What do you think?
Rate this book
Joni: The Anthology
Nine Grammys. More than ten million albums sold. Named one of the greatest singers and songwriters of all time by Rolling Stone. Joni: The Anthology is an essential collection of writings on Joni Mitchell that charts every major moment of the famed troubadour's extraordinary career, as it happened.
From album reviews, incisive commentary, and candid conversations, Joni: The Anthology includes, among other things, a review of Mitchell's first-ever show at LA's Troubadour in June of 1968, a 1978 interview by musician Ben Sidran on jazz great Charles Mingus, a personal reminiscence by Ellen Sander, a confidant of the Los Angeles singer-songwriter community, and a long "director's cut" version of editor Barney Hoskyns' 1994 MOJO interview. A time capsule of an icon, the anthology spans the entirety of Joni's career between 1967-2007, as well as thoughtful commentary on her early years.
In collecting materials long unavailable, rare, or otherwise difficult to find, Joni: The Anthology illuminates the evolution of modern rock journalism while providing an invaluable and accessible guide to appreciating the highs--and the lows--of a twentieth century legend.
Once I crossed the border, I began to write and my voice changed. I no longer was imitative of the folk style. My voice was then my real voice and with a slight folk influence, but from the first album it was no longer folk music. It was just a girl with a guitar that made it look that way.--Joni Mitchell, 1994
From album reviews, incisive commentary, and candid conversations, Joni: The Anthology includes, among other things, a review of Mitchell's first-ever show at LA's Troubadour in June of 1968, a 1978 interview by musician Ben Sidran on jazz great Charles Mingus, a personal reminiscence by Ellen Sander, a confidant of the Los Angeles singer-songwriter community, and a long "director's cut" version of editor Barney Hoskyns' 1994 MOJO interview. A time capsule of an icon, the anthology spans the entirety of Joni's career between 1967-2007, as well as thoughtful commentary on her early years.
In collecting materials long unavailable, rare, or otherwise difficult to find, Joni: The Anthology illuminates the evolution of modern rock journalism while providing an invaluable and accessible guide to appreciating the highs--and the lows--of a twentieth century legend.
Once I crossed the border, I began to write and my voice changed. I no longer was imitative of the folk style. My voice was then my real voice and with a slight folk influence, but from the first album it was no longer folk music. It was just a girl with a guitar that made it look that way.--Joni Mitchell, 1994
320 pages, Hardcover
Published October 3, 2017
29 people are currently reading
419 people want to read
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 - 27 of 27 reviews
November 19, 2024
The goat ❤️
April 28, 2018
Joni: The Anthology is a variety of articles, interviews, and reviews collected by editor Barney Hoskyns. It is all Joni Mitchell, all the time. And, even if you aren’t a rabid Joni fan, it’s an interesting collection.
The “chapters” are individual, previously published pieces about Joni Mitchell and her music. Some are more personally focused, but most review her recordings and performances over the years. Following chronological order, it reveals the progression of her career. The reviewers point out the high points, the low points, and the places where she confused her audience with exploration.
As an editor, Hoskyns contributes only one piece. His presence is simply felt in the choice of chapters and the overall organization. These worked for me. The sections break at logical times and the pieces included are strong representations of who Joni Mitchell is and how she’s contributed to music in her lifetime.
Truth be told, it’s my husband who’s been rabid Joni fan since his teens. His interest in her music drew me to this book. Of course we have a collection of her CDs, somehow including two copies of her 2000 CD Both Sides Now, which is pictured above. We also saw Mitchell perform in Camden, NJ when she toured for that album in June of 2000. I still remember driving home from that concert with the convertible top down, singing at the top of our lungs, and the strong honeysuckle smell along the highway.
Joni’s music is the soundtrack of our courtship, including that unique twentieth century phenomenon, a mix tape. Reading this book was more than just musical history for me.
As a writer and reviewer, I reveled in the unique turns of phrase from contributors. Because I’m a student of people, I noticed the way Joni changed as she aged. As a listener, I enjoyed the intense musical critiques. Right off the bat, though, I realized that reading it straight through wasn’t for me. I enjoyed it more a few articles at a time.
My conclusions:
This isn’t a book for everyone. But if you’re a Joni Mitchell fan, it’s a worthwhile investment. It’s a deep dive into her long and storied career. It’s nostalgia and memories, note by note and album by album. I’ll be jamming to some Joni this weekend in honor of completing this book.
Acknowledgements:
Thanks to NetGalley, MacMillan-Picador, and the author for the opportunity to read a digital ARC of this book in exchange for my honest review.
More reviews at TheBibliophage.com.
The “chapters” are individual, previously published pieces about Joni Mitchell and her music. Some are more personally focused, but most review her recordings and performances over the years. Following chronological order, it reveals the progression of her career. The reviewers point out the high points, the low points, and the places where she confused her audience with exploration.
As an editor, Hoskyns contributes only one piece. His presence is simply felt in the choice of chapters and the overall organization. These worked for me. The sections break at logical times and the pieces included are strong representations of who Joni Mitchell is and how she’s contributed to music in her lifetime.
