As early as the 90’s, the fabled stories of Joni Mitchell have been put to page by countless authors. The transition between mediums seems immediately obvious when considering Joni’s work; her life poses itself as a fascinating conduit for studying the 60’s folk revival and its bohemian culture, the 70’s jazz fusion movement and the era’s studio decadence, as well as the capitalization of nostalgia and celebrity in the 80’s and onwards.
Contrary to other readings, Ann Powers approached Joni Mitchell with several caveats. Joni’s recent public renaissance reinvigorated public interest in her work, making a new reading of her material especially timely. The recent swing of singer-songwriters waving authenticity and intimacy clearly calls Joni their north star.
Ann Powers herself acts as the most interesting piece of Traveling’s puzzle though. The NPR writer, who also boasts history with the Los Angeles Times, the New York Times, and most notably the Village Voice, is not only one of America’s most renowned and storied music critics, but her personal connection with post-bohemian America posits her as a critical soothsayer to Joni’s most perplexing and undertold moments.
Sitting down in late May for a sprawling conversation with me, Ann Powers discusses Joni Mitchell’s impact on pop stars historic and contemporary, her relationship with literary and musical greats of her time, and Ann Powers’ own trepidation in approaching Traveling.
[Note: This interview has been edited for clarity]
I know this is probably a question you get asked a lot but how did it come into your head that you wanted to write this book?
Well, as I talk about in the introduction, I was actually approached to write a book on Joni Mitchell. An editor named Denise Oswald, who at the time was a Dey Street Press, now she’s a Pantheon, approached me. She really kept it very open. Basically, what she said was, “I just want to read you on Joni.”
That was great because it was such an open invitation. It honestly wasn’t something I had thought about before. Not that I’d never written about Joni, I’d written about Joni of course, but to do a book-length on her, it never really entered my mind. I’m not a biographer by nature, so I was a little hesitant, and then I was like “yes I’m going to try this.”
I definitely had buyer’s remorse, or a little bit of trepidation, after I said I would do it, not only because the subject is daunting; I mean Joni Mitchell is such a huge legend and how could I possibly add to the already rich conversation about her and live up to what her fans expect or what she expects of a project, but also because I don’t really consider myself the kind of writer who’s naturally made to write biography. Even when I was a journalist back in the nineties of New York and writing a lot for magazines, like SPIN and Rolling Stone, and places like that, profiles were not my favorite thing. I prefer doing criticism. I prefer doing reviews and think pieces and stuff like that. So I thought “Oh my god, what have I done? I’ve signed up to write this book!?”
So I had some freak outs for a while. Then I read a book called Out of Sheer Rage and it’s a little tiny book by Geoff Dyer and it’s about his attempts to write a book about DH Lawrence. He’s like me, was quite daunted about the subject. It’s a very funny book, it’s really an account of, like, writer’s block and struggling with it. Somehow that book gave me permission to foreground my own doubts and questions about writing this kind of book and about trying to put my arms around the Joni Mitchell story. It just opened a door and then I was able to do it.
I really like how you feature yourself in the book and put yourself in conversation with her. How did you navigate how much to include your own perspective and when to pull back?
That’s a great question. A lot of my writing has autobiographical elements. When I was in my early 30’s, I had actually published a memoir [Weird Like Us: My Bohemian America] but even then I was always doing hybrid work. That book, for example, it is a memoir, but it also contains interviews.It’s about my life as a young bohemian in the 80’s and early 90’s in San Francisco mostly, and I interviewed all my friends and stuff. So I’ve always been interested in the hybrid forms of personal writing combined with reporting and criticism.
That’s something I really learned how to do at the Village Voice, and through alternative weeklies in general, but at the Village Voice when I worked there in the early 90’s. There were so many great writers who were doing that there, whether it was Lisa Jones or Amy Talbot with her film criticism or Donna Minkowitz. There were just a lot of great writers doing that kind of work there. So that’s kind of my natural approach.
With my previous book that I published in 2017, [Good Booty: Love and Sex, Black & White, Body and Soul in American Music], I left myself completely out of it. So much so that there is one point- you would never know about this unless I told you about it- I cite a New York Times article and it’s my article! But I didn’t want to put my name in it because it was more of a history?
So I had tried that approach of my life story being out of it, with just my voice being present. I felt like that was a little bit unnatural for me. In the kinds of stuff I published in NPR Music, I often incorporate autobiography. It was very natural for me to return to that frame. But I will also say that I was encouraged by my editor to do so.
