Travelling by Ann Powers review — the lonely road of Joni Mitchell

An unusual, acerbic biography argues that the folk singer rose to great fame by resisting the pressure to be soft and likeable

by Victoria Segal
Times
July 14, 2024

When Joni Mitchell took to the stage at the Newport Folk Festival on July 24, 2022, it was a moment few fans had dared to imagine. In 2015 the Canadian singer-songwriter had been struck by a brain aneurysm that had initially left her unable to walk or talk. Sitting on a throne surrounded by her musical courtiers at the festival, Mitchell, then 78, slowly turned up the dial on her commanding presence, singing and playing the guitar on such deathless songs as Both Sides Now, Big Yellow Taxi and Amelia.

It was an irresistibly sweet victory, but it's the kind of neat happy ending that the revered American music critic Ann Powers is reluctant to accept for an artist who has always existed so fiercely on her own terms. "Joni," she writes, "what you gave us was the chance to say everything that isn't nice. To be neurotic, mean, confused, rude. While also being wise, sensual, empathetic, honest. Honest above all." As Powers shows in Travelling, a book admirably resistant to easy sentiment, Mitchell is too awkward and complicated a figure to be neutralised, softened into a beaming white-haired fairytale queen.

"What you are about to read is not a standard account of the life and work of Joni Mitchell," Powers declares grandly as the book begins. Fans keen to know exactly what the singer was doing on, say, May 9, 1987, will need to look elsewhere; Powers is more interested in cultural context, in the strange metamorphic processes of creativity, than in the emotional minutiae of Mitchell's brief affair with Leonard Cohen or the exact dimensions of the sweater she knitted for her lover Graham Nash.

Reality TV has turned the concept of being on "a journey" into a bland platitude, but Travelling frames Mitchell as an artist in constant motion, shucking off convention in a world that didn't - doesn't - trust free-floating women. "Becoming exceptional was, for her, a form of self-protection," Powers writes. Mitchell's debut album of 1968, Song to a Seagull, includes Cactus Tree, a song about a woman who refuses to be tethered to one man because "she's so busy being free" - and it's clear that Mitchell viewed the pursuit of liberty as her work, a mission to match her male counterparts for ambition and scope.

That path was tough from the start. Song to a Seagull was a record born from her turbulent post-teen years when Roberta Joan Anderson left her home in Saskatoon to play in the coffee houses of Toronto, became pregnant, and ended up unhappily married to fellow folk-singer Chuck Mitchell in Detroit. Her daughter was placed for adoption (they were reunited in 1997) and although her marriage did not last, she kept Chuck's name.

Yet Powers does not seek to fix Mitchell in place with a biographer's string and glue - she is more interested in charting Mitchell's navigations and negotiations as she crossed often hostile musical and cultural terrain. She speaks to key figures from Mitchell's past - not least Nash and David Crosby, another former lover - but Powers is wary of how frequently retold stories can lose meaning, becoming as flat and shiny as photographs. She wryly notes how Mitchell's male companions - once "all about dick energy, the rivalry, the homoerotic edge" - now speak of her with reverence, even though Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young never quite got as far as inviting Mitchell into their band.

Not that she needed them - Mitchell ascended to rock music's Olympian heights alone, presenting a convincing challenge to the kind of male genius epitomised by Bob Dylan or Cohen. She elevated the art of the confessional on her 1971 album Blue; traced a restlessly experimental arc through Court and Spark (1974) and The Hissing of Summer Lawns (1975); immersed herself in the world of jazz fusion with Hejira (1976) and Mingus (1979). Prince loved her; so do Bjork and Taylor Swift, among countless others. Cohen once asked Nash what it was like living with Mitchell. "Leonard, what's it like to live with Beethoven," he replied.

To avoid such anecdotal old chestnuts, Powers widens her circle of interviewees, her areas of research. She unpicks the pat idea that a bout of childhood polio turned Mitchell into an artist, suggesting it was more likely to be responsible for her high-level perfectionism. Cass Elliot's sister Leah Kunkel, a contemporary of Mitchell's in LA's hippy luxe Laurel Canyon scene, illuminates the ways Mitchell was not like the other girls, her preternatural talent and her lack of domestic ties allowing her entry to the CSNY boys' club. Later, Powers draws out Mitchell's second husband, Larry Klein, on her experiments with electronic music.

Powers never swerves the more difficult aspects of Mitchell's story, digging into issues other biographers might choose to gloss over. She is especially fascinated by Mitchell's move towards the complexities of jazz fusion in the 1970s, and there is a subsequent chapter on Mitchell's racial politics, including her perturbing black male alter ego Art Nouveau. She can be seen dressed as him on the cover of the 1977 album Don Juan's Reckless Daughter (excruciatingly, she allegedly tried out the costume at a Halloween party). Powers digs into this bizarre lapse, acknowledging that while there might be reasons - a desire not to be pigeonholed, maybe - there are no excuses. It's sharp, provocative criticism, refusing to slither away from the uncomfortable, from the things that jam Mitchell's heroic status.

Travelling is astute throughout, whether Powers is linking Mitchell to Joan Didion or Stevie Wonder, or analysing the gilded consumerism of the Me Generation. Possibly in a deliberate echo of Mitchell's unabashed insistence on her own genius, Powers can be an abrasive presence in her own book, inserting jarring elements of memoir, and drawing oddly self-regarding parallels between her life and Mitchell's. Yet among the many things Mitchell teaches women, it's that likeability is not always a worthy goal. Instead, Travelling displays a bracing rigour and an exhilarating curiosity about its subject, coming closer than most to catching up with Mitchell on her lonely road.