We sang Joni Mitchell's "Both Sides Now" at my eighth-grade graduation in suburban New Jersey in 1971. It ruined the song for me for decades. That said, I have always loved Mitchell. Of course I have. My generation grew up to a soundtrack of "Court and Spark," "Blue," "Ladies of the Canyon" and "Hissing of Summer Lawns." In recent years, I have played "Chelsea Morning" at the start of every day, just to set the tone.

There's new reason to delve back into Mitchell's remarkable catalogue: two new books inspired by the legendary singer-songwriter. Neither work is a traditional biography - both authors are completely and frankly obsessed with Mitchell, and neither one has conducted any interviews with Mitchell or ever met her. Henry Alford's "I Dream of Joni" is a playful, gossipy book. Paul Lisicky's "Song So Wild and Blue" is a memoir about the struggle to become an artist - and a whole person - in the context of one extraordinarily powerful creative influence.

These books join a wide shelf of creative responses to Mitchell. Beyond the well-known biographies by Sheila Weller and David Yaffe is Zadie Smith's brilliant philosophical essay "Some Notes on Attunement," which first appeared in the New Yorker in 2012 and then in her 2018 collection, "Feel Free." In it, Smith explains how she went from despising Mitchell to being so moved by her that she cannot listen to her in public, with instructive stops at Wordsworth and the philosopher Seneca along the way.

Alford's "I Dream of Joni" takes a different tack. The book is a delightful compendium of everything you ever wanted to know about Mitchell, broken down into 53 anecdotes, presented out of chronological order. Chapter 3, for instance, introduces readers to Joni's mother, Myrtle, who every day vacuumed the family garage; a few chapters later, Mitchell is on the phone with Warren Beatty, discussing his request for Georgia O'Keeffe's phone number. Chapter 36 touches on Mitchell's various health problems - her bout with polio as a child, the strange skin condition she developed later and the aneurysm that nearly ended her life in 2015. Based on exhaustive research and myriad interviews with people who knew Mitchell, the book highlights the greatest hits of Mitchell-inspired art, including John Kelly's uncanny drag performances, Greg Tate's amazing poem "How Black Is Joni Mitchell?" and a brilliant moment in Lorrie Moore's "Who Will Run the Frog Hospital?" when an entire roomful of women drop everything to sing "Little Green."

And the trivia! I'm not sure I knew that Graham Nash wrote "Our House" after he and Mitchell moved in together, and I definitely never heard that "You Can Close Your Eyes" came to James Taylor when he was watching Mitchell sleep in a motel room during the early days of their affair. I had to text each one of my children about this immediately, since not only did I nightly put them to sleep by singing this song, but my oldest son sings it to my grandchildren now.

Alford, a humorist who writes for the New Yorker, has a deliciously witty prose style. Describing Taylor and Mitchell's duet on backup vocals for Carole King's "Will You Love Me Tomorrow," he writes: "To see the most widely circulated photo of them doing this recording - Taylor is wearing the sweater that Mitchell knitted him - is to witness an atom bomb of adorable." (This of course is where you will be Googling that photograph, which is indeed nuclear-grade cute.) Of Laurel Canyon in the 1970s, he writes: "Imagine a Lite FM theme park populated by all your favorite peddlers of mellow - Carole King, Neil Young, James Taylor, Linda Ronstadt, Bonnie Raitt, Harry Nilsson, Glen Campbell, Paul Williams, and Jackson Browne lived in this enclave, as did members of the Eagles, the Byrds, the Turtles, Three Dog Night, the Doors, and the Mamas & the Papas. The neighborhood smelled of eucalyptus and potential."

Lisicky is up to something a little different in "Song So Wild and Blue." He sets himself an ambitious goal - "to give to others what Joni had given to me, which was more than a sequence of brilliant albums. Her work had given me a chart as to how one lives a life, evolving over time, rejecting a previous self, trying out a self simply through a new palette of tunings, keys, instruments, and washes of sound" - and pursues it with intensity and candor. "I'm afraid to say Joni's songs saved my life, because it sounds too easy, but then again, no - I'll break through that wall. Those songs did save my life. They showed me that you could take what others saw as awkwardness, limitation - failure - an aspect of ridicule, and spin it into pure gold." His commitment to getting to the heart of his experience of Mitchell's music creates a context for contemplating one's own. I hadn't thought about it for a while, but for a troubled adolescent me, the insouciant lyrics of "Twisted" were a kind of defiant, redemptive theme song. "They say as a child I appeared a little bit wild ..."

A major thread of the memoir is Lisicky's coming of age as a gay man and his romantic life. Though he doesn't name the poet Mark Doty in this manuscript, he recounts some of the story of their 12-year relationship (the couple broke up in 2013). Lisicky, the author of seven books, including "Later: My Life at the Edge of the World," goes on to share details about his current relationship, with a man named Jude, to whom the book is dedicated.

At the start, Lisicky worried that Jude might not like Mitchell's work - a dealbreaker - but it turns out that their shared love of the artist is embedded in their love of each other. "We kept coming back to Joni as our orientation point: her phrasing, her tunings, her guitar versus her piano songs. Her half-baked songs - it felt both transgressive and thrilling to talk about the half-baked songs in such a way that made our disappointment bring us into a deeper form of respect." Eighteen months later, sitting together at a Mitchell concert in 2023, Lisicky's narrative reaches its emotional peak: "For the first time I was in my life and not hovering above my life. I loved him to the point of speechlessness. The sunset flared in the sky beyond the stage."

Alford and Lisicky cover some of the same ground. In both books, for example, you'll find the backstory of "Both Sides Now" - that it was inspired by Mitchell's encountering a passage about clouds from Saul Bellow's "Henderson the Rain King" while on an airplane. After first being made famous by Judy Collins, the song has been recorded by either 1,616 (Lisicky) or 1,573 (Alford) other artists, including Glen Campbell, Bing Crosby, Courtney Love and Laurie Anderson, and it was central to the hit movies "Love Actually" and "CODA," as well as many TV shows and ads. Both books recount the performance of the song during Mitchell's triumphal return to the stage at Newport with Brandi Carlile in 2022, "a radiance in creme and pale blue on a tufted rococo chair" (Lisicky); "sitting on her gilded, Louis XIV-style throne ... wielding her cane like a tribal staff, exuding buckets of regality" (Alford).

I wondered how these two authors felt when they heard that their books, each long in the making, would come out so close together. I think I can reassure them. Though there is enough similarity that I'd suggest not reading one right after the other, their overall effect is quite different. The true Joni fans - and it seems there are very, very many of us - will want to read both.