by Ann Powers
Dey Street Books
2024/$43.50/448 pp.
Another “biography” of the Joni Mitchell we like to call our own has arrived. Author Ann Powers is a North American music critic with a great eye for the scene. In her brilliantly titled new book, Traveling, she portrays the beloved octogenarian variously as a “homesick wanderer,” a “genius” who was able to inhabit that role only by distancing herself from other women, and a self-sufficient revolutionary. On page after page, I scribbled a note next to a zinger: “Becoming exceptional was, for her, a form of self-protection,” is one.
The standard biographical information has been covered in other works. This book newly frames Mitchell as a woman endlessly driven to move on—physically, emotionally, musically. This is attributed, in part (to my annoyance) to her “banal” surroundings as a child. Hey, are those Alberta and Saskatchewan suburbs and rivers any more banal than Ohio’s or New Jersey’s? In part also, the drive came because Joni could not allow herself to be a woman like other women.
As a through-line the travelling frame can’t be faulted. In the sixties, when Joni began to perform and write, and the seventies when she became famous, detaching oneself from hometown, from expected roles, from your “old man” and indeed from your children, suddenly became possible for women. And it seemed to be the only way to succeed as men had. Mitchell’s determination to learn, to grow, to be free from enclosure, and from anyone’s definition of her, remained for her entire career.
Her serial lovers we know about, all musicians, from Graham Nash to James Taylor to (briefly) Leonard Cohen, to, in her more domestic period, Larry Klein, with whom she spent more than a decade. News to me was that Joni worked with Black musicians and Indigenous musicians, absorbing their techniques. In the mid-seventies, bewigged, she took a road trip down the east coast of the United States and across the south to California, a “hippie sophisticate” writing about the white lines of the freeway for her album Hejira. But as Powers says, “that freeway is a place of stasis as much as a conduit to change.” Joni was “busy being free,” but today we have to question her entitlement to dabble in other identities, for instance by wearing blackface.
To me the best parts of Traveling conjure Joni’s lyrics, and literary roots. In motion from place to place, from bed to bed, and studio to studio, Mitchell has kept in touch. I feel I’ve been in conversation with her all along. She cut the path for those of us coming behind. Since her tragic brain aneurysm in 2015 and her recent reappearance at Newport, Joni has been reborn as a “crone matriarch” with a smoker’s voice, singing those first captivating songs. Still with us!
Katherine Govier is a novelist and essayist from Alberta.
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