Truth be told, it’s my husband who’s been rabid Joni fan since his teens. His interest in her music drew me to this book. Of course we have a collection of her CDs, somehow including two copies of her 2000 CD Both Sides Now, which is pictured above. We also saw Mitchell perform in Camden, NJ when she toured for that album in June of 2000. I still remember driving home from that concert with the convertible top down, singing at the top of our lungs, and the strong honeysuckle smell along the highway.
Joni’s music is the soundtrack of our courtship, including that unique twentieth century phenomenon, a mix tape. Reading this book was more than just musical history for me.
As a writer and reviewer, I reveled in the unique turns of phrase from contributors. Because I’m a student of people, I noticed the way Joni changed as she aged. As a listener, I enjoyed the intense musical critiques. Right off the bat, though, I realized that reading it straight through wasn’t for me. I enjoyed it more a few articles at a time.
My conclusions:
This isn’t a book for everyone. But if you’re a Joni Mitchell fan, it’s a worthwhile investment. It’s a deep dive into her long and storied career. It’s nostalgia and memories, note by note and album by album. I’ll be jamming to some Joni this weekend in honor of completing this book.
Acknowledgements:
Thanks to NetGalley, MacMillan-Picador, and the author for the opportunity to read a digital ARC of this book in exchange for my honest review.
More reviews at TheBibliophage.com.
October 25, 2017
Summary: A retrospective on the life, music, art, and performances of Joni Mitchell through reviews and articles from the popular music press, chronologically organized.
Yes, I went through a Joni Mitchell phase. Part of it was songs like “Woodstock” or “Big Yellow Taxi” that were anthems for my generation. And part of it was that Mitchell epitomized a certain ideal of artistry and beauty–this willowy woman with long, straight blonde hair and high cheek bones who could write and sing, albeit some of her “yodels” were a bit strange! The last Joni Mitchell I bought was The Hissing of Summer Lawns. Her music and my tastes were changing, and not in the same direction. I have to admit that I more or less stopped following her career except for hearing about an album she did with Charles Mingus before he died, one that seemed to be panned by many critics. Then a couple years ago, her name surfaced again when I heard the news that she had nearly died from a brain aneurysm. (At the time of writing, she is still living, has gone through rehabilitation, and made a couple of public appearances).
This new anthology, edited by popular music writer tells the story of Mitchell’s work and life through a collection of music press articles and reviews of her albums and concerts, arranged chronologically. Hoskins writes in his introduction:
“Her words and her ‘weird chords’ you can read about at length in the pieces pulled together in this compendium. Included in Joni are some of the most open and thoughtful interviews Mitchell has ever given, as well as some of the finest snapshots of her complex, often spiky personality. Here are reviews of (almost) all her albums – the consensus masterworks, the curate’s eggs – and of live appearances she’s made in tiny clubs and glitzy concert halls. Here are the words of writers who’ve fallen, as I did, under the spell of her piercing honesty, her tingling musical intimacy, her coolly nuanced moods: Americans and Brits alike, men and women who know how uniquely brilliant she is.”
The collection begins with an article by Nicholas Jennings tracing her life from her beginnings in Alberta and Saskatchewan, her early singing attempts, her time in Toronto’s club scene, her brief marriage to Chuck Mitchell, the recognition of her writing, performed by others like Judy Collins, the move to New York, and then L.A. and her subsequent success in the late 1960’s and early 1970’s. We read of her various liaisons, most notably with Graham Nash, and the role David Crosby played in her early work. We learn about her unconventional practice of “open tuning”, her gradual move toward more of a jazz idiom, beginning with Court and Spark, and, after the Mingus album, a decline in the commercial success of her work, until her Grammy award-winning Turbulent Indigo (1994) garnered her renewed attention.
The strength of the articles that follow is that they trace the development of Mitchell’s career from its early days until her last album in 2007, giving us a taste of the mixture of critical opinion about her work throughout her career, and her own increasing disenchantment with a music world that failed to recognize her brand of creativity. I learned of albums I had never heard of, as well as her long relationship with Larry Klein. Nearly all her album covers bore her artistic work, and we learn of her continuing growth and recognition as a visual artist. Throughout her career from 1970 on, we read of periodic retreats from writing and performing (the later she has never enjoyed), with a return to the studio time again, even after her “retirement” in 2002.
The downside of this collection is that, while you get a kaleidoscope of perspectives, you also get a good deal of repetition, particularly concerning her early life. At the same time, Hoskins has unearthed some of the best writing about Mitchell over the course of her career. By not editing out repetitive material, you get the full impact of each piece.
I found myself with mixed feelings about Mitchell the person, who seemed to become more “hardbitten” as she matured, and Mitchell the artist, who developed in some interesting ways, while continuing to do some of the best writing around. I totally missed Turbulent Indigo. Over the years, I’ve come to appreciate jazz far more, so I may want to go back to the Mingus album and others. If nothing else, the book filled in the gaps in my understanding of her work and life through some of the best things written about her.
____________________________
Disclosure of Material Connection: I received this book free from the publisher through Netgalley. I was not required to write a positive review. The opinions I have expressed are my own.