I think that in 2024 and among younger people like yourself, the personal voice has a particular kind of authority that people trust. If you can convincingly and honestly and truthfully speak from your heart and your brain, then you’re going to gain the trust of the reader. That was sort of my goal with including those passages in the book.
It’s also matched to Joni’s writing too, of her stuff.
Yeah, great point. She famously once said, don’t look for me in my songs, look for yourself, so I guess I’m just taking her advice.
I wanted to talk about her tendency to write about herself as a way of dealing with others. I feel like now, so much songwriting is pushed to be so personal and there’s such a kind of a tilt towards relatability that sometimes doesn’t seem natural. I wanted to know your thoughts on that, if you feel like that started with her and if it has warped your perspective on it.
Another great question. She came out of the folk revival. In the folk revival, there were always people writing their own songs, but the voice of the people was favored, and this idea that folk music was really meant to carry on legacies and be a political tool in creating community was very strong. Even though you had Pete Seeger or Woody Guthrie or whoever, penning songs that were wholly autobiographical.
Joni, of course, was a huge admirer of Bob Dylan, and a peer of Bob Dylan. Someone else I was talking to said she’s referred to Dylan as her pacesetter, always trying to run alongside him. and Dylan had pioneered that. I remember reading an interview with Joni where she talks about “Positively 4th Street.” The first line of the Dylan song, “Positively 4th Street,” which was released in 1965 is “You’ve got a lot of nerve to say you are my friend.”Joni talks about how that’s just a revolutionary line because it’s so conversational. It’s addressed from me to you, and it’s so personal and also emotional, you know, you hear the frustration and the peevishness in that line immediately.
I think she looks to Dylan for inspiration in that way, but she was also looking to blues artists. The blues is a form that is very personal even though, for reasons it has to do with institutional racism, oftentimes blues artists didn’t get credit for their personal racism. But it’s a very gut wrenchingly personal style. Joni’s first song [“Day After Day”] was basically a blues song.
The third thing I’d say that led her into the personal was the Beatles. She was a big Beatles fan and that whole folk scene was influenced by the Beatles much more than people acknowledge.
It’s interesting, I feel like she has so many peers in different fields, but like I don’t know, no one can match her all the way.
That’s a great way to put it. I think that’s one of the paradoxes of Joni Mitchell, is that she’s singular and yet she’s representative at the same time.
For me initially when I was struggling to confront her. It was frustrating to me that everyone was like “She’s the greatest, she’s the greatest!” I felt like I had to pull away from that myth around her. But the problem is once you pull away from the myth and you really put yourself into the music, you’re like “You know what? She really is the greatest.” So I came back to that place, I had to put a pin in the balloon of her fame. If only as a lyricist, you cannot match her. She’s incredible.
You conducted a lot of interviews and research for this book. Would you say there were any that changed how you approached writing?
Yes, several different ones. When you’re working on this kind of biographical or historical work, you can’t go into it with your ideas preconceived. You have to be open to learning and adjusting your view. Otherwise, whenever you do an interview, you need to listen, be listening enough that you can put aside what you think is right.
There were definitely cases like that. I think talking to Larry Klein, who was Joni’s husband and collaborator for many years- he didn’t want to talk to me at first. He eventually answered some technical questions, but his insights into how they did that, how they used electronics, and how they explored so many different avenues of music making in the 80’s, that really helped me grasp that era. I also will say the jazz fusion chapter, which was originally, embarrassingly, 27,000 words long; I talked to some people like Randy Brecker and Larry Carlton, who were in that scene, especially Randy Brecker; he never played with Joni, but he just really gave me a lot of context of how jazz fusion worked and how those musicians who had been trained in jazz ended up playing on all these pop records and rock record. It was really valuable to have that kind of insight.
Talking to someone like Judy Collins, that was really brilliant in terms of helping me see how Joni’s first times at Newport took place. Both for Tom Rush and Judy Collins, I wanted to make sure those two got credit for how much they helped Joni early on. Joni especially, because I think she’s underrated as a real force in the star making process of that time.I was really happy to hear how she had championed Joni and how she heard from the beginning how great she was. I love the story that she tells about Al Kooper calling her at three in the morning and being there with Joni and having Joni play her songs over the phone. That needs to be in a movie..
You’ve talked to a lot of people over time, but were there any you were particularly intimidated by?
