Travelling On The Path Of Joni Mitchell

Gabi's Review

Music critic Ann Powers take her title for Joni Mitchell's biography, from a song line “I am on a lonely road and I am travelling”. Travelling is a book that moves with its subject across a dynamic time when music stopped being about entertainment and started becoming about art. Mitchell is revealed as a pivotal figure.  She was more exceptional because of her gender, where history has judged her as villain, victim or saint.

Rock and roll in that era ran on a male prerogative no male ever had to defend, and while Powers doesn’t judge Mitchell anachronistically, she lets the contradictions stand. Mitchell's ambition came at the cost of many who loved her and the reader can reach a verdict or otherwise as they see fit.  What makes the book such an exhilarating read is the era itself. The album became a unit of meaning the listener sat with like a novel. The studio production became an instrument itself with multitracking, tape manipulation, and overdubbing. A record was no longer a document of a performance but a narrative construction, closer to film than to live music.

Songwriters claimed authorship in a way pop had rarely allowed, and Mitchell took it somewhere else again, bringing a painter’s eye and a confessional intimacy that didn’t exist in the form before her. The singer-songwriter category is largely her invention. Music was where the real arguments were being had in the 60's and 70's. Relationships, war, race, sex, consciousness and everything a life was about can be discovered in the lyrics of Mitchell's era. The record industry was big enough to fund eccentricity and not yet consolidated enough to crush it.

Reading Travelling may leave you with the realisation that Mitchell's journey was indeed a lonely road to the top. Reading it also immerses you in her unique legacy, a compact we never quite found again, where a popular song could carry the full weight of an interior life. 

Nostalgic and culturally rich, I loved it.

 
Publisher’s Review 

An Independent Best Non-Fiction Book for 2024. 

Celebrated music critic Ann Powers explores the life and career of the legendary Joni Mitchell.

What you are about to read is not a standard account of the life and work of Joni Mitchell. Instead, it’s a tale of long journeying through a life that changed popular music: of a homesick wanderer forging ahead on routes of her invention, and of me on her trail, heading toward the ringing of her voice.

One of the most celebrated artists of her generation, Joni Mitchell has inspired countless musicians and writers, while never stopping still herself.

In Travelling, celebrated music critic Ann Powers seeks to understand the paradox of Mitchell – at once both elusive and inviting – through her myriad journeys. Drawing on extensive inter­views with Mitchell’s peers and deep archival research, Powers takes readers to rural Canada, charts the course of Mitchell’s musical evolution, follows the winding road of Mitchell’s collaborations with other greats and explores the loves that fed her songwriting.

Kaleidoscopic in scope and intimate in detail, Travelling is a fresh and fascinating addition to the Joni Mitchell corpus – and one that questions whether an artist can ever truly be known to their fans.