Yes, I went through a Joni Mitchell phase. Part of it was songs like “Woodstock” or “Big Yellow Taxi” that were anthems for my generation. And part of it was that Mitchell epitomized a certain ideal of artistry and beauty–this willowy woman with long, straight blonde hair and high cheek bones who could write and sing, albeit some of her “yodels” were a bit strange! The last Joni Mitchell I bought was The Hissing of Summer Lawns. Her music and my tastes were changing, and not in the same direction. I have to admit that I more or less stopped following her career except for hearing about an album she did with Charles Mingus before he died, one that seemed to be panned by many critics. Then a couple years ago, her name surfaced again when I heard the news that she had nearly died from a brain aneurysm. (At the time of writing, she is still living, has gone through rehabilitation, and made a couple of public appearances).
This new anthology, edited by popular music writer tells the story of Mitchell’s work and life through a collection of music press articles and reviews of her albums and concerts, arranged chronologically. Hoskins writes in his introduction:
“Her words and her ‘weird chords’ you can read about at length in the pieces pulled together in this compendium. Included in Joni are some of the most open and thoughtful interviews Mitchell has ever given, as well as some of the finest snapshots of her complex, often spiky personality. Here are reviews of (almost) all her albums – the consensus masterworks, the curate’s eggs – and of live appearances she’s made in tiny clubs and glitzy concert halls. Here are the words of writers who’ve fallen, as I did, under the spell of her piercing honesty, her tingling musical intimacy, her coolly nuanced moods: Americans and Brits alike, men and women who know how uniquely brilliant she is.”
The collection begins with an article by Nicholas Jennings tracing her life from her beginnings in Alberta and Saskatchewan, her early singing attempts, her time in Toronto’s club scene, her brief marriage to Chuck Mitchell, the recognition of her writing, performed by others like Judy Collins, the move to New York, and then L.A. and her subsequent success in the late 1960’s and early 1970’s. We read of her various liaisons, most notably with Graham Nash, and the role David Crosby played in her early work. We learn about her unconventional practice of “open tuning”, her gradual move toward more of a jazz idiom, beginning with Court and Spark, and, after the Mingus album, a decline in the commercial success of her work, until her Grammy award-winning Turbulent Indigo (1994) garnered her renewed attention.
The strength of the articles that follow is that they trace the development of Mitchell’s career from its early days until her last album in 2007, giving us a taste of the mixture of critical opinion about her work throughout her career, and her own increasing disenchantment with a music world that failed to recognize her brand of creativity. I learned of albums I had never heard of, as well as her long relationship with Larry Klein. Nearly all her album covers bore her artistic work, and we learn of her continuing growth and recognition as a visual artist. Throughout her career from 1970 on, we read of periodic retreats from writing and performing (the later she has never enjoyed), with a return to the studio time again, even after her “retirement” in 2002.
The downside of this collection is that, while you get a kaleidoscope of perspectives, you also get a good deal of repetition, particularly concerning her early life. At the same time, Hoskins has unearthed some of the best writing about Mitchell over the course of her career. By not editing out repetitive material, you get the full impact of each piece.
I found myself with mixed feelings about Mitchell the person, who seemed to become more “hardbitten” as she matured, and Mitchell the artist, who developed in some interesting ways, while continuing to do some of the best writing around. I totally missed Turbulent Indigo. Over the years, I’ve come to appreciate jazz far more, so I may want to go back to the Mingus album and others. If nothing else, the book filled in the gaps in my understanding of her work and life through some of the best things written about her.
____________________________
Disclosure of Material Connection: I received this book free from the publisher through Netgalley. I was not required to write a positive review. The opinions I have expressed are my own.
July 31, 2017
I’m a pretty big fan of Joni Mitchell. Alas, I used to have quite a few of her albums on vinyl, but sold them all to pay the rent a few years back — Ladies of the Canyon, Blue (swoon!), Court and Spark, The Hissing of Summer Lawns and Hejira. I consider Mitchell to be the consummate Canadian musician (even if Mitchell would rather be known as a painter first), liking her even more than Neil Young. The fact that Blue shows up regularly as the No. 1 Canadian Album of All Time on many lists speaks to the power of her music. So, naturally, I was all over Joni: The Anthology, a collection of album and concert reviews and interviews culled by English music journalist Barney Hoskyns. (The book has already appeared in the United Kingdom under the title Reckless Daughter.)
What Joni: The Anthology does well is chart Mitchell’s music career in a chronological arc. If you’re looking for how Mitchell became a musician and charted a career through folk, rock and jazz, becoming a grand old dame in the process, this book is for you. You’ll see how much Mitchell is an independent woman, even if she was romantically linked to many men (whom she still maintains close friendships with, which is a selling point of her personality). Some stones are left unturned — Blue, for instance, barely gets an airing in this book, and that is arguably her finest moment — and the book does suffer from some repetition. That’s because Hoskyns reprints articles practically verbatim, so a great deal of them go into Mitchell’s childhood. Honestly, by the 13th time you learn that Mitchell learned how to play guitar from a folk music instruction record, you might be tempted to throw the book across the room. Some more judicious editing might have helped.