I knew I had to be delicate with Larry. They were married, you know. I think I would have been intimidated by the big stars like James Taylor, Graham Nash, and David Crosby but they were all very open and receptive. The one thing I’ll say is when you interview older people who have been interviewed many millions of times, oftentimes they’ll just give you the stories that you have heard before.
With David Crosby, for example, he was very open with me and lovely. I interviewed him maybe a year before he died, he was playing a Tiny Desk, I got to be done for that. We had a great conversation, but there were a couple times when I thought, “Oh, here’s a little detail he’s never said to anyone before.” One detail, this is so funny, was the famous night, it was a late night party at his house and he brought Joni down in the bedroom to play for this gathering of people.
He talked about how he had this really good sinsemilla (marijuana). And I’m like, “oh, he’s never told anybody before what kind of weed he had.” But the next day, David Brown published a piece and it had that detail and I was like “agh!”
I will tell you one thought. This didn’t make it in the book, and I blame myself, but I interviewed Wayne Shorter early on in my process. Michelle Mercer helped me get a hold of him, and I have to say, I just feel I was not prepared. Wayne was an incredible genius, an incredible associative thinker and I just completely lost control of that interview. He’s talking about Superman. He’s talking about all of this science fiction stuff. I ultimately decided to not use that interview and I regret it. I hope to use it at some point in another context.
Is there anything that you feel you left out? Or is there anything that, maybe an editor, wanted you to add in that you didn’t feel was needed?
A: I cut 50,000 words from the book, so yes, they’re definitely things that I left out. I still dream, and I’m just constantly putting this out there to manifest it, but I really want to do a podcast on jazz fusion because I think that’s such a fascinating period, it’s so controversial and I think it would be really interesting. I went way too deep into that. My chapter on Latin music was five times as long as what’s published. I really just got into it. I had no room to do that.
As far as what my editor or other people who read the manuscripts thought I should be doing- I will say my agent, Sarah Lazin, encouraged me to be chronological. When I started writing this book, it was more thematic. It was more like “Here’s a chapter on childhood, here’s a chapter on feminism, here’s a chapter on travel,” they were spanning her whole career and she said, “people are gonna want to be able to walk with Joni on this road with you.” I really am happy that she encouraged me to make it more chronological because I think it really helps the narrative. Anna Montague, my incredible editor, she actually encouraged me to put more of myself in at times and I think that really worked.
How did you get into Joni? I’m curious
I have always really liked folk music. I really like Simon & Garfunkel when I was little, that was kind of my starting point. Then I got really into Leonard Cohen and then that’s kind of an easy crossover.
Well yes, they definitely had a relationship, personal and artistic.
I listen a lot of music by women, but similarly how you talk about it, I was daunted by her because when people list women in music she’s always like one of the first three names and it’s hard when it seems like someone represents a whole thing, a whole half of the population, which of course she never wanted to do.
What was the first album that you got into?
Blue.
Oh, yeah, that’s the road in. Writing about Blue was a particularly fun challenge in the book because I guess I have a bit of a wild hair about always wanting to say something original about something that’s been written about a lot. How do you do that about Blue? I mean so much has been written about it. It’s been immortalized in movies. We have the Love Actually scene, there’s so many famous moments with that album. People have performed it all the time. How do I do that?
Figuring out that I could focus on how it might relate to the work of Miles Davis was just one of those wonderful moments as a writer, I’m sure you’ve also had, “ding! I’ve got it.” And it worked out. It was very (truthful?). That was the one part that was actually published before the book. I published that before the book was out for Blue’s 50th anniversary guys.
It’s definitely an album that everybody thinks they own, and I welcome all interpretations, I just hope mine add something to that mix.
It absolutely does. You’re talking about how the challenge with the whole book is saying something new. It’s interesting too, you talk a lot about how Joni was so able to capture her time. I feel like a lot of young people are very gravitated towards her writing, people who are very unfamiliar with that time who of course weren’t alive, maybe their parents weren’t even alive. It’s such a testament to just the strength of the music that it can still last like that.
That was the thing about the turn toward the personal with her. She has always said she’s very influenced by film, more so than books, but way later in her career she said, “maybe I’m a short story writer.” I think similar to great filmmakers of the 70’s and great short story writers of the 70’s, she is able to create these scenes that are very of their time, but they also are so relatable, like they could be lifted into another time.
