Ann Powers was writing Joni Mitchell’s life story. She found her own.

With her new biography about Joni Mitchell, NPR music critic Ann Powers says she wanted to challenge the idea that there’s only one definitive story of a life. June 10, 2024 Early on, Ann Powers wasn’t a fan of Joni Mitchell. The music critic for NPR is renowned for writing about female artists such as Kate Bush and Tori Amos. Their songs had given voice to her feminist awakening. But, due to a generational gap, Ms. Powers had resisted the iconic songwriter who once called Bob Dylan her pace runner. That all changed when a publisher commissioned her to write a biography. “I didn’t know that I needed Joni,” Ms. Powers says during a video call. “She really did set the bar and set the template for what so many others have done.” Ms. Powers’ book, “Traveling: On the Path of Joni Mitchell,” available June 11, is about as conventional as her subject’s alternate guitar tunings. It not only retraces the seldom explored paths of the musician’s travelogue, but it also detours into Ms. Powers’ own experiences. In a conversation with The Monitor, the author explains that music takes on additional meaning when we filter it through our own subjective perspectives. Ms. Powers’ autobiographical stories illustrate the universality of Ms. Mitchell’s songs. This interview has been edited for length and clarity. What makes Joni Mitchell extraordinary? It’s not that often that you have the combination of this restless mind that endlessly wants to move to a new place and this hyper brilliant sui generis talent. She is both. Oftentimes, when you look at long careers, whether they’re musicians or painters or filmmakers, many great artists kind of do one thing or maybe two things very well and offer variations on that. But with Joni, there’s these distinct loops within loops within loops. As I say in the book, quoting Dan Wilson the songwriter, there’s just this way she moves and changes and it’s never unrecognizable, but is always requiring us to go somewhere maybe we don’t want to go with her. I think another thing that’s very rare about […]

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