Read more here: https://medium.com/@zachary_houle/a-r...
What Joni: The Anthology does well is chart Mitchell’s music career in a chronological arc. If you’re looking for how Mitchell became a musician and charted a career through folk, rock and jazz, becoming a grand old dame in the process, this book is for you. You’ll see how much Mitchell is an independent woman, even if she was romantically linked to many men (whom she still maintains close friendships with, which is a selling point of her personality). Some stones are left unturned — Blue, for instance, barely gets an airing in this book, and that is arguably her finest moment — and the book does suffer from some repetition. That’s because Hoskyns reprints articles practically verbatim, so a great deal of them go into Mitchell’s childhood. Honestly, by the 13th time you learn that Mitchell learned how to play guitar from a folk music instruction record, you might be tempted to throw the book across the room. Some more judicious editing might have helped.
Read more here: https://medium.com/@zachary_houle/a-r...
July 16, 2021
I love Joni so much, and if was illuminating to read her reflections on her art in own words. I feel like I learned a lot about her. It was also interesting to read a chronology of the music industry’s reaction to her work. However, the book got very repetitive after a while - not really something you read straight through so I put it down frequently.
March 30, 2018
A collection of reviews of Joni Mitchell’s concerts and albums and essays explores the evolution of her many styles of songwriting and performance over the years — as well as the many styles of rock criticism as an art form itself. What’s striking is the occasional jabs of sexism and condescension by male rock critics (i.e. Creem and Rolling Stone in the 1970s, etc) that is a distracting, poignant reminder of how thick-skinned Joni must be if she read these magazine articles at the time and how unwelcoming the music press can be to women. There is overall a balance of contributors across decades and genders, but that stands out. You’ll learn less about Joni Mitchell and more about all the varying opinions of her out there by reading this anthology. In conclusion, I am grateful to be a woman in rock today and not yesterday.
Read
May 4, 2024A collection of profiles, reviews, interviews and other journalistic ephemera about Joni Mitchell organized chronologically by date of publication, so you sort of get a biographical sketch without the forced retrospective angle of a conventional biography. It's an interesting and useful way to explore a subject, particular if you have a researcher's outlook. The most enjoyable sections are the interviews because you get to read Joni's own words, which tend to always be the best words in any category, since they are written in her own blood (to use her own words, or abuse them as the case may be). The main insight I got from this collection is that Joni was raised in a working class (if not entirely impoverished) family and this hugely informs her work and notably how she sees her own work as well as her peers' work. She takes pains to make clear that though she was a folkie when she first started playing music, by the time her recording career began she was no long writing folk music at all, but rather songs in the tradition of the classical composers. She discusses how she listened to certain classical records over and over as a child, because they were the only records she had. And in parallel to this, she initially had a rather dismissive view of Bob Dylan, because he was a middle class kid doing a fatuous impersonation of Woody Guthrie, but that changed when he released Positively 4th Street, a song with its own voice and more or less the ultimate diss track (because the target is the listener, or the listener at least stands in for the ultimate target). So like many singer-songwriters, Joni does credit Dylan for opening up the terrain of subject matter - suddenly, you could write about anything. But remember, Joni didn't see her songs (even on her early albums) as coming out of the folk music tradition - because if you come out of the working class, at that time, you'd aspire to an educated, sophisticated ideal - that of classical music. Whereas if you're Robert Zimmerman, college boy and son of a prosperous shop owner, putting on the costume of the salt of the earth folk is where it's at. Joni didn't go to college, she got married to a college boy who treated her like a 'dumb blonde' (her words and her perception) and quite liked that she wasn't educated until she didn't stay that way and learned to read and write far better than he could. This we have to keep in mind when we fast forward decades later Bob and Joni are on tour together, and after she plays Bob comes up to her backstage flipping his wig over 'those chords' she plays. How does she play those chords, he wants to know? How does she even find them? Joni, the queen of doing it the hard way, Miss Open Tuning herself, tells the future Nobel Prize Winner that he will have a lot more fun if he continues to play music his own way, that is to say the easy way - because Dylan's ultimately not much of a musician (if you've ever heard great harmonica playing on a Dylan record that's Charlie McCoy playing, and if you've ever heard great acoustic guitar playing on a Dylan record that's also probably Charlie McCoy, and if you've heard great electric guitar playing on a Dylan record that's likely Robbie Robertson). Meanwhile Joni Mitchell wrote these fabulous pop songs that aspired to be classical music but appeared to the untrained eye to be folk tunes because after all it was a girl with a guitar, and as her songwriting became ever more ornate, sophisticated, unique and personal it eventually collapsed into jazz, which is when it really got good. And that's why she's ultimately not just the better musician and songwriter (though Dylan actually can write a damn good song, so he's at least a worthy rival on that front) but most of all a far better artist, because she never stopped striving for something that was beyond obtaining the imprimatur of street legal cool, or a literary and sophisticated self-expression through pop music, but something far more transcendent than all that - an ever wandering soul, "In search of love and music / My whole life has been / Illumination / Corruption / And diving, diving, diving, diving / Diving down to pick up on every shining thing / Just like that black crow flying / In a blue sky"
June 26, 2018
The concept of this book is a good one. It captures reviews, interviews and conversations with the master singer-songwriter Joni Mitchell covering her entire professional career. The writers whose work is included were from many publications both in the US and overseas, and the words were created during all of the eras of her career and some in retrospect. I'm a huge Joni Mitchell fan dating roughly from about 1974, so it was fascinating to see the reactions she provoked in the early stage of her career when she emerged from Canada to sing in New York City and later moved to the LA area. In my case, a friend played Song for the Roses for me and I was hooked. Then she came out with (i>Court and Spark and started to make the transition from the solitary artist of her first few albums into a musician who wrote great songs and worked with a band to bring them to life. I saw her live in the winter of 1974 and both Joni's were present: the solo artist and the rock and roller accompanied by the LA Express.
