Entry to the household piano and Mitchell’s 1972 album “For the Roses” served as gateway medicine; in highschool, Lisicky began to compose his personal songs, and when that proved too intimidating, shifted to writing tales with out music. However the singer’s fluid singularity, her refusal to apologize or conform, made him really feel electrical and understood.
What follows performs out largely in an intimate, impressionistic “Portrait of the Artist as a Younger Man” mode, interwoven with Mitchell myths and parallels. Lisicky’s abilities finally earned him a spot on the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and he went on to turn out to be a well-respected instructor and writer, even the companion of a well-known poet, with properties in Provincetown and New York. His devotion to Mitchell ebbed and flowed. (“The late ’80s didn’t appear to know what to do with Joni, nor she with the late ’80s.”)
Her presence within the pages of “Track So Wild and Blue” can really feel equally unresolved, tousled in an unwieldy mixture of musical critique, inventive hypothesis — at one level, an entire inside monologue for Mitchell’s disapproving mom is conjured as she watches her daughter carry out at Carnegie Corridor — and tribute. There’s a stunning coalescence, although, within the guide’s finale, a fraught cross-country journey to see Mitchell carry out, post-aneurysm, at a spectacular outside live performance bowl in Washington State in 2023.
If Alford is the witty good friend leaning in to share good gossip at a cocktail party and Lisicky is the ardent, eloquent professor, riffing on quarter notes and the petty politics of academia, they aren’t to date aside ultimately. In a time when anybody who’s heard “A Case of You” on the drugstore or rewatched “Love Truly” at Christmas has at the least some passing data of Mitchell’s existence, to be a hard-core devotee nonetheless implies sure qualities: that one is soulful and somewhat in opposition to the grain, a defender of open tunings and tough truths. (Additionally, sure, inordinately keen on cloud metaphors.)
At 81, Mitchell, although nonetheless very important and out on this planet, is farther from the forceps than the stone. She is stardust, she is golden; uncountable followers and self-styled consultants have already tilled that backyard. To go all in anyway as these two writers do, to maintain attempting to make artwork and sense of such a identified, unknowable life, looks like about essentially the most Joni factor you would do.
I DREAM OF JONI: A Portrait of Joni Mitchell in 53 Snapshots | By Henry Alford | Gallery Books | 345 pp. | $29.99
SONG SO WILD AND BLUE: A Life With the Music of Joni Mitchell | By Paul Lisicky | HarperOne | 259 pp. | $28
