TRAVELING

A vibrant critical assessment of the eclectic and enigmatic folk/jazz/pop icon.

Veteran NPR music critic Powers, author of Weird Like Us and Good Booty, clearly admires Mitchell's creative restlessness, but she also challenges some of the received wisdom about Mitchell’s life and career and calls out her more problematic moves. To avoid retracing Mitchell’s “official portrait,” the author eschewed interviewing the artist herself, but she tracked down friends, lovers, and fellow musicians (the three groups tended to intermingle) like David Crosby and James Taylor to explore her career in depth. A childhood bout with polio was likely less formative, Powers surmises, than Mitchell’s decision in 1965 to give up a child for adoption. She had storied relationships with powerful men in the music industry, but was no pushover; Powers finds correspondence in which she pushed back against sexist marketing campaigns around her. Far from needing her virtuoso collaborators to guide her, she was an accomplished “studio rat” pushing for new ideas on her own behalf. The author writes about these themes thoughtfully and thoroughly, but her appreciation doesn’t cloud her frustration with Mitchell’s missteps—most infamously, her mid-1970s invention of a blackface character, Art Nouveau, and various attempts to appropriate Native American culture. (Powers invites Miles Grier, a Black scholar, to put Art Nouveau in a musical and cultural context.) The author covers Mitchell’s remarkable comeback from an aneurysm in 2015, and she expands her appreciation beyond Mitchell’s much-lauded comeback (with Brandi Carlisle’s support) to show how her influence extends to jazz, country, pop, and drag performance. Those simply looking for loving commentaries on Mitchell classics like Blue will find them, but Powers offers more than mere hagiography, positioning Mitchell as “an embodiment of freedom and singularity, of sorrow and of play.”

A top-notch music critic set loose on a worthy subject.