Many listeners didn't keep up with her as she expanded her palette to include jazzier sounds, but I was making the same transition as a musician myself, so an album like Hejira that had sophisticated songs and amazing backup from bassist Jaco Pastorius was perfect for me then -- and now.
For many listeners, the story stopped around that point as Joni started working with more true masters of jazz like Wayne Shorter and did an experimental album in collaboration with Charles Mingus which was flawed, but gave her a foundation for what was to follow. She also took this music on the road and I saw a memorable show with Jaco, Pat Metheny, Lyle Mayes and Michael Brecker. For those who didn't get to see her then, the Shadows and Light live album is a reasonable sample of what this amazing group was able to do live and a review of the album is contained in the book. You can also go out to You Tube and find videos of that group playing live on songs like Free Man in Paris.
But no, the story of Joni and her musical oeuvre didn't stop there. Throughout the Eighties and Nineties, she continued to roll out new music every 2 - 3 years and this anthology has lots of great conversation and reviews from this period. Like most brilliant artists, Joni created remarkable music in every stage of her career and a mere recounting of a few greatest hits from the late sixties to early seventies period doesn't do her or the listener justice. I found myself smiling as the early reviewers weren't quite sure what to make of her -- let's see, she's got long hair and plays acoustic guitar, so she must be a folk singer, right? Uh... not exactly.
The book also sent me back to listen to those CDs of the Nineties that truly contain some fine work such as Come in from the Cold. She also was a guest on a couple of Herbie Hancock albums later on -- which adds another dimension to Joni as an artist. If you love Joni Mitchell, you'll find a lot of wonderful content here about the artist, the person and her music. If you only know a little bit about her, the reviews and conversations offer a fine introduction to her many different creative periods. Joni Mitchell, a true master who created at very high levels for almost fifty years --- check it out both here in the book and in her music. And don't forget to look at her visual art -- which has been a second career for her in parallel with the music and has often been found on her album covers.
Many listeners didn't keep up with her as she expanded her palette to include jazzier sounds, but I was making the same transition as a musician myself, so an album like Hejira that had sophisticated songs and amazing backup from bassist Jaco Pastorius was perfect for me then -- and now.
For many listeners, the story stopped around that point as Joni started working with more true masters of jazz like Wayne Shorter and did an experimental album in collaboration with Charles Mingus which was flawed, but gave her a foundation for what was to follow. She also took this music on the road and I saw a memorable show with Jaco, Pat Metheny, Lyle Mayes and Michael Brecker. For those who didn't get to see her then, the Shadows and Light live album is a reasonable sample of what this amazing group was able to do live and a review of the album is contained in the book. You can also go out to You Tube and find videos of that group playing live on songs like Free Man in Paris.
But no, the story of Joni and her musical oeuvre didn't stop there. Throughout the Eighties and Nineties, she continued to roll out new music every 2 - 3 years and this anthology has lots of great conversation and reviews from this period. Like most brilliant artists, Joni created remarkable music in every stage of her career and a mere recounting of a few greatest hits from the late sixties to early seventies period doesn't do her or the listener justice. I found myself smiling as the early reviewers weren't quite sure what to make of her -- let's see, she's got long hair and plays acoustic guitar, so she must be a folk singer, right? Uh... not exactly.
The book also sent me back to listen to those CDs of the Nineties that truly contain some fine work such as Come in from the Cold. She also was a guest on a couple of Herbie Hancock albums later on -- which adds another dimension to Joni as an artist. If you love Joni Mitchell, you'll find a lot of wonderful content here about the artist, the person and her music. If you only know a little bit about her, the reviews and conversations offer a fine introduction to her many different creative periods. Joni Mitchell, a true master who created at very high levels for almost fifty years --- check it out both here in the book and in her music. And don't forget to look at her visual art -- which has been a second career for her in parallel with the music and has often been found on her album covers.
March 18, 2021
Imagine Joni Mitchell, age 9, smoking cigarettes and listening to Claude Debussy records at her Saskatchewan home. Though this prairie girl was pigeonholed into the realm of folk as she was just coming up in the late '60s, her first interests were rooted in classical music. Joni: The Anthology offers a chronological account of the unprecedented musical endeavors she took through rock, jazz, pop and beyond, as well as a copious helping of her love of painting.