“The Last Time I Saw Richard,” for example, when I hear that song, I see a particular place. I see a bar. I see a particular kind of guy sitting in the corner. I smell the cigarette smoke, it’s so evocative. But it’s also the kind of thing that could happen in your life or my life. You could imagine that kind of encounter now. That’s one of her particular skills that I think is really brilliant; creating these scenes that- just as how you love a film, you can just immerse in it and feel like, “wow, I’m there.”
If you were to pick a filmmaker that would be her parallel, who would you say?
I gotta cite my favorite, Jane Campion. I loved Jane Campion, I am obsessed with her films. She deals with singular themes in her work, like the artist, what it means to be an outsider, what it means to be an eccentric. The relationship between white people and brown people and other kinds of people. I’m thinking about The Piano, if you’ve ever seen that one. That’s a complicated and, many people think, problematic relationship with the indigenous people of Australia. And we have Joni, with “Paprika Plains.” I think those two have a lot in common.
I also say that I think Joni was watching a lot of movies. I know for a fact that she was a big consumer of movies. Especially in the 70’s in LA, she was moving in circles where Jack Nicholson and Warren Beatty were hanging out and if you watch those movies, many of them directed by men, but the indie movies, the wave that Peter Biskind write about in his book Easy Riders and Raging Bulls, movies like Shampoo or Five Easy Pieces or The Conversation or even Harry & Tonto, Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore– sorry I’m just reeling off names.
Those movies that are similar, in that they are very timeless, but they are very rooted in these particular scenes and milieus. I think an album like the Hissing of the Summer Lawns is almost like a sonic version of one of those movies. I recommend Shampoo.
I feel like that was such a time, which goes back to the folk music we were talking about where vulnerability was so big, but it wasn’t quite monetized as it is now.
One thing I got kind of deep into in a couple of chapters is how the self-help movement and psychoanalysis and spiritual journeys informed her writing and informed the writing of the time. I’m old enough that I grew up- I was a child of the 70’s, so as I write it, I was subjected to some of the self-help methods by my parents.
I feel like maybe that’s another parallel. It never really goes away, but it’s interesting there’s been like a vogue for personal writing, as you’re saying, especially with someone like a Phoebe Bridgers or Waxahatchee or these younger women, but not only women, songwriters; I suppose you could say Noah Kahan also. It’s interesting to me that in another moment when therapy and diagnosing your neuroses is a very big part of our culture, we want songwriters who are going to address those issues in their work. Across time, that seems to be a connection between these two moments.
Have you noticed Joan Didion is very big among young people now, similarly part of that tide.
My friend Evelyn McDonnell actually just published a book called [The World According to Joan Didion] that addresses that a little bit and talks about why she continues to be such an icon.
It’s also nice to see Eve Babitz getting some credit too. You asked me something that I left out: originally I was going to have a chapter where I talked about Eve Babitz because she actually crossed paths with Joni in a way that I don’t think Joan Didion ever quite did, and I see a lot of like the effervescence of Joni, which is underrated. The Joni of a song like “Carey” or “Talk to Me,” one of my favorite songs in the later period, or even a “Coyote.” That Joni, the sensualist and the adventurer, that’s so much like Eve. The humor, which is underrated in Joni, which is also found in Eve.
They don’t let women be funny. They won’t give them credit so often.
I was very happy when Claire Dederer, who blurbed my book and wrote that great book [Monsters: A Fan’s Dilemma], said “and have you noticed this book is funny?” I was glad that someone noticed that I had humor there. I wasn’t just being somber, or whatever
You have such a light touch in your writing, I really appreciate it. It’s really similar to Joni, even like a “A Case of You,” which is a sad, very intense song; “If you need me I’ll be at the bar,” that’s funny, that’s totally witty.
It’s totally funny and it’s real. That was the challenge she posed for me. It’s not like they aren’t incredibly pretentious lines in Joni Mitcheel songs, there are. But as she matured and progressed as a songwriter, and even as early as that, like you’re saying, she realized how to ground it in the conversational and the intimate. I always loved that scene in “The Same Situation” with a pretty girl in her bathroom checking out her sex appeal. Oh my god, that is such a great, amusing, tender, and totally pedestrian image. I just love that she can throw that in there.
One thing I wanted to talk about with this book was; obviously I’m going to spend time with the classic albums and the classic period and I’m going to talk about the relationship with Crosby and all those moments and her interplay with Jaco Pastorious. But I really wanted to shine a light on the later Joni. Not just the 80’s, which is another chapter that could have been a book; I really kind of felt love with her, Larry as a couple.
