Posted February 03, 2009
JoniMitchell.com has received an advance copy of Will You Take Me As I Am: Joni's Blue Period
We were a little worried that this might be a "making of an album" book centered on Joni's 1971 album Blue. Thankfully it is not. Michelle Mercer has written a seriously entertaining and imaginatively thoughtful study of Joni Mitchell's autobiographical songwriting. Mercer's treatment of what she calls Mitchell's "Blue Period" encompasses the songwriter's career from 1970 to 1976. As she tells the story of this Blue Period, Mercer skillfully covers subjects as diverse as Augustine, Beat Buddhism, the songwriting of Bob Dylan and Leonard Cohen, and the influence of landscape on music.
The book contains plenty of fresh quotes - this is the first book about Joni and her work to include original interviews with the artist herself. Mercer makes the most of her access to Joni, often quoting her at length on previously unexplored subjects. And though Mercer is not interested in gossip (she's "more interested in how songwriters make their work personal than in what they get personal about") she does turn up some revelations: the backstory of the song "Court and Spark;" the identity of "Richard" from the "The Last Time I Saw Richard" (no... it's not Chuck).
But the real strength of the book is Mercer's expansive examination of Joni's autobiographical work. Anyone who's applied the "confessional songwriter" tag to Joni Mitchell might think differently after Mercer's careful study of the history of literary confessionalism and personal songwriting. Mercer argues persuasively that Joni's work departs from the confessional model: "She doesn't strive to tell the truth about herself. She strives to find and express human truths, and in the process, she happens to reveal quite a bit about herself."
The story of Joni's childhood has been often told, but Mercer brings it new meaning by focusing on its prairie setting. With this focus, Mercer illuminates in great clarity and detail the "sound of open spaces" that have been so vaguely referred to in descriptions of Joni's music in the past. Along the way Mercer makes a sweeping examination of the connection between music and landscape, considering everything from Beethoven symphonies to Neil Young's prairie songs. (This chapter, "Eyes On The Land And The Sky," includes a priceless quote from Joni in which she inventively links the sound of Jamaican tree frogs to the rhythm of reggae.)
For all the book's interview material, Mercer is not afraid to argue with Joni. She takes issue with Joni's devaluing of her autobiographical period, and more controversially takes on some of Joni's most sacred self-mythology. For example, the author doesn't buy that her bout with childhood polio was the originating moment of her artistry: "Sometimes artists and their fans try too hard to come up with a source for unusual creativity, even resorting to pathologizing it. A gift for art may be deepened or otherwise influenced by tragedy, but it doesn't necessarily have to be born of it."
Mercer addresses a couple periods in Joni's career that have been previously overlooked. Joni's post-Blue meltdown and retreat to British Columbia's Sunshine Coast in 1971 is fully considered for the first time here. Mercer situates Joni's retreat within a broader discussion of the value and hazards of autobiography for an artist. (A fascinating interview with songwriter Loudon Wainwright III livens up this discussion). With many supporting quotes from Joni herself, Mercer makes a compelling case for this hermitage as a major turning point in her career, a time when she began to cultivate her need for both love and freedom into an artistic strategy: "A serial romantic life allowed her to experience an affair's stream of small episodes and feelings, which would be followed by the stillness of solitude, when she could then worry those passing events into the big themes of her songs."
Another interlude considered in great depth is Joni's 1976 meeting with Chogyam Trungpa, which fans know was commemorated in the song "Refuge of the Roads." As Joni tells it, Trungpa, a Tibetan lama, forced her into a space "beyond ego," where she experienced great equanimity. Mercer builds an analysis of Hejira from Joni's story, suggesting the album was Joni's attempt "to write her way back to that temporary state of equanimity, to compose herself into the grace" that she experienced when meeting Trungpa.
Mercer's background as a National Public Radio essayist is evident in her clear, accessible prose. She often aspires to a lyricism reminiscent of her subject: Joni's traveling songs, she writes, are "aural postcards from the edge of feeling."
The photo insert is an added bonus that features many unseen childhood shots (Joni with Sharon Bell), a photo of Joni and Carey Raditz together outside the Mermaid Cafe, and even one of Joni during her solo "hejira" back to LA in 1976.
This book is highly recommended.
Will You Take Me As I Am
(DISCLOSURE: JoniMitchell.com provided some research assistance to the author of this book.)
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