A collection of reviews and interviews - inaccessible or otherwise difficult to find, even in the age of the Internet, from a plethora of sources including MOJO, Rolling Stone, and Melody Maker cascade through the decades to paint a portrait of Mitchell that is as complex as it is revealing. Interesting are the juxtapositions: on one page a music critic denounces her experimentation with jazz, while on the next Mitchell explains how her original chords were so distinct that rock musicians couldn't grasp them, so she was suggested to hire jazz musicians on her later albums. Mitchell goes on to explain that her music went "outside the laws of jazz," creating totally original music that the taste-spinners pushed aside. Those harmonics are currently being studied and taught in music schools.
Joni: The Anthology invites you to sit in on a photoshoot as Mitchell, dressed in all black, mourns the loss of Bluebird, her stolen Mercedes Benz, which she bought with her first royalty check in 1969; learn why she snubbed the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame's invitation for her own induction, or why she chose to not play her hits on that 1998 tour with Bob Dylan and Van Morrison; understand just why her most appreciated compliment from a blind black piano player was that her music was raceless and genderless - a corroboration to why American jazz pianist Charles Mingus invited Mitchell to pen words to his chops on Mingus. Readers are privy to more personal matters like how she couldn't fulfill Graham Nash's desire of a traditional wife, or the relationship she developed later in her life with Kilauren, the baby girl she gave up for adoption when was 21. Aside from her discography and personal life, Anthology succeeds at presenting a didactic voice through the changing times. Her concerns in ecology and preservation are topics of concern equally important to Neil Young and Willie Nelson.
Music mogul David Geffen once told Mitchell, "You're the only star I ever met that wanted to be ordinary." Whether because of this, or in spite of this, we've placed Joni Mitchell among the constellations. There's a reason why my mother loves her, why Hissing of Summer Lawns was Prince's favorite album, why Bill and Hillary Clinton named their daughter after her song "Chelsea Morning," and why the second-in-command of the LA Crips - a three-hundred pound black man - is a fan Joni Mitchell
(This review appears on JoniMitchell.com and ElmoreMagazine.com)
A collection of reviews and interviews - inaccessible or otherwise difficult to find, even in the age of the Internet, from a plethora of sources including MOJO, Rolling Stone, and Melody Maker cascade through the decades to paint a portrait of Mitchell that is as complex as it is revealing. Interesting are the juxtapositions: on one page a music critic denounces her experimentation with jazz, while on the next Mitchell explains how her original chords were so distinct that rock musicians couldn't grasp them, so she was suggested to hire jazz musicians on her later albums. Mitchell goes on to explain that her music went "outside the laws of jazz," creating totally original music that the taste-spinners pushed aside. Those harmonics are currently being studied and taught in music schools.
Joni: The Anthology invites you to sit in on a photoshoot as Mitchell, dressed in all black, mourns the loss of Bluebird, her stolen Mercedes Benz, which she bought with her first royalty check in 1969; learn why she snubbed the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame's invitation for her own induction, or why she chose to not play her hits on that 1998 tour with Bob Dylan and Van Morrison; understand just why her most appreciated compliment from a blind black piano player was that her music was raceless and genderless - a corroboration to why American jazz pianist Charles Mingus invited Mitchell to pen words to his chops on Mingus. Readers are privy to more personal matters like how she couldn't fulfill Graham Nash's desire of a traditional wife, or the relationship she developed later in her life with Kilauren, the baby girl she gave up for adoption when was 21. Aside from her discography and personal life, Anthology succeeds at presenting a didactic voice through the changing times. Her concerns in ecology and preservation are topics of concern equally important to Neil Young and Willie Nelson.
Music mogul David Geffen once told Mitchell, "You're the only star I ever met that wanted to be ordinary." Whether because of this, or in spite of this, we've placed Joni Mitchell among the constellations. There's a reason why my mother loves her, why Hissing of Summer Lawns was Prince's favorite album, why Bill and Hillary Clinton named their daughter after her song "Chelsea Morning," and why the second-in-command of the LA Crips - a three-hundred pound black man - is a fan Joni Mitchell
(This review appears on JoniMitchell.com and ElmoreMagazine.com)
January 17, 2018
Hoskyn’s Joni: The Anthology, presents previously published (with one exception) reviews of Mitchell’s albums and performances as well as interviews with her spanning the period 1968-2014. (This book was published in 2016.) The excerpts are presented in chronological order, so this creates the biographical stream.
There is no discussion, however, of how decisions were made as to what made it in vs. what did not. On balance, some of the comments are petty and spiteful, however, such comments really only underscore the fact that—like her or not —Mitchell was ahead of her time. Often criticized for techniques (e.g., polyphonic sounds) that just a few years later won other artists huge accolades, the book provides a solid overview of the artist’s work to date, how it has been received, and something of her thoughts on that.
This book has been very helpful in my growing appreciation for this prolific artist of whom I was only passingly familiar, but about whom I will do more research and use the interviews cited here as entre to her considerable body of work.
