Entertainment
Both Sides Now: Two New Takes on Joni Mitchell
Highly personal tributes by the writers Henry Alford and Paul Lisicky each view the singer’s life and artistry through their own prism.
I DREAM OF JONI: A Portrait of Joni Mitchell in 53 Snapshots, by Henry Alford
SONG SO WILD AND BLUE: A Life With the Music of Joni Mitchell, by Paul Lisicky
On one of her signature songs, the restless, almost phosphorescent 1976 anthem “Hejira,” Joni Mitchell sits in some cafe, sketching out a life philosophy: “We all come and go unknown/Each so deep and superficial/Between the forceps and the stone.” She sounds majestic but weary, like an eagle or an off-duty Valkyrie. Who are we flightless birds to disagree?
And yet: Such is the enduring lure of Joni-ology, the secular religion of her fandom, that two new meditations on Mitchell have already landed in this youngish year, just over a month apart. Henry Alford’s “I Dream of Joni” and Paul Lisicky’s “Song So Wild and Blue” are not really traditional works of scholarship or biography; footnotes are wielded gently. Instead, Mitchell mostly serves as a mirror and a muse, a blond godhead on which to pin the authors’ respective forms and fascinations.
With a title as pun-perfect as “I Dream of Joni,” you almost can’t blame Alford, the puckish longtime New Yorker writer and humorist, for writing an entire book to justify it. The subtitle, “A Portrait of Joni Mitchell in 53 Snapshots,” provides a structure and format that suits his tone: cheerful anecdotes, trivia and freewheeling commentary, buoyed by interviews. (Among others, Alford spoke to Mitchell’s prom date, the woman who makes her dulcimers and a recent mayor of her hometown, the Canadian prairie city Saskatoon.)
The Joni portrayed here in droll, chatty interludes, some as short as a page or two, is composed of the usual canonical parts: Saskatchewan rebel, lady of the Canyon, pop-culture eminence covered in glory. There are odes to her wardrobe, her bowling skills and the black-box mysticism of her songwriting process.
A litany of 20th-century luminaries duly make their cameos — names like Warren Beatty (Mitchell called him “Pussycat”), Georgia O’Keeffe (with whom she developed an odd, prickly rapport) and Prince (a fan and later a friend, he once invited her to join him onstage to sing the chorus of “Purple Rain”; she demurred, saying she didn’t know the words).
