What We Think About When We Think About Joni Mitchell

TRAVELING: On the Path of Joni Mitchell, by Ann Powers

How many singers have I listened to, on repeat, for years before playing music “on repeat” required a single mouse click? Bob Dylan. Sly Stone. Nina Simone. Aretha Franklin. Joni Mitchell. I play James Brown’s music less than I did, but I love Prince’s more than ever, especially his cover of Mitchell’s “A Case of You.” There were times when the melancholy in Mitchell’s songs (even the “happy” ones) too closely echoed my own. But I’m over that now. My favorite of her albums, “Blue,” and Los Lobos doing “Nothing Can Be Done” and Lana Del Rey’s version of “For Free” still surprise and move me, no matter how often I hear them.

Attentive readers will notice that I have begun a review of a book about Joni Mitchell by saying more about myself and Joni Mitchell than about the book. This may be an aftereffect of having read Ann Powers’s “Traveling: On the Path of Joni Mitchell,” a highly personal, even confessional, 400-plus-page meditation on Mitchell’s life and work — and what it has meant to Powers.

Using chronology as a loose organizing principle, “Traveling” tracks Mitchell’s continuing evolution and experimentations as a musician, her persistence, her romances, the times in which she lived and dozens of other subjects that occur to Powers — a music critic whose books include “Good Booty: Love and Sex, Black & White, Body and Soul in American Music” (2017). Seemingly unfiltered, the new book mixes accounts of the stages of Mitchell’s career and close readings of her lyrics with digressions about the author’s experiences, memories and opinions. She reports on (and revises) her ideas about feminism, gender, success, jazz, the music business, books, films, politics and many other subjects as she follows one Joni-Mitchell-adjacent association with another.

In an introduction, Powers makes it clear that she is not a biographer but rather “a kind of mapmaker … setting down lines meant to guide others along the trajectories of artists who are always one step ahead of me.” To her credit, she’s warning readers not to expect that path to be narrow: “I had to embrace a new way of writing that made room for gaps, inconsistencies and contradictions.”

Powers then explains her decision not to interview Mitchell — a hesitance born of fear that Mitchell’s seductive personality might compromise Powers’s objectivity. “Her supercharged appeal is a problem if clarity is your goal.” Near the end of the book, we learn that the author did meet Mitchell once, in 2004. On a panel about the singer’s work, Powers — who had recently adopted a child — wept when the discussion turned to “Little Green,” a song about the daughter Mitchell gave up for adoption. Mitchell was in the audience, and Powers remembers her yelling, “You can do it!” Powers recalls the humiliation that accompanied these words of encouragement but later learns that Mitchell more likely shouted, “Go on, go on!” — less heartening than impatient.