While the biography’s introduction characterizes Mitchell as a “sometimes reckless daughter of America’s folk-rock revolution,” its own contents reveal this complex musical pioneer to be far far more than that tidy morsel. As Mitchell herself acknowledges in noting that she does not “give good sound bite,” the body of work covered here attests to a far broader and as-yet still unfolding body of work that spans multiple artistic (and not just musical) forms and genres. By no means the final word on this fascinating topic, I thoroughly enjoyed Hoskyns’ book as a jumping off point for further exploration. In that regard, it is a five-star read, in my estimation.
There is no discussion, however, of how decisions were made as to what made it in vs. what did not. On balance, some of the comments are petty and spiteful, however, such comments really only underscore the fact that—like her or not —Mitchell was ahead of her time. Often criticized for techniques (e.g., polyphonic sounds) that just a few years later won other artists huge accolades, the book provides a solid overview of the artist’s work to date, how it has been received, and something of her thoughts on that.
This book has been very helpful in my growing appreciation for this prolific artist of whom I was only passingly familiar, but about whom I will do more research and use the interviews cited here as entre to her considerable body of work.
While the biography’s introduction characterizes Mitchell as a “sometimes reckless daughter of America’s folk-rock revolution,” its own contents reveal this complex musical pioneer to be far far more than that tidy morsel. As Mitchell herself acknowledges in noting that she does not “give good sound bite,” the body of work covered here attests to a far broader and as-yet still unfolding body of work that spans multiple artistic (and not just musical) forms and genres. By no means the final word on this fascinating topic, I thoroughly enjoyed Hoskyns’ book as a jumping off point for further exploration. In that regard, it is a five-star read, in my estimation.
July 17, 2021
Cigarette smoke seems to curl from the text of this compilation of criticism that will have Joni Mitchell fans dusting off LPs, CDs, and turning to Spotify and YouTube for a new and enhanced appreciation of her work.
In addition to being a thorough catalog of Mitchell criticism, JONI also offers a fascinating overview of rock journalism through the decades as nearly 50 writers attempt to describe the enigma that is Joni. It’s interesting to read how Mitchell’s music was interpreted when newly heard, and the reassessments of her work that came with each new album or declaration of retirement from the music business. Particularly illuminating for this reader was a piece on Mitchell’s collaboration with Charles Mingus, which includes an interview with her about the experience. We learn some specifics of Joni’s distinctive tunings in a review of her songbook, JONI MITCHELL COMPLETE SO FAR. . .
The pieces in which Mitchell speaks for herself are liveliest and most memorable, notably when she confides that, “The anatomy of the love crime is my favourite subject.” And who knew that Mitchell, before she was a singer, was a self-described rock and roll dancer? A work of this nature will, of course, repeat facts and anecdotes about Mitchell’s biography and career, but the pleasure here is on seeing how the legend was created and continues to evolve and grow ever more complicated. Includes contributor bios and an index.
Essential for Joni fans and should be considered core stock for stores with strong music sections and belongs in all public library collections.
Thanks to Picador and NetGalley for providing a digital review copy in exchange for an honest review.
In addition to being a thorough catalog of Mitchell criticism, JONI also offers a fascinating overview of rock journalism through the decades as nearly 50 writers attempt to describe the enigma that is Joni. It’s interesting to read how Mitchell’s music was interpreted when newly heard, and the reassessments of her work that came with each new album or declaration of retirement from the music business. Particularly illuminating for this reader was a piece on Mitchell’s collaboration with Charles Mingus, which includes an interview with her about the experience. We learn some specifics of Joni’s distinctive tunings in a review of her songbook, JONI MITCHELL COMPLETE SO FAR. . .
The pieces in which Mitchell speaks for herself are liveliest and most memorable, notably when she confides that, “The anatomy of the love crime is my favourite subject.” And who knew that Mitchell, before she was a singer, was a self-described rock and roll dancer? A work of this nature will, of course, repeat facts and anecdotes about Mitchell’s biography and career, but the pleasure here is on seeing how the legend was created and continues to evolve and grow ever more complicated. Includes contributor bios and an index.
Essential for Joni fans and should be considered core stock for stores with strong music sections and belongs in all public library collections.
Thanks to Picador and NetGalley for providing a digital review copy in exchange for an honest review.
January 26, 2024
We bought our daughters a turntable a couple of years ago as they had a growing interest in vinyl. They quickly filled their collection with current popular artists, most of which I am unaware of. But it is hard to miss the voluminous Taylor Swift collection. Disheartened, I began buying Joni Mitchell albums for them as I wanted them to hear for themselves what a real angst-ridden, thoroughly transparent female singer/songwriter sounded like. At least they are aware of who Joni is...
There are two singer/songwriters that are on Mt. Rushmore. Only two. Bob Dylan and Joni Mitchell. Dylan is the master lyricist, head and shoulders above the rest, but Joni is the complete package. This book charts her career though reviews and interviews that cover her career. There are some good things here, some not so good, but an acceptable cultural review of her amazing career. Worth the read for a Joni fan, probably not very interesting for anyone else. I enjoyed it.
