One of the greatest living artists in popular music still isn’t properly recognized. Joni transcends gender, genre, and time. Here’s why.

By Lindsay Zoladz Oct 16, 2017, 8:30am EDT

In one of the golden, waning years of the 1960s, Chuck Mitchell told his young wife to read Saul Bellow’s novel Henderson the Rain King. It was not a gesture of marital kindness so much as a power move: Chuck was older and more educated than Joan, and to her ears, his book recommendations always came with a tone of condescension. (“I’m illiterate,” she bemoaned to a friend around that time. “My husband’s given me a complex that I haven’t read anything.”) Chuck and Joan were both folk singers who played as a duo—together if not exactly equal. He was traditional where she was itchily forward-thinking (“Lately he’s taken to saying I’m crazy and blind,” she’d later sing in one of her own songs, “He lives in another time”). She had, on her guitar, an ability to find strange new tunings that Chuck called “mystical.” His penchant for making his wife feel decidedly un-genius-like was most likely born out of a terror—one that grew stronger with each day—that she actually was one.

Still, one day around 1966, she brought a copy of Henderson with her on a plane. It just so happened that the narrator of the book was also on a plane. “We are the first generation to see clouds from both sides,” he wrote, and Joni read. “What a privilege! First people dreamed upward. Now they dream both upward and downward.” That passage snagged something inside her. She closed the book. She scribbled some lyrics, and when the plane landed she picked up a guitar and twirled the tuning knobs until she found the properly improper chords to accompany her words. When she first played the song for Chuck, he scoffed. What could a 23-year-old girl know about “both sides” of life? More than anything, he was insulted that she’d put the book down less than halfway through and hadn’t bothered to finish it. He took this as evidence of her inferior intelligence, her “rube” upbringing, her flighty attention span. And yet, what else was there to get out of Henderson the Rain King? What more could a human being possibly get out of a book than Joni Mitchell putting it down to write “Both Sides Now”?

Some people think that when a woman takes her husband’s last name it is necessarily an act of submission or even self-erasure. Joni Mitchell retaining Chuck’s last name for decades after their divorce has always struck me as a defiant, deliciously cruel act of revenge. In the 50 years since, she spread her wings and took that surname to heights and places it never would have reached had it been ball-and-chained to a husband: the hills of Laurel Canyon, The Dick Cavett Show, a window overlooking a newly paved Hawaiian parking lot, the Grammys, Miles Davis’s apartment, Charles Mingus’s deathbed, Matala, MTV, the Rolling Thunder Revue, and the top of a recent NPR list of greatest albums ever made by women. Over a singular career that has spanned many different cultural eras, she explored—in public, to an almost unprecedented degree—exactly what it meant to be female and free, in full acknowledgement of all its injustice and joy.[…]

Continue reading: Joni Mitchell: Fear of a Female Genius