Alison Stewart: This is All Of It on WNYC, I'm Alison Stewart. This year's Grammys were a reminder of the legendary status of an artist. When a woman seated on a throne like chair turned to sing what was an anthem to a generation. [MUSIC- Joni Mitchell-Both sides now]

Joni Mitchell is the subject of a new book, traveling on the path of Joni Mitchell. From a childhood in central Canada to her life on the road as a young woman, to the foundational songs and relationships when she lived in Laurel Canyon, California. Author Ann Powers writes, "People are not definitive. Neither is anyone's story. That is the point of Mitchell's songs. Life is stranger and bigger than that, and people, even geniuses, are smaller, human, always incomplete. Every legend is also one of us." The book is out now, and NPR music critic Ann Powers joins me. Hi, Ann.

Ann Powers: Hey, Alison. I'm so happy to be here.

Alison Stewart: Listeners, are you a Joni Mitchell fan? What about her music speaks to you? Call us or text to us at 212-433-WNYC, 212-433-9692. You can reach out to us on social medial @AllofitWNYC. Do you remember the first time that you heard Joni Mitchell's music? What was the song? 212-433-9692, 212-433-WNYC. There have been plenty, plenty of biographies dedicated to Joni Mitchell. When you were thinking about writing your own book, how did your contribution, how did you see it standing out in the world of Joni Mitchell on the bookshelves everywhere?

Ann Powers: That's a great question. It's true, there are some great conventional biographies of Joni, and I really wanted to get into the world in which she lived, the world that made her and the world that she made. I wanted to contextualize her. At the same time, I wanted to consider my relationship with her music and sort of offer the journey of a fan, actually of a skeptic who became a fan, trying to play this role of a pilgrim on the road, following this near deity. As you said, she is a legend.

Alison Stewart: Were you a skeptic because you were a critic, professionally?

Ann Powers: Yes. I think my skepticism had to do with something of a knee jerk reaction against any legendary pop star, anyone who's accrued that status as a monument almost, as a solid thing. I just am put off by the way we fetishize our stars and the way we kind of solidify them and don't let them be the complex and sometimes imperfect people that they are. I wanted to get to every aspect of Joni Mitchell's work and her life.

Alison Stewart: You make it clear that although you interviewed many people who are around her, you didn't want to interview Joni Mitchell for this book. Why not?

Ann Powers: Yes. For one thing, when I started writing this book, it wasn't too long after Joni had suffered this life altering aneurysm, and it was actually unclear if anyone would interview her. Subsequently, she's only done very few interviews. She did a long one with her friend Cameron Crowe, but that was one practical reason. But really, as I got into writing the book, Alison, I realized that if I were to make an encounter with her the center of the book, and really in some ways, turn my authority over to her, because once you have made it an official biography, you as a writer don't have the same amount of control or authority, I would lose the chance to make associations I wanted to make, or make criticisms I wanted to make. Those kinds of books exist out there. There are some great ones, I hope mine contributes something different.

Alison Stewart: As you collected all the interviews and you've read all the correspondence about Joni Mitchell to Joni Mitchell, what would you do with that years of information? How did you structure the book?

Ann Powers: It's a multi layered book. It does move chronologically through her life. There is the thread or the current of a conventional biography in the book. Then there's also the story of my coming to reckon with her as a figure, as an artist, as a person I'm trying to understand, and there is all of this placing her within historical moments. I write, for example, in the chapter about her childhood. I also wanted to think about how, why do we care about artists childhoods? It's partly because artists tell us to, and I was fascinated with how many songs Joni and her peers wrote about their childhood. I wanted to look at that and think about the myth of the child in songwriters work, so trying to go unexpected places.

Alison Stewart: Let's take a couple calls. Let's go to Nicole. Hi. Nicole's calling in from Brooklyn. How are you?

Nicole: Hi, Alison. I'm so good. I love this topic so much, so you might have to cut me off.

Alison Stewart: Never.

Nicole: Since I was 18, and I remember my peers being like, "Joni who?" I'm 37 now, so not so long ago, but I was first introduced to her via vinyl on this amazing album, Miles of Isles, which was just like a compilation record from a live show that she did. Then my interest just exploded from there. I feel like she is the antithesis of a powerful woman who wanted to travel, who didn't keep a child that she couldn't raise herself. She was also just rock and roll, as much as she was soul and an artist, and she just has this beautiful, expansive career, and clearly I adore her.