But the 90’s stuff too. When you look at a song like “Stay in Touch,” for example, from her later work, after she had been reunited with her daughter. It’s not about that, it’s supposedly about another relationship she had, but that’s another song that is so believable and it’s ambivalent and it’s hope and it’s acknowledgement of human limitation.The fact that even in that later period she’s still writing songs that are that acute is amazing to me.
Older songwriters continue to make great music, don’t get me wrong, but the ability to be that acute, even as you’re ten albums into your career, it’s pretty great.
There’s the challenge of only knowing fame and then just writing about fame and writing about writing.
The isolation can really affect you. Leonard Cohen is another great example of someone who had an amazing way to write Renaissance. It was partly a matter of needing to make money because he had that unfortunate encounter with the shady business manager. But we have so much to learn from our older artists and I’m just thankful when they’re willing and able to bring that perspective.
If you listen to a record like “You Want It Darker,” you learn a lot about what it means to be older and in pain and looking death in the eye. And plus, it’s funny.
I really appreciate a book like this coming out now, I feel like the tendency to discredit older artists, especially older women, you just don’t hear about them as much. Do you ever feel despair as all these albums keep getting their 50th anniversary, and more and more people are nearing the end of their lives and it seems like that era’s last gasps are happening a little bit? Does that fill you with a little bit of fear?
There was that recent Apple best album list. Lauryn Hill is put above Thriller and Frank Ocean is above Stevie Wonder. A lot of people I know were horrified by that, but I have to agree with my husband, Eric Weisbard, who posted about this on Facebook.
He’s said “whenever the opportunity exists for younger generations to pop up the older generation we should encourage it, because this is how we keep moving through life and history.”
I believe in the preservation of classic works. I believe in the preservation of works that nobody has heard of. Some of my favorite artists are not super famous at all. But I also think that to hang on to certain artists or albums as sacred cows is a mistake.
It’s fascinating to me to see what resonates for your generation that maybe even my generation scorns. An example would be Fleetwood Mac. I always liked Fleetwood Mac, but definitely when I was a younger person in the 80’s, they were out. They were not cool, they were doing that synth pop thing, like so many classic rock bands did then, They were the example of California decadence and too much cocaine. And then to watch the renaissance of Stevie and watching that arc over many years, watching her fanbase just continuing to grow and her legacy emerging as the legacy of that band. Now, to the point where Rumours is one of our fundamental texts. It’s just interesting to me. Nobody is talking about Dark Side of the Moon anymore.Everybody’s talking about Rumours. That is a revolution that I can get behind you. Nothing against Dark Side of the Moon.
I actually have a phone note in my phone of acts that I feel like I was told were not cool that, now, people age think are very cool. Steely Dan, I feel like was always like dad rock, but now they’re very hip.
Limp Bizkit made a comeback of some kind!? I have a 20 year old daughter and she loves to torment us by playing with that song “Nookie.” I don’t know, Creed? Creed was the one I was like “are you kidding me? There has to be a limit.”
On the other hand, I don’t know. To me, it’s more interesting to ask why something is resonating, than to be like, “oh, it shouldn’t be resonating.” That’s just boring. I mean, here I am championing jazz fusion. I went to college at University of Washington for the first few years when Kenny G went. I have been around a lot of jazz fusion haters. Although he’s really smooth jazz.
It’s interesting what people let themselves contend with. I feel like right now we’re in such a spot, maybe the tide is turning on poptimism but with like, I don’t know if you’ve so many publications or so willing to fully endorse like whatever the new Taylor Swift and Beyonce- not that those things aren’t great, it’s just interesting to me. I feel like the idea of cool has shifted so much.
Oh, I totally agree with that. It’s funny for me as someone who’s been a music writer for my whole life and now I’m 60. I don’t wanna sound like I’m tooting my horn, or whatever, but I was the person when I was at the New York Times back in the 90’s who would be like “we got to review this act that you think sucks,” or whatever. We have to talk about these big stars. I went to Creed. I went to Madison Square Garden and saw Creed, and I was like, “I’m going to figure this out.” I guess I was like part of that original wave of trying to say what’s popular deserves critical attention.
The other thing about poptimism, so it’s called, is that while the terms were mostly defined by white guys, and of course Kelefa Sanneh, who’s a black critic who’s very important, and Carl Wilson and his book [Celine Dion’s Let’s Talk About Love: A Journey to the End of Taste]. What happened was that, as the doors opened, more women and non-white critics and journalists could enter. As the pantheon started to get redefined, it became much more equal in those ways and that was so important.
