Few cultural figures approach the renown of singer-songwriter Joni Mitchell, whose status and struggles music journalist Ann Powers (Good Booty) fully investigates in her potent and intimate biography, Traveling: On the Path of Joni Mitchell. Powers traces Mitchell's origins, influences, significance, and social and cultural contexts with crisp, insightful detail, delving into the pathways that forged Mitchell's legacy and legend. "Becoming legendary is a strange process of both expansion and reduction," she observes, as "the knotty totality of a person is smoothed out into one official portrait, and in a way, the legend becomes a former person, at least in the public view."
However, Powers's work is neither hagiographic nor fan service, providing instead a nuanced portrait of an artist very much of her time--a time that lauded male genius, a contrivance that accorded few women anything other than supporting roles. There's magic in Powers's fluid and lyrical prose and in the details she provides from her own life and work as counterpoints or corollaries to what she finds in Mitchell's story. Another striking feature of Traveling is the depth and breadth of interviews Powers conducted over a multiyear period with people from all eras of Mitchell's life, relayed with Powers's own wry and illuminating commentary. For instance, as one man after another tells Powers that they consider Mitchell "the best singer-songwriter of our times," she realizes "that humility is one source by which old men recharge themselves."
Traveling is a monumental biography--revelatory and compassionate. --Elizabeth DeNoma, executive editor, DeNoma Literary Services, Seattle, Wash.