Alison Stewart: Nicole, you did well. Thank you for calling in. [crosstalk] Go ahead.

Ann Powers: Oh, I just wanted to say, Nicole, I love that you came to Joni via Miles of Isles. One thing I try to do in the book is honor every point in Joni's career, and I'm fascinated that younger fans, fans in their 30s, some in their 20s, might have gotten into Joni through some of her later albums, like Night Ride Home or Turbulent Indigo. Nora Jones, for example. I remember having a conversation with her a while ago where she said those late '80s, early '90s albums were her way in. This is the thing, Joni is a lot more than Blue. That's all I have to say, and more than Hejira, even though those are great records.

Alison Stewart: Let's talk to Reno in Tribeca. Hi, Reno. Thanks for calling All Of It.

Rena: Sure. Hey, Alison. How you doing?

Alison Stewart: Good, thanks. Well, we lost her. She'll call back.

Ann Powers: We lost her.

Alison Stewart: We'll talk to Todd from the Upper west side. Hi, Todd.

Todd: Hi, Alison, and welcome back. I'm so delighted that you made it through, really. It was a rough few months without you. I'm in my mid 60s, I happen to play guitar and sing, but for me, Joni Mitchell's kind of a coming of age story. I was telling the screener that I just turned 14, that was the early '70s, and I was visiting my older brother at college. I was falling asleep one night in his dorm room, and what was playing court and spark, Raised on Robbery. I remember falling asleep to the cool glow of the old fashioned AM FM receiver, and I thought, this is what being grown up is all about. It was just the coolest thing.

It was a combination of that moment in my life, early adolescence and music, which actually, was always really important to me. When I heard that you guys were talking about Joni Mitchell and this great new biography, congratulations by the way, Ann.

Ann Powers: Thank you.

Todd: I thought, yeah, I've got a Joni Mitchell memory, so that's all.

Alison Stewart: Thank you so much for calling in, Todd.

Ann Powers: I love it. I have to say, I know I keep interrupting you, but I want to reply to this.

Alison Stewart: Pease.

Ann Powers: My first Joni Mitchell song was Raised on Robbery, too. I'm a little younger than Todd, but that was a song in my childhood. I had older parents who loved the swing era and then the kind of vocal sound of the Andrews sisters, which is what Joni is invoking with that song. That's when I fell in love with her, too.

Alison Stewart: My guest is Ann Powers. Her new book, Traveling: On the Path of Joni Mitchell is out now. She's here to talk about her years researching Joni's life, analyzing her music. We're also taking your calls. Are you a Joni Mitchell fan? What about her music speaks to you? Do you remember the first time you heard her music? Our phone number is 212-433-WNYC. 212-433-9691, you can also reach out to us on social media @allofitWNYC.

I want to ask you about the traveling part of that. First of all, why did you name it traveling? I think I know, but I want to know.

Ann Powers: First of all, you know why I named it traveling, and in fact, originally, if you look at this book, you see that the word traveling is faded out, it's printed and faded out four times, so in your head you hear traveling, traveling, traveling, traveling. I'm not going to sing because that would be painful for all of us, but of course, it is the first line of Joni's classic song All I want. I wanted that to kind of echo in people's ears when they heard the title.

Also, it's an obvious metaphor, Alison, I have to admit. Really, she's on a journey, I'm on a journey, but she does embody the mobility of people, and particularly women, I think, at the time, in the post war era and especially in the '60s and the '70s. She herself is an inveterate traveler, she's a road dog. She's lived in many different places, and her songs also are so mobile, but it's really the story of mobility and how it is played out in her music that inspired the title.

Alison Stewart: Of course, we have All I Want cued up. Let's listen.

[MUSIC - Joni Mitchell - All I want]

Alison Stewart: It's very interesting. We got this text, Ann, that said, "I heard her as a 12-year-old girl, a live recording of All I want brought me to tears. I have since been a lifelong fan and follower. She tells incredible stories with unique voice and sound. She changed my understanding of music forever with her invention of new chords and rhythms, new melody protocols, brilliant, vulnerable and sensitive artist. It's hard not to appreciate her music, writing, painting because it is like no other." I found that interesting because it focused-- she said she heard it when she was a twelve-year-old girl.

Ann Powers: Amazing. It's interesting because we think of Joni's music as so much about adult life, right? She's one of the most sophisticated songwriters and lyricists ever in any form. Her classic works, they deal with adult issues. The tension between wanting to be an artist or have a career, and wanting to have a domestic life and love. The kinds of the way you deal with regret, the way you deal with loss. This is also essential to Joni, but it's amazing that a 12-year-old could, especially from a song like All I want, could really get something.

