Joni Mitchell: An Intimate Look at the Life of a Music Icon

DenMac: Too many details……

Canada on Nov 08, 2023

Sliptak: A very well written account of this icons life, spirit, vices and more. Fascinating read for those who lived during the Joni eras. I highly recommend this book.

United States on Nov 03, 2023

Fausta Libardi: Plenty of details that help you uderstand her unique personality and groundbreaking work. Also explains her personal choices as a woman of heart and mind, and of genius, in a men's world - hard choices indeed. Still have to read to the end. As a biography, it lacks structure and imagination. But I still have to read it to the end.

Spain on Aug 24, 2023

alltatup: Yes, it's a very good biography of the woman, her music and her times, but Yaffe can be as guilty as Joni herself of a seeming need to put others down, which makes me feel a bit sorry for both of them. Was Joni a musical genius? I wouldn't put her in the same category as Dylan, whose lyrics are exquisite. Was she a trail-blazing artist with mad talent? Yes, indeed, and it wasn't easy for her being an independent woman who refused to capitulate to what men assumed about her during the 70s and 80s. She is one decade older than I am, and I can see as a woman what a difference that decade makes in terms of the impact of gender politics in the US.

It makes me sad to read about what lousy care Joni took of herself, and how quickly her health declined and failed her. She should have been still kicking ass in her 60s, but all that coke and all those smokes definitely took their toll on her. It seems to me that she literally burned herself out: her anger and her bodily ailments were exacerbated by her vices. I think coke and smoke is a lethal combination: it certainly was for Bowie.

Yaffe's book has led me to listen to Joni's later music with a new appreciation, and it was a...

United States on Oct 30, 2022

Franimi: I’d read a couple of books about Joni (one of my very favourite artists, - to be gender-bound for a moment, no other female songwriter comes close) before picking this up, and they were good, but right from the off I knew this was far more clued-up and simpatico. He not only knows the music but understands it, and so can satisfyingly describe its nuances and power. The very things that the one star brigade criticise are the strengths of this book, and I suppose it helps to be a true devotee to appreciate fully the detailed and highly literate allusions, not just from JM’s oeuvre but from other icons of the time and broader cultural references that adorn the narrative. I found it very balanced, not a slavish hagiography, although he is obviously at least as big a fan as me, he calls her out when he feels it called for. So, if you’re a fan, spoil yourself. If you’re not, it’s probably going to take more than this excellent book to convince you, sadly.

United Kingdom on Apr 15, 2021

judith: The author gets why Joni is one of a kind and rightly focuses on her best music from 68-79. She clearly seems to have some bitterness coloring her view when looking back on her marriage to Larry Klein (who was in his early 20's and 13 years her junior when they married) and the role he and other collaborators played in the failure of her work to sell and connect with audiences in the 1980's. The author gets both sides of the story when she stars assigning blame in a bitter way in her later years when looking back on her albums from the 1980's and their low sales. She failed to take the good advice she was given and it is clear she only has herself to blame. She does all the cliche things like fire her long time manager and engineer who clearly always had her best interest at heart, and blamed the music industry in general when album sales started to fall off. Despite her missteps in the 1980's, artists like Herbie Hancock and Wayne Shorter recognized a fellow genius and stayed friends with her and would help keep her artistry in the public sphere and make sure her genius and influence was not forgotten.

The author did his homework and, to put it simply, he 'gets' her and...

United States on Apr 01, 2019

Alex Brunel: This very detailed portrait of Joni Mitchell was a very absorbing read. It gave me great pleasure to re-visit her material as I read it, and it also introduced me to much I'd never heard, including the beautiful Paprika Plain, a sophisticated and beautiful composition that I hadn't fully appreciated before and that I ended giving to people this year as a Christmas present.

Mitchell comes across as a deeply gifted and embattled woman, strong and talented enough to survive the nasty juggernaut of fashion and trend that is the music business but ultimately betrayed by it, and by the parts of herself that continued to hunger after stardom and recognition as an artist, and could not allow her to be content with the huge things she had achieved. The author makes a plausible argument that the strength of Mitchell's ego greatly contributed to her success but ultimately also left her hungry and angry, much like Miles Davis, one of Mitchell's own icons.

The importance of Mitchell as an artist is well demonstrated here, and that is good reason to buy this book. But it must be noted too that Mitchell is also important as a woman artist, who broke new ground in an overwhelmingly...

United States on Jan 05, 2019

Red on Black: Finding a decent biography of Joni Mitchell has been akin to searching for the holy grail. Certain publications over the years have made a decent fist of attempting to capture the life of one of the most influential musicians to grace the music scene. Karen O'Brien's "Shadows and Light" was solid, While Michelle Mercer's time specific "Will You Take Me as I Am: Joni Mitchell's Blue Period", dives into the early work of this Canadian genius and throws up some of the more detailed facts on this incredible period of creativity, Avoid at all costs, however, the horrible pseudo-intellectual bovine scatology of Katherine Monk's "Joni: The Creative Odyssey of Joni Mitchell" possibly one of the worst books ever written.

To add to this list we have this new biography by David Yaffe "Reckless Daughter" (the same title used by Barney Hoskyns in his recent anthology on Mitchell). The first thing to say about Yaffe's book is that for once he tries to present an "even spread" over Mitchell's career in music. Everyone knows that Joni's purple patch lasted through the course of eight albums stretching from "Song of the Seagull" in 1968 to the staggering "Hejira" in 1976. Here, accompanied...

United Kingdom on Oct 26, 2017

Gerard Kelly: Yaffe may not offer any new insights, but at least this book is well written and heartfelt in terms of respect for Mitchell. It also covers ( with much more depth) the age old problem the FEMALE artist faces in the creative industries - especially back then. She was constantly criticised for being outspoken, driven, egotistical in a way that none of her peers (Dylan, Young, Cohen, Simon, Gaye etc) ever were. Not to mention the list of lovers who were always name checked in the opening paragraphs of even the most serious reviews of her greatest work or rare interviews - always aimed as a suggestive slur and is still appearing today, in every review I've read of this book. She may not be likeable or too outspoken or crazy, but genius is genius and Yaffe completely acknowledges this. He sees her important place in the history of 20th century popular music and the impact it had on future generations - not only women with guitars, but innovators like Prince, Bjork, Jimmy Page, Morrissey, Elvis Costello, Kate Bush etc. Interesting that Dylan acknowledged being inspired by Blue during the making of Blood on the Tracks ( many years after Blue when Mitchell had moved on much further to...

United Kingdom on Oct 21, 2017