Few artists are as intriguing as Joni Mitchell. She was a solidly middle-class, buttoned-up bohemian; an anti-feminist who loved men but scorned free love; a female warrior taking on the male music establishment. She was both the party girl with torn stockings and the sensitive poet. She often said she would be criticized for staying the same or changing, so why not take the less boring option? Her earthy, poetic lyrics ("the geese in chevron flight" in "Urge for Going"), the phrases that are now part of the culture ("They paved paradise, put up a parking lot"), and the unusual melodic intervals traced by that lissome voice earned her the status of a pop legend. Fearless experimentation ensured that she will also be seen as one of the most important musicians of the twentieth century. Joni on Joni is an authoritative, chronologically arranged anthology of some of Mitchell's most illuminating interviews, spanning the years 1966 to 2014. It includes revealing pieces from her early years in Canada and Detroit along with influential articles such as Cameron Crowe's never-before-anthologized Rolling Stone piece. Interspersed throughout the book are key quotes from dozens of additional Q&As. Together, this material paints a revealing picture of the artist— bragging and scornful, philosophical and deep, but also a beguiling flirt.

Celebrate the captivating life of Joni Mitchell, the world-famous songbird who used her music to ignite and inspire an entire generation, in this stunning picture book biography from award-winning author and illustrator Selina Alko. Joni Mitchell painted with words. Sitting at her piano or strumming the guitar, she turned the words into songs. The songs were like brushstrokes on a canvas, saying things that were not only happy or sad but true. But before composing more than two hundred songs, Joni was a young girl from a town on the Canadian prairie, where she learned to love dancing, painting, birdsong, and piano. As she grew up into an artist, Joni took her strong feelings--feelings of love and frustration, and the turbulence that came with being a young woman--and wrote them into vivid songs. Brought to life by Selina Alko's rainbow collages and lyrical language, this heartfelt portrait of a feminist and folk icon is perfect for parents, children, and music lovers everywhere. Back matter includes a letter from the author and Joni's full discography.

Joni Mitchell is one of the foremost singer-songwriters of the late twentieth century. Yet despite her reputation, influence, and cultural importance, a detailed appraisal of her musical achievement is still lacking. Whitesell presents a through exploration of Mitchell's musical style, sound, and structure in order to evaluate her songs from a musicological perspective. His analyses are conceived within a holistic framework that takes account of poetic nuance, cultural reference, and stylistic evolution over a long, adventurous career. Mitchell's songs represent a complex, meticulously crafted body of work. The Music of Joni Mitchell offers a comprehensive survey of her output, with many discussions of individual songs, organized by topic rather than chronology. Individual chapters each explore a different aspect of her craft, such as poetic voice, harmony, melody, and large-scale form. A separate chapter is devoted to the central theme of personal freedom, as expressed through diverse symbolic registers of the journey quest, bohemianism, creative license, and spiritual liberation. Previous accounts of Mitchell's songwriting have tended to favor her poetic vision, expansive verse structures, and riveting vocal delivery. Whitesell fills out this account with special attention to musical technique, showing how such traits as complex or conflicting sonorities, dualities of harmonic mode, dialectical tensions of texture and register, intricately layered instrumental figuration, and a variable vocal persona are all essential to her distinctive identity as a songwriter. The Music of Joni Mitchell develops a set of conceptual tools geared specifically to Mitchell's songs, in order to demonstrate the extent of her technical innovation in the pop song genre, to give an account of the formal sophistication and rhetorical power characterizing her work as a whole, and to provide grounds for the recognition of her intellectual stature as a composer within her chosen field.