On the other hand, there's that side of Joni that writes these great classic songs that have become children's songs, like Circle Game, for example, which many children's choirs have sung. She's able to do both, for sure.

Alison Stewart: My guest is Ann Powers. The name of the book is Traveling: On the Path of Joni Mitchell. We'll have more with Ann and as well as some of you callers. This is All Of It.

You are listening to All Of It on WNYC. I'm Alison Stewart. My guest is Ann Powers. She's written a new book, Traveling: On the Path of Joni Mitchell. There is a biography in here, you talk about her childhood. She was born Roberta Joan Anderson in 1943, but you also talk a lot about how she moved, how she was always on the move, Calgary, Toronto, Detroit, New York, New England, London, Coconut Grove, all in a span of few years. When you think about all of the movement that she experienced, where do we see the movement in her songs?

Ann Powers: The movements in the music itself, I think that's so important to talk about. She famously invented her own guitar tunings because she had suffered from polio as a child. In recovering, she had a lot of weakness in her left hand, which forms, of course, the chords on the fretboard, and so she adopted these open tunings that she learned from blues artists like Elizabeth Cotton, Richie Havens, people like that. Already, she's moving beyond the parameters of conventional folk music. Then the way, especially as she hits her stride in the seventies, her lyrics and the structures of her songs start to be almost like stream of consciousness at times.

I mean, think about Hejira, which is a road album, by the way. Hejira means pilgrimage. The song lyrics just pour out of her. The movement of her mind is the movement of the music, so it's right there in the music. Then, of course, just as a young woman at a time when a lot of young women were challenging conventional gender roles, she made herself mobile. She made herself a traveler in order to escape what she saw as a life that was attractive, but she couldn't live the life of the wife, the conventional wife and mother.

Alison Stewart: We're going to listen to the song, Day After Day, which she claims was her first song. What should we listen for here?

Ann Powers: Oh, this is a great example of what I'm talking about. It is a blues, it's really very much ripped from the American song bag, as they say, but it's a fascinating song. It was probably written at a time when she was aware that she was pregnant with the child she then entrusted in adoption a few months after that child was born. She was alone, beginning her life, beginning her career in a crisis point. It's a classic song about a woman who's been abandoned by a lover, but then there's also this question of this woman is far from home. She herself left her home. Already, we see this determination to separate from convention and then the predicament that causes.

Alison Stewart: Here's Day After Day by Joni Mitchell.

[MUSIC - Joni Mitchell - Day After Day]

Alison Stewart: Let's talk to Ellen on line three. Hi, Ellen. Thanks for calling All Of It.

Ellen: Hi, Alison. Welcome back. So glad you're back.

Alison Stewart: Thank you.

Ellen: I'm in my 70s, and Joni Mitchell was the soundtrack of my college years. I saw her very early in a club in the village in the '60s before she was at all well known, just singing very soulfully with long blonde hair, not very slick, just singing as a passionate folk singer. I turned to my boyfriend at that time and I said, "Wow, I think she's going to go somewhere."

Ann Powers: And she did.

Alison Stewart: Thank you for that call. Let's talk to, I believe, Marie. Is Marie there? Hi, Marie.

Marie: Yes. Hi. How are you doing?

Alison Stewart: Doing great.

Marie: I have been a Joni-- can you hear me okay?

Alison Stewart: Yes, you're great. Go for it.

Ann Powers: Yes, you sound great.

Marie: Okay, great. I have been a Joni Mitchell fan since my teenage years, and my friend Anthea had her self portrait album, where she painted her beautiful face on the cover of it. I was playing guitar at the time, and when I started to hear the songs and the open tunings, I just became obsessed. I learned all her open tunings, played them, memorized all the songs on her album, been following her ever since. My friend Dina Oster, we were so obsessed with her. Actually, built a dulcimer because she researched the woman who built Joni Mitchell's dulcimers, and she built a dulcimer like that.

We were also playing her songs on the dulcimer. I have been playing her songs ever since. Urge For Going, which was never on one of her albums, I still have as part of my repertoire. I'm in a band. I've been in women's bands my whole life, Mountain Aidens and still sing Urge For Going, which is so beautiful. I'd say she influenced my teaching life. I'm a music teacher, and I teach children a lot of her songs.

