"A swami told me that in my last life I was a bird," Alberta-born singer-songwriter Joni Mitchell told an interviewer last year. "In the life before that I was an English gentleman, and before that an Arab rug merchant." In this life, Mitchell is enjoying a return to commercial and critical grace, the latest chapter of which is a three-book deal recently signed with the U.S. publishing house Crown.

Along with an 18th studio album, Mitchell is now at work on her memoirs, which are to be published simultaneously by Crown, Random House in Britain and Knopf Canada. No publication date has been set. Crown, apparently, is shy of pressuring Mitchell with anything like a deadline. The other two-thirds of the deal will be a volume of Mitchell's poetry and a book sized for the coffee-table, featuring her paintings.