The Music of Joni Mitchell

Abstract Joni Mitchell is one of the foremost singer-songwriters of the late 20th century. The book presents a thorough exploration of Mitchell's musical style, sound, and structure in order to evaluate her songs from the perspective of music analysis. Analyses are conceived within a holistic framework, which takes account of poetic nuance, cultural reference, and stylistic evolution over a long, adventurous career. Mitchell's songs represent a complex, meticulously crafted body of work. This book offers a comprehensive survey of her output, with many discussions of individual songs, organized by topic rather than chronology. Individual chapters each explore a different aspect of her craft, such as poetic voice, harmony, melody, and large-scale form. A separate chapter is devoted to the central theme of personal freedom, as expressed through diverse symbolic registers of the journey quest, bohemianism, creative license, and spiritual liberation. The book develops a set of conceptual tools geared specifically to Mitchell's songs in order to demonstrate the extent of her technical innovation in the pop song genre, to give an account of the formal sophistication and rhetorical power characterizing her work as a whole, and to provide grounds for the recognition of her intellectual stature as a composer within her chosen field of popular music.