Joni Mitchell Inspires and Unsettles a Memoirist’s Life

Reverence for Joni Mitchell is clear in Paul Lisicky’s memoir. So, too, is an artistic courage that both inspires and unsettles him.

by Megan Volpert
PopMatters
February 19, 2025

Paul Lisicky's Song So Wild and Blue: A Life with the Music of Joni Mitchell is an introspective memoir steeped in anxiety, longing, and the search for artistic identity. The book intertwines the author's personal history with his lifelong admiration for Mitchell, sometimes dipping into parasocial fandom as he imagines Mitchell's psychology in various iconic moments of her own life.

Structured in three sections - "Gathering", "Becoming", "Letting Go" - Song So Wild and Blue unfolds as a meditation on interpersonal and creative struggles undergirded by the resonance of Joni Mitchell's music in Lisicky's life. His prose, filled with astute questions about human social behavior and moments of sharp self-awareness, attempts to mirror the complexity and depth of Mitchell's work so that the memoir doesn't simply celebrate her but also uses Mitchell as a lens through which Lisicky can examine himself.

In "Gathering", the earliest years of his life are juxtaposed with his imagined version of Joni Mitchell losing the ability to walk due to polio, an image of uncertainty that haunts his reflection on taking piano lessons and beginning his first attempts at artistic expression. These formative moments, full of anxiety and self-questioning, shape his view of the world and of himself as a young queer person trying to navigate environments that were often unwelcoming. He recalls his gay cousin Andy and remarks, "All gay people had to be like this - hypervigilant, curious, judging - just to survive everyday group encounters, in which someone was ever on the ready to use your observations against you."

The insecurity and survivalism that characterize this period of his life lead to more questions than answers. This passage epitomizes Song So Wild and Blue's introspective and often tormented tone: "I didn't want to be Joni - that idea came a while back, like a message without words. I wanted something more difficult. [...] To follow Joni's lead was to find out what was inside me, which was a lot harder to find than I had the ability to see. On many days it felt like there was nothing there. I'd grab around to see if I could catch something, and I didn't know what to do with that. Who had taken me away from myself? What had I given up?" These reflections, raw and unresolved, set the stage for his continued search for understanding.

While Lisicky skillfully excavates his anxieties, a deeper parallel exploration of Joni Mitchell's struggles might have enriched the narrative. There isn't much biographical detail about her beyond well-known bullet points, which will not please Mitchell superfans nor spur casual listeners on to their own deeper explorations. Lisicky's chops are strongest when directly analyzing the music and lyrics of her songs. However, he still might have usefully dipped a toe into research beyond offering his imagined profile of what Mitchell may have felt.

While "Becoming" shifts toward his development as a writer, it remains haunted by layers of anxiety, even as moments of humor and defiance emerge. His writing retains a poet's sensibility, honed through years of literary experimentation. Though his connection to music remains, he keeps it at arm's length: "I'd keep my musical life unlived to protect it, so it could never be sullied, touched by the wrong hands, disparaged by the money system. The water of it would stay clean, so clean that I could slake my thirst with it for the rest of my days. I wasn't giving up, retreating in disappointment. I was taking care of music by protecting all the songs that would never get written." This romanticized preservation of his unwritten music mirrors his reverence for Joni Mitchell's work.

His years in the Iowa Writers' Workshop reveal the pressures and politics of literary success, how creativity is constrained by the expectations of academic institutions and the business of publishing: "And if you crossed over an arbitrary line of expression, someone was always there to call you on it, which didn't mean he didn't want to cross over with you, because he knew that's where the life was. That's where growth and change were. But power didn't live on that side. Big agents didn't either. Contracts for first novels? No. So given the choice between life and death, some always chose death, with a knowing shake of a head and a rueful squint. They'd get to be in The New Yorker one day while you kept your beautiful life."

His reluctance to openly defend Joni Mitchell at literary gatherings speaks to the high-stakes posturing in this writing program and the risk of association with perceived artistic decline. "The assumption was that Joni was a person who had squandered her art; her name was a cautionary tale" - a fear Lisicky clearly internalized as he navigated his career.

Another thread running through "Becoming" is his long-term romantic partnership with a famous poet, widely understood to be Mark Doty, though Lisicky never names him outright. The voice in these sections has a kind of quiet ache, perhaps alluding to a pain that still needs protection against a memoir style that would truly tell all. For all the depth of such a love, Lisicky's writing very clearly conveys an equally deep ambivalence about the role he played as the partner of a celebrated literary figure: "And so began the life of endless motion, of being side by side with a traveling writer who wanted to walk, run, and fly through space as much as he wanted to be still."

The performative nature of being attached to someone well-known weighs on him at his partner's events: "In such situations the room was all eyes. I felt them darting, even if they were pretending to look ahead. So he wasn't ever the only one onstage, though that was not officially so. Afterward someone inevitably said, 'I loved watching your eyes, the reaction on your face.' I was a part of the performance." This awareness extends to the history of queer literary partnerships, the potential for one partner's ambitions to be eclipsed by the other's success. An awareness of the possibility of being sidelined parallels his feelings about studying at Iowa.

One of the brightest spots is Lisicky's attendance at John Kelly's Paved Paradise, a performance adjacent to the orbit of drag where Kelly embodies Joni Mitchell. It becomes a moment of profound, multi-layered recognition: "John as Joni looked in my eyes, I looked back, and I didn't feel the urge to look away, the fear of domination or submission. I was protected, or maybe I was protecting John as Joni by listening, by being present. We made a circle around us, and it was turning like a wheel the size of the room and beyond. And it felt too many things at once to name while we were in it. Joni singing to me. Joni fan to Joni fan. Queer person to queer person. One musician singing to a former musician, trying to bring him back home."

"Letting Go" is, fittingly, less about resolution than the ongoing struggle to release old fears and attachments. His disillusionment with literary expectations continues. "I didn't seem to be able to write the kind of literary novel that stayed within the prescribed margins of what was deemed appealing." This frustration reflects his broader concern with being boxed in, mirroring Joni Mitchell's resistance to industry constraints. He seeks a greater purpose for his art.

"I didn't want my words to simply be the repository of hurt. I didn't want to be anguish's conductor, to carry a charge to people who'd already been suffering. I'd simply wanted to stand next to its power to show myself that it could be withstood. That was something to offer a reader too, right? If I could withstand it, you could too, which was not the same thing as saying that the conditions for that hurt should have been tolerated or enabled. I wanted to feel the current all the way down to my feet so that I'd never be wounded again." It's a big ask as he turns his attention to his mother's dementia and his father's struggles to care for her, bringing on still more contemplative grief.

Song So Wild and Blue concludes with an attempt to move toward delight, though the weight of all he's said before makes it difficult to embrace fully. "In a better world, I'd be able to sing it," he confesses, but he admits to picking writing to escape the scrutiny that comes with music. "Unlike music, the audience for writing was small."

Lisicky's memoir is a moving and melancholic meditation on how art shapes a life. Even as he questions his choices, he remains profoundly attuned to the power of creative expression. The reverence for Joni Mitchell is clear in Song So Wild and Blue, but more than that, the author sees in her an artistic courage that both inspires and unsettles him: "And now you might be thinking, Why didn't you retune yourself? Why weren't you a Joni, emboldened and on fire against the structures that oppressed you? Where was the lion in you to defy it all? I'm thinking that too, alongside you." A poignant admission, and perhaps Song So Wild and Blue's most lasting echo.