A lush exploration of Joni Mitchell's career and art. When singer, musician, and broadcast journalist Malka Marom had the opportunity to interview Joni Mitchell in 1973, she was eager to reconnect with the performer she'd first met late one night in 1966 at a Yorkville coffeehouse. More conversations followed over the next four decades of friendship, and it was only after Joni and Malka completed their most recent recorded interview, in 2012, that Malka discovered the heart of their discussions: the creative process. In Joni Mitchell: In Her Own Words, Joni and Malka follow this thread through seven decades of life and art, discussing the influence of Joni's childhood, love and loss, playing dives and huge festivals, acclaim and criticism, poverty and affluence, glamorous triumphs and tragic mistakes . . . This riveting narrative, told in interviews, lyrics, paintings, and photographs, is shared in the hope of illuminating a timeless body of work and inspiring others.

"She was like a storm." —Leonard Cohen Reckless Daughter is the story of an artist and an era that have left an indelible mark on American music. Joni Mitchell may be the most influential female recording artist and composer of the late twentieth century. In Reckless Daughter, the music critic David Yaffe tells the remarkable, heart-wrenching story of how the blond girl with the guitar became a superstar of folk music in the 1960s, a key figure in the Laurel Canyon music scene of the 1970s, and the songwriter who spoke resonantly to, and for, audiences across the country. A Canadian prairie girl, a free-spirited artist, Mitchell never wanted to be a pop star. She was nothing more than “a painter derailed by circumstances,” she would explain. And yet, she went on to become a talented self-taught musician and a brilliant bandleader, releasing album after album, each distinctly experimental, challenging, and revealing. Her lyrics captivated listeners with their perceptive language and naked emotion, born out of Mitchell’s life, loves, complaints, and prophecies. As an artist whose work deftly balances narrative and musical complexity, she has been admired by such legendary lyricists as Bob Dylan and Leonard Cohen and beloved by such groundbreaking jazz musicians as Jaco Pastorius, Wayne Shorter, and Herbie Hancock. Her hits—from “Big Yellow Taxi” to “Both Sides, Now” to “A Case of You”—endure as timeless favorites, and her influence on the generations of singer-songwriters who would follow her, from her devoted fan Prince to Björk, is undeniable. In this intimate biography, drawing on dozens of unprecedented in-person interviews with Mitchell, her childhood friends, and a cast of famous characters, Yaffe reveals the backstory behind the famous songs—from Mitchell’s youth in Canada, her bout with polio at age nine, and her early marriage and the child she gave up for adoption, through the love affairs that inspired masterpieces, and up to the present—and shows us why Mitchell has so enthralled her listeners, her lovers, and her friends.

An extraordinary collection of photographs of the legendary Joni Mitchell, captured by celebrated rock-and-roll photographer Norman Seeff. Joni: The Joni Mitchell Sessions is the ultimate celebration of a visionary musician and the artist who captured her spirit on film. It is a creative partnership that has lasted for over 40 years. Joni Mitchell, the artist behind celebrated hits “Help Me” and “Big Yellow Taxi,” and Norman Seeff, a rock-and-roll photographer with a host of legendary subjects in his portfolio, did some of their best work together. Joni was a truly authentic subject, able to surrender herself to the art and express herself freely within his lens. Through over a dozen sessions across more than a decade together, the photographer captured the many facets of her personality in some of her most famous images. Joni: The Joni Mitchell Sessions is the culmination of their partnership. Timed to release on Joni’s 75th birthday, this collection of familiar and rare imagery tracks the pair’s history together through these exclusive moments captured on film. A combination of album artwork and candid shots reveals Joni’s personality in ways few have managed to capture before or since. Featuring commentary from Seeff on the enlightenment into his art that he gained from their sessions, this compilation is a true reflection on mutual creativity between artist and muse.

'Glorious' Guardian 'Revelatory' New Yorker 'Evocative' Los Angeles Times In 1971, as her groundbreaking album Blue emerged as a singular commercial and critical success around the world, Joni Mitchell puzzled over what gift to give her friends that Christmas. The result was a handmade book, with only one hundred copies produced, filled with Joni’s hand-written lyrics and reproductions of many of her stunning drawings — portraits, abstracts, random concertgoers, and more. Each was given to a friend and, until now, the edition has remained private. Today, with Morning Glory on the Vine, Joni’s long-ago personal Christmas present is a present to us all.