Musician's biographer back for a visit

by Juliet Smith
New Plymouth Daily News
January 12, 2002

KAREN O'BRIEN says she used to wake up dreaming about Canadian musician and artist Joni Mitchell.

The former New Plymouth journalist spent so much time researching her for a biography that Joni Mitchell was never far from her thoughts.

But it got to the stage, when the book, Shadows and Light: Joni Mitchell, was finished that she could not handle listening to her music.

"For a month I couldn't bear to listen to any of it -- even songs I have loved for years."

Ms O'Brien said she now listened to the occasional song but, "Joni and I need some distance from each other."

Joni Mitchell was one of the most influential musicians of the 20th century, who was not only a musician but a brilliant painter and photographer, she said.

Her music career boomed after Woodstock, but by the late 1970s she had left the mainstream music industry, moving on to experimenting with samples, merging jazz and poetry and exploring world music.

Ms O'Brien said she was partly inspired to write a biography on Joni Mitchell because of the lack of writing available on her. "I wanted to redress the imbalance, compared to someone like Bob Dylan who has had hundreds of books written on him."

The neglect was largely because Joni Mitchell was a woman musician and also because she did not produce an album every year or come out top of the charts, she said.

Ms O'Brien was visiting New Plymouth from her home base in London for her yearly visit. She lived in New Plymouth and worked as a reporter and a sub-editor at The Daily News from 1978-1981.

"New Plymouth is the place I like to come back to. I can't believe I took the city so much for granted when I was here. It's stunningly beautiful."

These days she works as a producer for the BBC World Service and in her spare time is a music journalist who write books. Her previous book, Hymn to Her, was a collection of writing on women musicians, including Yoko Ono and Kirsty McColl.