It’s fine to turn away from poptimism and say “well, what happened with the changes in the business, writing about mainstream music became almost like a form of promotion.” That’s true. But let’s hang on to the aspect of it that’s about having a wider definition of greatness. That’s all I’m saying.
You know who would agree with that? Joni Mitchell. She loves 50’s doo-wop. She loves old rock and roll. I think Bob Dylan would agree with that too. The artists that get held up as the best, the unimpeachable rock artists or whatever, they all enjoy pop music.
It’s always been “so much of pop music has always been geared towards young girls and therefore it can’t be good.”
You saw that with the Beatles and you see that with K-pop now. The difference is there’s more champions. There’s more people like yourself who are out there thinking about these things and trying to figure out how to write about them.
It’s tricky too, we’re a magazine that is not for profit and we don’t get funding from anybody, so we can be mean if we want to, which is nice. Do you ever feel constrained by that?
I have a great gig and I’m very grateful for it. And I have a lot of freedom and I’m grateful for that. Not talking specifically about NPR, there’s no denying this is a horrifyingly challenging time for culture writers and arts writers and the arts in general and I do worry about what’s happening in terms of keeping certain institutions and legacies alive. Even aside from whether or not it’s going to be viable to be a music critic in the future. I think about live theater or classical music or dance; these aspects of culture that really need the critical voice to help champion them and how difficult it’s been for those in artists and institutions.
You could say, social media is doing it now, but social media is so oriented towards buying and selling. The critic’s role is supposed to be standing apart from that process of buying and selling and thinking about other things. Aesthetics, cultural impact, and the place of history of this work. I don’t know what the critic’s role is becoming. I’m interested.
I think there’s a lot of positive things. I love video essays, for example, I think they’re really interesting and cool. Like I said, I love the fact that the field has grown so much more diverse. But you have to wonder, if nobody’s able to make a living writing about the arts, what effect does it have on the arts in general? But you know, you’re out there doing it!
I’m not somebody who’s going to stand there being fuddy-duddy being like, “oh, TikTok is the devil.” I find a lot of stuff on TikTok and I’m interested in it but I wish there were a little bit more clear standards of practices for journalism and criticism on social media, because just as facts matter, perspective matters. Whether or not you’re getting free stuff from the people you’re doing a TikTok about matters.
It’s also new and it’s hard to look at it in the face.
I agree with that. Culture always adjusts to technology and emerges in relationship to and out of technology. The existence of a popular music break at all, that was a response to changes in both journalism and popular music and the flourishing of new journalism and of alternative newspapers and underground newspapers and all of that. That’s what made it possible for rock criticism or music criticism to exist in that way.
If that arc is sort of ending, there is going to be another arc. We’ll see what comes out of that arc.
Is there anything you want to include that you feel you haven’t gone to say about this book?
I’ll say for your audience, I really wanted to go beyond the idea of Joni just as the baby boomer icon, or just as an icon of the 60’s and 70’s. At the same time, I think there’s a lot about that time that forms the foundation of her work.
I wanted to provide that context, but I really wanted to show how she is not merely a representative of the counterculture and she’s not merely representative of a particular moment. The most exciting thing about her is that she kept moving, Even in those glory days from, say, Ladies of the Canyon, to Hejira or something. She was always one step ahead and she was always insistently one step ahead. I think that’s one reason why she remains so relevant today. She didn’t sink into a moment. She didn’t settle in a moment. And so I’m glad that people are constantly rediscovering.
Well, now she’s back on Spotify.
I know! And she’s performing. She’s able to rest on the throne now. I think it’s wonderful that Brandy and others have been supporting her and it’s been fascinating to watch the kind of way that the Joni jams have he followed to support her vocals and what she can and wants to do now. Another thing I would say is enjoy the Joni we have now, love the Joni we have now, but also go on YouTube and find the other Joni’s because there’s a lot there.
There’s so much to marvel at, at her performance. Everything from that scene in that Scoresese documentary [Rolling Thunder Revue] where she’s playing “Coyote” to watching early clips of her from her folk revival days and just hearing that voice to her MTV video she made with Larry in the 80’s. All of that is so rich to explore. I just encourage people to do that.
Traveling: On the Path of Joni Mitchell is available now via Dey Street Books/HarperCollins