On one of her signature songs, the restless, almost phosphorescent 1976 anthem “Hejira,” Joni Mitchell sits in some cafe, sketching out a life philosophy: “We all come and go unknown/Each so deep and superficial/Between the forceps and the stone.” She sounds majestic but weary, like an eagle or an off-duty Valkyrie. Who are we flightless birds to disagree?
And yet: Such is the enduring lure of Joni-ology, the secular religion of her fandom, that two new meditations on Mitchell have already landed in this youngish year, just over a month apart. Henry Alford’s “I Dream of Joni” and Paul Lisicky’s “Song So Wild and Blue” are not really traditional works of scholarship or biography; footnotes are wielded gently. Instead, Mitchell mostly serves as a mirror and a muse, a blond godhead on which to pin the authors’ respective forms and fascinations.
With a title as pun-perfect as “I Dream of Joni,” you almost can’t blame Alford, the puckish longtime New Yorker writer and humorist, for writing an entire book to justify it. The subtitle, “A Portrait of Joni Mitchell in 53 Snapshots,” provides a structure and format that suits his tone: cheerful anecdotes, trivia and freewheeling commentary, buoyed by interviews. (Among others, Alford spoke to Mitchell’s prom date, the woman who makes her dulcimers and a recent mayor of her hometown, the Canadian prairie city Saskatoon.)
The Joni portrayed here in droll, chatty interludes, some as short as a page or two, is composed of the usual canonical parts: Saskatchewan rebel, lady of the Canyon, pop-culture eminence covered in glory. There are odes to her wardrobe, her bowling skills and the black-box mysticism of her songwriting process.
A litany of 20th-century luminaries duly make their cameos — names like Warren Beatty (Mitchell called him “Pussycat”), Georgia O’Keeffe (with whom she developed an odd, prickly rapport) and Prince (a fan and later a friend, he once invited her to join him onstage to sing the chorus of “Purple Rain”; she demurred, saying she didn’t know the words).
But the uneasier aspects of Mitchell’s history are also probed: her complicated and sometimes combative relationship with the daughter she gave up for adoption at 21, and wouldn’t meet again for more than 30 years; a childhood battle with polio and the brain aneurysm she suffered much later, both physically and emotionally devastating; even her bizarre embrace of blackface in the ’70s and ’80s, and her peculiar, stubborn refusal to view that as problematic in any way to this day.
Chronology is not this book’s particular concern. The timeline swings blithely from a 2007 interview with Charlie Rose to Mitchell’s fondness for designing her own culottes in high school, and then on to a tense confrontation with a Rolling Stone reporter in the midst of Bob Dylan’s chaotic, cocaine-soaked Rolling Thunder Revue in 1975.
In his attempts to make galaxy-brain connections, Alford sometimes gets lost in the proverbial weeds — lesser vignettes in which he constructs his own fridge-magnet free verse from various Mitchell quotes, catalogs the Facebook posts of her semi-estranged daughter or draws up a list of traits shared with the singer-songwriter Carole King. (Both women have blue eyes, put cats on their album covers and appeared in Gap ads? Spooky.)
But he is also a wry, cleareyed chronicler whose obvious affection for his subject doesn’t keep him from acknowledging the acutely human flaws and peccadilloes of an artist who has too often been written about with Mach 10 earnestness. (When the warbling-banshee outro on her recording of “Woodstock” hits at full volume, he winkingly concedes, “it is possible to clear a room of pets and heterosexual men.”)
Like Alford, Paul Lisicky is a gay man of a certain age and literary pedigree, though sexuality is often more than subtext in “Song So Wild and Blue,” a quasi memoir over which Mitchell hangs cool and a little unreachable, like the moon.
While the book opens as if it is inside her head many decades ago, deep in the act of puzzling out a song (“The smell of struck nickel came up from the strings. It was already past 4 in the morning …”), within several paragraphs the narrative has shifted to Lisicky in circa-2020s Brooklyn, texting a new friend and potential lover.
What if their shared love of Joni, he wonders, diverges too much in the details? Or maybe worse, brings too much closeness too quickly? The man on the other side of the phone doesn’t fully know yet what she meant to Lisicky as a lonely boy growing up in Cherry Hill, N.J., in the late 1960s and ’70s, tall and awkward and generally terrified of being seen as himself.
Access to the family piano and Mitchell’s 1972 album “For the Roses” served as gateway drugs; in high school, Lisicky started to compose his own songs, and when that proved too intimidating, shifted to writing stories without music. But the singer’s fluid singularity, her refusal to apologize or conform, made him feel electric and understood.
What follows plays out mostly in an intimate, impressionistic “Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man” mode, interwoven with Mitchell myths and parallels. Lisicky’s talents eventually earned him a spot at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and he went on to become a well-respected teacher and author, even the partner of a famous poet, with homes in Provincetown and New York. His devotion to Mitchell ebbed and flowed. (“The late ’80s didn’t seem to know what to do with Joni, nor she with the late ’80s.”)
Her presence in the pages of “Song So Wild and Blue” can feel similarly unresolved, tangled up in an unwieldy mix of musical critique, creative speculation — at one point, a whole inner monologue for Mitchell’s disapproving mother is conjured as she watches her daughter perform at Carnegie Hall — and tribute. There’s a lovely coalescence, though, in the book’s finale, a fraught cross-country trip to see Mitchell perform, post-aneurysm, at a spectacular outdoor concert bowl in Washington State in 2023.
If Alford is the witty friend leaning in to share good gossip at a dinner party and Lisicky is the ardent, eloquent professor, riffing on quarter notes and the petty politics of academia, they aren’t so far apart in the end. In a time when anyone who’s heard “A Case of You” at the drugstore or rewatched “Love Actually” at Christmas has at least some passing knowledge of Mitchell’s existence, to be a hard-core devotee still implies certain qualities: that one is soulful and a little against the grain, a defender of open tunings and difficult truths. (Also, yes, inordinately fond of cloud metaphors.)
At 81, Mitchell, though still vital and out in the world, is further from the forceps than the stone. She is stardust, she is golden; uncountable fans and self-styled experts have already tilled that garden. To go all in anyway as these two writers do, to keep trying to make art and sense of such a known, unknowable life, feels like about the most Joni thing you could do.
The post Both Sides Now: Two New Takes on Joni Mitchell appeared first on New York Times.