There are two singer/songwriters that are on Mt. Rushmore. Only two. Bob Dylan and Joni Mitchell. Dylan is the master lyricist, head and shoulders above the rest, but Joni is the complete package. This book charts her career though reviews and interviews that cover her career. There are some good things here, some not so good, but an acceptable cultural review of her amazing career. Worth the read for a Joni fan, probably not very interesting for anyone else. I enjoyed it.
September 24, 2017
This six part book is a collection of previously published articles written about singer Joni Mitchell that covers years 1943 through 2014. Many essays are reviews of her albums and performances. Other articles resulted from interviews with the singer or her associates. Two recurring themes stand out, tight inner circle of relationships and balance between creativity, hard work, and luck needed to succeed in show business. The collection provides insight on the folk music era, key influences, and Joni Mitchell’s career. Her talent and ability documents how the music industry stays consistent despite changing performances and audiences. Hoskyns includes brief contributor biographies and an index.
Goodreads Giveaway randomly chose me to receive this book. Although encouraged, I was under no obligation to write a review. The opinions I have expressed are my own.
Goodreads Giveaway randomly chose me to receive this book. Although encouraged, I was under no obligation to write a review. The opinions I have expressed are my own.
October 11, 2017
I received a free copy in a giveaway.
This hippie chick grew up listening to Joni and Carol and Joan and Janis so I was delighted to win this anthology. After reading it I'm still delighted although it didn't really cover much I hadn't already heard or read.
The book is basically comprised of articles previously written about Joni and while as I said, I had read many of them before, not everyone has so it's perfect for those who know nothing about Joni Mitchell. My only disappointment was that the book contained no photographs of her. That might have bumped up my rating.
This hippie chick grew up listening to Joni and Carol and Joan and Janis so I was delighted to win this anthology. After reading it I'm still delighted although it didn't really cover much I hadn't already heard or read.
The book is basically comprised of articles previously written about Joni and while as I said, I had read many of them before, not everyone has so it's perfect for those who know nothing about Joni Mitchell. My only disappointment was that the book contained no photographs of her. That might have bumped up my rating.
April 20, 2018
This book is a compilation of interviews, album and concert reviews, and articles by various authors. There probably isn't much new here for fans -- whether due to Joni's somewhat recalcitrant attitude toward interviews or the focus of writers on only certain aspects of her life and work, there was quite a bit of repetition (childhood polio epidemic, identifying as a painter rather than a musician, etc.). It was interesting to read about reactions toward her and her music but, aside from interviews, we don't get much sense of Joni herself.
March 11, 2022
kind of a startling collection—some of the critics and editors whose odd opinions show up here should probably be embarrassed by their work—looking at you, michael swank. worthwhile to see how critics and reporters wrote about Mitchell through the years, especially because you get those great three or four q&a interviews where she interrogates the way she’s been treated by the press. also always interesting and wild to read her thoughts on feminism… even if I don’t fully understand what’s she’s getting at.
December 7, 2017
I read this and David Yaffe's Joni biography Reckless Daughter simultaneously and this is not nearly as good. It is what it says it is - an anthology, a collection of interviews, reviews and articles about Joni spanning her career. Quite a few of the pieces are brief, some poorly written, some simple screed and others dated. It's a bit interesting from a historical perspective, but for a more in depth (some say too sympathetic) understanding, I'd suggest reading Reckless Daughter.
September 26, 2017
A collection of reviews and interviews which Joni Mitchell has gotten or received. Interesting but not much more. A fan or music buff would love this book, but more than likely a fan would already be aware of the content. I received this book from Goodreads for free.
April 2, 2018
This is an anthology of Joni Mitchell's music reviews, interviews, and articles about her. Not compelling. Joni Mitchell is an idiosyncratic musician who has always "marched to the beat of her own drum". But that was hard to find in this rather bland and boring collection.
May 2, 2023
This book consists of a lot of reviews, most of which didn't interest me much. There are a couple extensive interviews, however, that I hadn't read or heard before, that are well worth the time.
In general, I'd say this book is only for us Joni fans who are hungry for anything about her.
In general, I'd say this book is only for us Joni fans who are hungry for anything about her.
September 14, 2024
i mean it’s just a lot of interviews, reviews, & articles of joni so i wouldn’t recommend it to ppl who aren’t fans but i enjoyed it !! the author was really more the organizer and that organization worked for me !
November 5, 2017
A good book to add to your collection
May 27, 2018
Love her.
June 14, 2022
twas okay.
October 30, 2022
A bit repetitive, but much good information about Diva Joni.
January 8, 2023
Gift from E! Looked the book. Loved learning a little more about Joni’s path. Didn’t really take a year but went to it often. Fun times!
June 15, 2020
Needlessly sexist at times, but it IS a compilation of interviews from as early as 1968. So that, unfortunately, seems unavoidable even from female journalists featured. A very interesting look at the optics of Joni’s career, rather than the creative undercurrent. A very interesting read for an artist, to gain a better idea of the critics perspective, or lack thereof.
Displaying 1 - 27 of 27 reviews