Summarize this content to 2000 words in 6 paragraphs in Arabic Unlock the Editor’s Digest for freeRoula Khalaf, Editor of the FT, selects her favourite stories in this weekly newsletter.“All girls go through a Joni Mitchell phase,” the Texan singer-songwriter Tift Merritt once said. “If any girl tells you she never did, don’t believe her.” But American music critic Ann Powers claims she resisted falling under the Canadian singer-songwriter’s spell until late adulthood. This goes some way to explaining why Powers’ new book, Travelling: On the Path of Joni Mitchell, is less a conventional biography and more a personal and poetic reckoning with its “difficult” subject’s “svelte, swanlike” brilliance.Often hailed as one of the greatest singer-songwriters of all time — having risen to prominence in the hippy folk scene of California’s Laurel Canyon in the 1960s and ’70s — Mitchell’s work contains a push-pull tension between piercing intimacy and unsettling remoteness. “Maybe I’ve never really loved, I guess that is the truth/ I’ve spent my whole life in clouds at icy altitudes,” she sang on her 1976 track “Amelia”. While the male artists on that scene — James Taylor, Jackson Browne and Crosby, Stills & Nash — aimed at a fraternal warmth in their sound, Mitchell stood aloof: not a member of the boys’ club and yet slightly scornful of the other women in their orbit.As a feminist 20 years younger than her subject, Powers struggles with Mitchell’s resistance to the sisterhood. She admits she is “a little bit angry at Joni for trying to genius her way beyond gender”, illustrating her point by quoting lyrics such as those of 1966’s “Conversation” in which Mitchell describes a lover’s wife with contempt: “She only brings him out to show her friends/ I want to free him”. But the writer also calls herself out for the “surge of envy” she feels on studying Mitchell’s lithe, blonde beauty.While recent biographies by both Sheila Weller and David Yaffe have provided crisp chronological accounts of Mitchell’s life, Powers grants herself the space to meander off-topic and challenge some of the creation myths they both repeat. Rock lore has it that Mitchell’s artistry grew out of an idyllic prairie childhood, crystallised into fierce ambition by a briefly paralysing bout of polio aged nine and her decision at the age of 21 to give her only child up for adoption. According to this narrative, Mitchell arrived on the scene with her musicianship apparently forged in splendid isolation.Travelling sniffs out a messier, more relatable timeline. Powers finds a country girl who always yearned for the buzz of big cities. A struggling pregnant woman who married her daughter’s “non-conformer” of a father but, abandoned by him, opted to give her child a more secure home. The author traces Mitchell’s musical influences to the Black blues tradition of Elizabeth Cotten and Richie Havens, and argues that the silvery early vocals you hear on “Both Sides Now” (1966) echo those of American protest singer Joan Baez.Having thus tethered her elusive subject, Powers explores how Mitchell’s questing creativity took her into breathtakingly original sonic spaces. The polio virus did leave her unable to stretch her hands into some conventional chord shapes and she compensated with original fretboard geometry. Taking her cue from modal jazz she left spaces around notes and twisted tunes at unexpected angles: always “travelling, travelling, travelling” as she sang on her 1971 album Blue. Although Powers takes issue with Mitchell’s apparent lack of feminism, she celebrates the ways in which her songs articulated the challenges faced by 20th-century women, and the brutal choices many faced between freedom and domesticity; art and motherhood; trading on your sex appeal or making less money. Mitchell’s decision to wear blackface on the sleeve of her 1977 album “Don Juan’s Reckless Daughter” — and to attend parties at the time dressed as a Black character she named Art Nouveau — is more problematic and often glossed over by fans unwilling to address it. Powers calls on Black academic and cultural critic Miles Grier, who — though upset by Mitchell’s blacking up — believes it was “a reaction against sexism”. He argues that her decision to align herself with the music industry’s other exploited demographic, while unacceptable, flagged how “all the white dudes around her — all sexists in one way or another — wanted to be Black men themselves. And she thought, well, all right, I’ll trump them.”At times Travelling is so scrupulously balanced and nuanced that the prose spins in circles. But, if you’re prepared to read at a meditative pace, the book offers a wealth of personal and poetic insight. There’s a tenderness in the tale of Mitchell’s later-life marriage to bassist and producer Larry Klein, her struggle with Morgellons disease, her 2015 brain aneurysm and her triumphant return to the stage at Newport Folk Festival in 2022.Having looked at Mitchell from both sides now, Powers concludes by thanking her ornery heroine for giving women “the chance to say everything that isn’t nice. To be neurotic, mean, confused, rude. While also being wise, sensual, empathetic, honest.” Travelling: On the Path of Joni Mitchell by Ann Powers HarperCollins £25, 480 pagesJoin our online book group on Facebook at FT Books Café and subscribe to our podcast Life & Art wherever you listen
