A Daughter Lost and Found

Time (Magazine)
April 21, 1997

In 1970 she wrote "they paved paradise and put up a parking lot," but singer-songwriter Joni Mitchell may be less cynical these days. As an unmarried Canadian art student in 1965, the woman who would go on to compose such quintessential '60s and '70s hits as Both Sides Now, Woodstock and Big Yellow Taxi gave birth to a baby girl. After much agonizing, she gave up the child for adoption. Last year Mitchell, now 53, hired investigators to search for her daughter. As it happens, Kilauren Gibb, 32, had also been looking for her birthmother for five years.

By February of this year, Gibb had suspected the singer might be her mother and got in touch with Mitchell's agent. Since their reunion, mother and daughter (a former model who is now a computer student) have spent several joyful weeks together. "There's a definite umbilical cord that was never cut," Gibb told the Los Angeles Times. Mitchell found more family than she expected: a 4-year-old grandson, Marlin (Gibb is separated from his father). "Kilauren and I get to watch him grow up now," says Mitchell. And to sing him her songs.