When the legendary singer and songwriter Joni Mitchell made her surprise return to live performance at the Newport Folk Festival in 2022, it represented the culmination of a long and cyclical journey from her initial appearance there in 1967. The circ*mstances surrounding the triumphant 2022 set and its rhapsodic reception could scarcely have been more unlikely. Mitchell, 78 at the time, hadn’t performed a full live set since 2000 and had kept a conspicuously low public profile since suffering a brain aneurysm in 2015. Nevertheless, backed variously by a worshipful coterie of big-ticket admirers, including Brandi Carlile, Marcus Mumford and Wynonna Judd, Mitchell played and sang with aplomb and moxie — the same combination of miracle talent and marked determination that had first led her from the tiny Saskatchewan folk scene to the brink of global stardom all those decades ago. She closed her set the same way she did in another Newport appearance in 1969, with a bravura version of her classic “The Circle Game.” What goes around comes around.
Or at least keeps going. The title of Ann Powers’s remarkably insightful new overview of Mitchell’s work, “Traveling,” comes from the opening lines of “All I Want,” the first song on Mitchell’s masterpiece “Blue” (1971), which depicts the joys and terrors of a generation whose postwar prosperity engendered unprecedented social and geographic mobility. Mitchell is perhaps the finest chronicler of what was gained and what was lost on those endless highway runs, and of the quivering tension in the discovery of oneself at the expense of deeper roots. Freedom’s just another word, when everything is lost.
Mitchell is an awe-inspiring figure in both achievement and reputation — among peers, perhaps only Bob Dylan is so universally revered — a circ*mstance that has understandably but meaningfully biased previous biographers who spoke at length with her. Early on in “Traveling,” Powers explains her decision to not personally engage with Mitchell as a kind of protective literary scheme. Powers, a longtime music writer, speaks from experience about the rock star/journalist dynamic, which can cut both ways: “I knew that even a little intimacy can create the desire for more.”
Keeping a distance pays great dividends here. Powers proves an adroit codebreaker for the uniquely complex cross-pollination of romantic ennui, class consciousness, spiritual striving and occasional narcissism that characterizes the full sweep of the Joni Mitchell enterprise. “Traveling” is particularly astute when interrogating Joni’s jagged and deeply layered relationships with her crucial male collaborators, including the folk singer Chuck Mitchell, to whom she was briefly married; fellow canonized Canadian Leonard Cohen; and the even more self-satisfied L.A. kingpins Crosby, Stills & Nash. In every instance, Powers explains the subtle trade-offs and subjugations that came with navigating a male-dominated industry as a wildly gifted person with dreams beyond their control.
On the other hand, Powers is dispassionate enough to fully castigate her subject for some astonishingly wrongheaded gestures. Mitchell’s decision to don blackface, on the cover of her album “Don Juan’s Reckless Daughter” (1977) and later in different public and private contexts as her alter ego and “muse” Art Nouveau, regrettably cannot be dismissed as simply a creative swing and miss in a less-enlightened age, as previous biographers have done. Following a long and nourishing discourse with the Black journalist and scholar Miles Grier — reprinted in interview form in the book — Powers renders her harsh verdict: “Whatever else it was — homage, satire, possession — her creation of Art Nouveau did involve a kind of violence. The theft part of appropriation always does.”
The final third of the book is fruitfully and touchingly fixated on the relative reversals of the ’80s and ’90s — Mitchell’s wilderness years from the culture. She continued to make records, but increasingly confrontational releases, such as “Dog Eat Dog” (1985), an underappreciated collaboration with Thomas Dolby, only encouraged an already downward trend in her sales. Powers makes a strong case for that mostly dismissed part of her catalogue. Mitchell was seeking a true synthesis with new wave, as she had with jazz. Check out “Fiction” from “Dog Eat Dog” and imagine it as a New Order track. She was always busy being born.
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And then there was the reemergence. In one ironic note in what is often a layered meditation on the bad-romance vibes that frequently emerge between biographer and subject, Powers — neck-deep in writing this book — passed up the opportunity to attend the 2022 concert in Newport, just as Mitchell herself skipped Woodstock. It is a great compliment to Powers’s ebullient style that her accruing sense of fatigue and wonder around her subject never reads as less than fascinating. Visceral prose, pure fusion.
Having valiantly traversed the rocky shoals of the Mitchell experience, Powers lands on a positive note. For all of Mitchell’s contradictions and blind spots, the abiding genius of her work is its capacity for reinvention, regeneration and a forward-looking worldview, even when everything but the endless possibilities of the open road seems arrayed against you. The last line of “Traveling” could be the first line in a Joni Mitchell song: “Okay, let’s start.”
Elizabeth Nelson is a critic, singer and songwriter. The latest release from her band, the Paranoid Style, is “The Interrogator.”
Traveling
On the Path of Joni Mitchell
By Ann Powers
Dey Street. 437 pp. $35