Alison Stewart: You know what? I had a music teacher who taught me all of her songs as well. We appreciate you, Marie. One more. Let's talk to Caleb from Brooklyn. Hi, Caleb. Hey, Caleb, you there?

Caleb: Yes, I'm here.

Alison Stewart: Go for it, you're on the air.

Caleb: I'm 46. I grew up knowing about Joni from my mother's era, but never really had a go in with her until I was probably 18/19. I was a huge Prince fan, and Prince's song, The Ballad Of Dorothy Parker, he references her song from Court and Spark, helped me in kind of an interpolation. Then I learned that he considered her one of his favorites and so I really fell in love with Court and Spark, and then got into so many of her other albums and the rest of her music. Really appreciated the down at the Chinese Cafe interpolation with Unchained Melody that Joni Mitchell did. The hissing of Summer Lawns is one of my favorite albums. I think she's a brilliant storyteller, is definitely one of my all time favorites, along with Prince.

Alison Stewart: Thank you so much for calling in. Does that surprise you?

Ann Powers: Me? No. The Prince was a huge Joni fan. Hissings of Summer Lawns was his favorite record. In fact, he famously offered her a song to record, but in his playful, teasing way, he offered her a song called Emotional Pump, which is one of his-- I call this the lingerie songs of Prince. Joni herself said, "I'd have to jump around in a black teddy to sing that song, and I'm not going to do that." They were quite fond of each other, though.

Alison Stewart: I'm going to read this text, and you do touch on this in the book. "Have always loved Joni Mitchell, but was disappointed to learn recently of multiple incidents of her and blackface. Can the author speak to this and to Joni's relationship to Black music? You write about this in your chapter, For Art's Sake."

Ann Powers: Yes, I have a whole chapter on this. It is really the most difficult aspect, I think, of Joni's career. In the 1970s, she adopted, or she made public a persona that she's always said lived within her, this persona of Art Nouveau, also known as Claude, who is a Black man. She first wore the costume, including putting brown makeup on her face at a Halloween party. It still was completely inappropriate, but a little bit understandable, I guess, that she would have worn it at a Halloween party. Again, not making any excuses for it. Later, though, she appeared on the cover of her album, Don Juan's Reckless Daughter in this costume. She even appeared a couple times on film in this costume.

I really felt like this was an under confronted aspect of her career. Everyone who's written about Joni touches on it, and there's been a few great essays on it by Eric Lott, Kevin Falaise, but nobody's really taken it by the horns. Well, there is one person, Miles Greer. He's a great scholar. He teaches at Queen's College. He's going to write his own Joni book, and I was lucky enough to talk to him about this for my book as I confront this subject. Please check it out, I think it's really something we do need to talk about.

By the way, last thing, Joni herself has never denounced her persona as Art Nouveau. However, this year, the reissue of Don Juan's Reckless Daughter, she reissued it with a different cover. I think that's a tacit signal of something.

Alison Stewart: Joni Mitchell is still alive today. She's made some notable appearances in the last few years, the New York Faux Festival to the Grammy Awards. You've got Brandi Carlisle helming up this resurgence of Joni Mitchell. What do you think people would take away from her creativity in 2024?

Ann Powers: I think for many people, it's a story of triumph, triumph over the kinds of ills we can all understand. I mean, she's had these horrible health issues, and the fact that she learned to walk again for a third time because she'd had to learn to walk again after her polio bout as a young girl is so inspiring. Then also, we never appreciate our older artists enough. I don't care. Sure, Dylan, he's out on the road. Maybe he gets enough love, but we tend to venerate them at a distance, and it's so great that she's back and just able to bask in the love. No one can create the feeling of love and of shine and light more than Brandi. Brandi Carlisle, it was the perfect person to surround Joni with love and appreciation.

Alison Stewart: Favorite song of yours?

Ann Powers: Oh, man, every time. I don't know. The one that sprang to mind is a song that she wrote about-- I love the Larry Klein years, the years in the '80s when she was married to Larry Klein and they produced records together, did lots of experimentation. There's a song, though, called Last Chance Lost, which is the only song she ever wrote about their breakup, clearly. It's such a devastating little song about what happens, how a long standing relationship just dissolves. I recommend that Last Chance Lost.

Alison Stewart: Ann Powers. Her book is called Traveling: On the Path of Joni Mitchell. Always a pleasure to talk to you.

Ann Powers: Thank you so much, Alison. It truly is.

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