Review by Booklist Review
To veteran music journalist Powers, Joni Mitchell is a "kind of seer and friend." The essence of Mitchell's music is timeless; the intimacy of it "speaks to the world." But as Powers makes clear, she is not a biographer and, thus, this is not a standard biography. Rather, she looks at herself as "a kind of mapmaker" and in Mitchell she has found an "inexhaustible subject." A marvelous writer, Powers has created a glorious and poetic journey through Mitchell's life and career. She follows the artist through her many permutations, from her childhood in Canada and her bout with polio to her coffeehouse-circuit days on both sides of the border to her hippie life in Laurel Canyon to her self-described "Heidi" existence ("you know, with goats and an orchard") in British Columbia, and up to the present day, including her recent health scares and her rich and productive association with Brandi Carlile who helped steer her "comeback." Powers says she always admired Mitchell even when she found her persona "daunting" and her "swanlike cool felt so distant" from herself. Could she write about someone so formidable? Yes, indeed. The result is a brilliant and personal distillation of a singular artist.
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
NPR music critic Powers (Good Booty) paints a dazzling portrait of a legendary musician whose restless creativity fueled her multifaceted career in the folk, jazz, rock, and soul genres. Powers traces Mitchell's musical evolution beginning with a childhood bout of polio that weakened her left hand and led her to fashion a style of open tunings and fingerpickings on guitar. From there, Powers documents Mitchell's immersion in folk music, forays into jazz in the early 1970s, romances and collaborations with fellow musicians James Taylor and Don Alias, and recovery from a 2015 brain aneurysm. Throughout, Powers foregrounds Mitchell's penchant for journeys both literal (she penned songs on road trips) and metaphorical. Of the sense of experimentation that animated Mitchell's 1970s songs, Power writes, "this was the sound of the brain inquiring about itself." The view of Mitchell that emerges is expansive, nuanced, and generally admiring, without letting her off the hook. For example, though Powers criticizes Mitchell's decision to wear blackface on the cover of her 1977 album Don Juan's Reckless Daughter, she takes care to acknowledge the complexities involved, citing scholar Miles Grier's suggestion that Mitchell's "desire to claim Black masculinity" was, in her mind, a "way out of the... trap" of being a "maligned woman artist." The result is a dynamic portrayal of an artist whose "journey would be, throughout her life, her destination." (June)
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Review by Library Journal Review
NPR music critic Powers (Good Booty: Love and Sex, Black and White, Body and Soul in American Music) has written a lyrical biography of 80-year-old singer-songwriter Joni Mitchell's life, career, and legacy. In her surprisingly personal account of Mitchell, Powers turns the act of documenting someone's life into an artistic endeavor, which makes this book unlike most other titles in the genre. She executes this by merging biography, memoir, and investigation. Even readers who know the basics of Mitchell's life will find much more to gain from this volume. Readers will leave with a sense of Mitchell's interesting past and a new perspective on why she's relevant now and will likely always be. VERDICT Experiencing this book is more akin to wandering down a scenic path than traveling a timeline of someone's life, and there is no other musician better suited for this style of biography than the ever-changing Mitchell. Powers's highly anticipated title lives up to the hype and is sure to be on many lists of the best books of the year.--Emily Kubincanek
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Review by Kirkus Book Review
A vibrant critical assessment of the eclectic and enigmatic folk/jazz/pop icon. Veteran NPR music critic Powers, author of Weird Like Us and Good Booty, clearly admires Mitchell's creative restlessness, but she also challenges some of the received wisdom about Mitchell's life and career and calls out her more problematic moves. To avoid retracing Mitchell's "official portrait," the author eschewed interviewing the artist herself, but she tracked down friends, lovers, and fellow musicians (the three groups tended to intermingle) like David Crosby and James Taylor to explore her career in depth. A childhood bout with polio was likely less formative, Powers surmises, than Mitchell's decision in 1965 to give up a child for adoption. She had storied relationships with powerful men in the music industry, but was no pushover; Powers finds correspondence in which she pushed back against sexist marketing campaigns around her. Far from needing her virtuoso collaborators to guide her, she was an accomplished "studio rat" pushing for new ideas on her own behalf. The author writes about these themes thoughtfully and thoroughly, but her appreciation doesn't cloud her frustration with Mitchell's missteps--most infamously, her mid-1970s invention of a blackface character, Art Nouveau, and various attempts to appropriate Native American culture. (Powers invites Miles Grier, a Black scholar, to put Art Nouveau in a musical and cultural context.) The author covers Mitchell's remarkable comeback from an aneurysm in 2015, and she expands her appreciation beyond Mitchell's much-lauded comeback (with Brandi Carlisle's support) to show how her influence extends to jazz, country, pop, and drag performance. Those simply looking for loving commentaries on Mitchell classics like Blue will find them, but Powers offers more than mere hagiography, positioning Mitchell as "an embodiment of freedom and singularity, of sorrow and of play." A top-notch music critic set loose on a worthy subject. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
