or not she was uniquely hard done by in those years by a sexist press. Of course she was, but it’s not that simple. Also witness her refusal to work with outside producers through most of her peak, outside of engineer Henry Lewy—a level of control beyond almost any other woman in the industry, but also many men.
There’s a fertile section about 1970s jazz-rock fusion, placing Mitchell’s albums of that period in broader musical context. But that also requires confrontations with the ways Mitchell crossed racial lines more negatively: She appropriated indigenous experience in some of her songs; she playacted in blackface both on an album cover and, by her own weird accounts, at parties in the 1970s, as a persona called “Art Nouveau.” (Without excusing it, I think some of this owes to a self-flattering naïveté on racial issues that was specifically caucasian-Canadian, and endemic here until fairly recently.)
On the other hand, Ann also celebrates Mitchell’s many creative partnerships, especially her artistic and romantic marriage with bassist Larry Klein and the technically innovative but often demeaned work they produced in the 1980s. Ann makes a vivid case for placing Night Ride Home, in particular, among Mitchell’s masterworks. She points out that alongside Peter Gabriel and Kate Bush, Klein and Mitchell should be counted as Fairlight synthesizer pioneers. Touchingly, she also talks about seeing in them a reflection of her own life of creative intimacy with husband and fellow music writer Eric Weisbard.
Kicking against the typical diminishing returns of the final third of most music bios, Ann dives deep in her last chapters into further undersung collaborators (jazz drummer Brian Blade; queer performance artist John Kelly) as well as Mitchell’s often cold or combative stance toward many of her female artistic heirs in the 1990s and 2000s. This comes into contrast with the bountiful matriarchal figure struck by her post-aneurysm comeback over the past few years, a Saint Joni who seems to have let fall from her fist her flaming sword.
Ann doesn’t begrudge the outpourings of love that return has occasioned, of course. But it is timely to be reminded that what’s most special about Mitchell as an artist has never been that she was a simple figure to love. Indeed, that is one of her own primary subjects, being “so hard to handle,” as she sings in “River”—being a “difficult” woman, because being an easy one can cost so much more.
Or perhaps, that only holds true as long as you’re not too difficult. I’m departing from the book now, but I realized how much Ann’s work had deepened my ways of hearing not just Mitchell, but whole artistic milieus, when I watched two finely made and emotionally crushing music documentaries, the recent Lost Angel: The Genius of Judee Sill and 2020’s Karen Dalton: In My Own Time. I imagine I’ll reflect in similar but separate ways when I see the forthcoming Dory Previn: On My Way to Where.
It would be too much to say any of these talents were Mitchell’s equals. But they were all extravagantly gifted people. (Notice the overlap of names with Mitchell’s circles in the trailer above—Sill was in David Geffen’s world, in Graham Nash’s.) However, each of these women conspicuously lacked many of Mitchell’s privileges, from her middle-class security to her model-level beauty to her (not unrelated but probably also innate) psychic robustness: Few people have ever sung of sorrow as well as Mitchell did while being so sustainedly productive and self-possessed.
The great public exception is her phase in the early 2010s claiming that, amazingly ever on-trend, she was experiencing the almost certainly psychosomatic (but still deserving of empathy) condition called Morgellon’s. What a breach in Mitchell’s armor to describe an alien entity literally breaking through her skin, the very seal of the self. Ann deals with this with characteristic sensitivity, but understandably must leave it unresolved.
Through no fault of Mitchell’s own, the likes of Dalton and Sill, Laura Nyro, and others whose names we may never know got compared with the great Joni and found wanting. “We only need one” tokenism forever has afflicted and set women against one another, across fields and genres—it’s been remarked on and somewhat fought in hip-hop lately, but look also to the continuing subtext of “stan” competition in social media over their so-called pop girlies’ chart spots and sales records, whether that’s Cardi v. Nicki or Taylor v. Olivia. Female celebrities need not even conduct their own catfights now; their fans will do it for them.
But you might have experienced it in your own office too.
The complex self-destructive drives of a Sill or a Dalton cannot be set aside. As Ann has pointed out, many men in Mitchell’s orbit also succumbed to addiction and to blues darker than Blue. But the despair of her potential female peers often was exacerbated by the lack of latitude they were given by the music business and society. Some of the manners in which Mitchell defended her position and legacy arguably played into those hands.
However, instead of simply condemning her as a “guy’s girl” in the thrall of internalized misogyny, let’s grant that she was understandably hellbent that a fate like Sill’s never befall her. The unfairness may have been a blind spot. But unlike her racial misperceptions, that individualist determination as a woman at the time, that failure of solidarity, being what Jenny Offill famously called an “art monster”, might have been the only way available of becoming Joni Mitchell. Looked at pessimistically, maybe it’s still like that. Either way, it’s impossible to estimate where we’d all be now without her.
That’s a lot from me, but I assure you it only skims the surface. If you’re remotely interested in Mitchell, as well as in biography and music writing, please do read Traveling. And join us this afternoon, or Ann and Tab in Toronto on June 17. We’ll do our best to speak real good, for free. (Psst, that’s the zoom link, as a reward for having gotten this far.)