Bibliofemme Bookclub An Irish Bookclub

From her self-titled debut in 1968 through the masterpiece of Blue, her jazz experimentation years and her most recent album, Travelogue Now, Joni Mitchell has released 19 albums over the course of a career that has spanned almost 40 years. She’s a musician who has managed to be consistently innovative on her recorded output and who has worked and recorded with some of the best. How then is it possible that this biography by Karen O’Brien is so flat and lifeless?

While what she has done in her life sounds fascinating and O’Brien’s detail and research are meticulous, Mitchell is still strangely elusive. Working from the premise that as a female musician she has never been as acclaimed as contemporaries like Neil Young and Bob Dylan, O’Brien bangs the drum for Mitchell as a “complex and charismatic” woman who “has become a post-Modernist Muse, an unlikely Zelig of popular culture who has permeated our consciousness.”

Opening strongly by documenting the Canadian’s childhood and exciting early career, Shadows and Light seems to lose focus on its subject from the 1980s and her marriage with musician/producer Larry Klein onwards and peters out in a curiously downbeat manner. While this book undoubtedly contributes to our knowledge of Joni Mitchell as an artist, it gives little away in terms of who the person behind the music is. Best give Blue a spin again…