Traveling: On the Path of Joni Mitchell
Mitchell is one of a handful of women in her era who were invited into the music world’s clubby little definition of genius, and Powers has the chops to explain exactly why that was so, both through her virtuosic writing on Mitchell’s musicianship and creativity and through a sophisticated interrogation of the gender and race politics of the era. She shows us how we can love an artist like Mitchell and let her be human, too, how we can understand her genius from — forgive me, Joni — both sides now ... Powers isn’t a biographer, she asserts on Page 2, she’s a critic, and she didn’t ever interview Mitchell for this book. That status frees her to write in a way that doesn’t trade creative independence for access ... eading Powers is like hearing one of Mitchell’s signature open tuning chords, an adaptation she developed because of polio’s effects on her left hand. The book, like the chord, doesn’t resolve neatly — it asks questions that ring on.
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Remarkably insightful ... Keeping a distance pays great dividends here. Powers proves an adroit codebreaker for the uniquely complex cross-pollination of romantic ennui, class consciousness, spiritual striving and occasional narcissism that characterizes the full sweep of the Joni Mitchell enterprise ... Astute ... It is a great compliment to Powers’s ebullient style that her accruing sense of fatigue and wonder around her subject never reads as less than fascinating. Visceral prose, pure fusion.
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A highly personal, even confessional, 400-plus-page meditation on Mitchell’s life and work ... Admirably, she appears to have read everything written about Mitchell ... Will be catnip for readers who would enjoy spending a weekend with a chatty music-critic friend, with everyone talking excitedly, even obsessively, about Joni Mitchell.
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