I DREAM OF JONI

An assessment-in-fragments of Mitchell’s complicated musical and personal journey.

This stylish consideration of the folk-rock-jazz legend by magazine veteran Alford (And Then We Danced, etc.) is “loosely inspired” by Craig Brown’s dishy 2017 book, 99 Glimpses of Princess Margaret. Each of its 53 sections begins in a particular time and place and explores a particular theme in Mitchell’s life: Her relationship to the ’60s Laurel Canyon folk scene, her childhood in icy Manitoba, her cringeworthy late-’70s affinity for blackface, her relationship with her daughter, Kilauren Gibb, whom she gave up for adoption and reunited with in the late ’90s. Alford’s riffs are typically thoughtful and informed, based on books and previously published articles but also bolstered by his own interviews with Mitchell’s childhood acquaintances and collaborators (though not Mitchell herself). Still, the life-in-pieces approach reflects Alford’s belief that his subject defies easy summary, or even sense. Why was she so snappish in interviews? Perhaps, he speculates, “we fans didn’t realize the repercussions of our neglect. Maybe we didn’t realize that we’d abandoned our girl.” Her blackface era, he supposes, “is another example of how someone who feels things too intensely is, ironically, someone who can’t always read a room.” A clear lack of answers prompts some creative approaches: Gathering up all the punctuation marks in her lyric sheets, he finds her early records a series of gentle commas and quotation marks, while her busier, more synth-heavy ’80s albums are crazed pileups of question marks and exclamation points. Not every such salvo works: a list of contents of Gibb’s Facebook posts illuminates neither her nor her mother. Even if the book doesn’t function as a conventional biography, it succeeds as a series of prompts for fans to think about Mitchell’s sometimes-baffling artistic choices.

A deliberately disorganized but heartfelt reconsideration of an iconic artist.