Music Book Roundup: A Riot Group Memoir and the Long-awaited Joni Mitchell Biography

Years ago, Ann Powers received a call from an editor in New York asking her to write about Joni Mitchell. Powers’ first impulse was to pull the phone away from his face and burst into laughter.

That seemed on the nose. Who better to write about iconoclasm than the co-editor of She Wrote Rock: Women Write About Rock, Rap, and Pop, a critic who has spent her career pondering what it means to be called a woman in music?

Wondering if she was being pigeonholed, Powers recalled that she had never been asked to write about the Beatles, for example.

However, she later called her editor back and agreed to make Mitchell’s career “the center of my world for a while,” as she writes in the foreword to the resulting book, Traveling: On the Path of Joni Mitchell.

“Little did I know when I set out with her in mind that this journey would take me into so many complicated spaces.”

The Big Yellow Taxi singer’s biography will be published by Day Street Books on June 11th. Powers, a longtime music critic for National Public Radio and author of Tori Amos’ memoir Piece by Piece and 2017’s The Good Booty: Love and Sex, Black and White, and the Body and Soul of American Music, could not have predicted when he took on the Joni job that by the time the book was released, the 80-year-old Mitchell would be in the midst of a full-blown career resurgence.

In fact, in 2015, Mitchell suffered an aneurysm that left him unable to speak. As the singer-songwriter went silent, Powers wrote a book based on interviews with Mitchell’s colleagues and extensive archival research. Given its biographical nature, she offers the disclaimer that Traveling is not a standard account of Mitchell’s music and times.

Powers writes not as a chronicler but as a critic, or, in her words, “a kind of cartographer.” Millions of people watched Mitchell sing “Both Sides Now” during this year’s Grammy Awards broadcast. How did she get there? The journey follows a course.

Other books about music

Mohawk Warriors, Hunters & Chiefs, Tom Wilson Tehohahake (Goose Lane, on sale)

Hamilton singer-songwriter Tom Wilson eloquently and charismatically describes how he recently discovered he is Mohawk in his 2017 memoir Beautiful Scars. His follow-up, which opened this month with a related art exhibit at Toronto’s Cultural Goods Gallery, collects images of his paintings (including a brightly colored guitar) that explore what it means to strip away and reconnect one’s cultural heritage.

Three Shades of Blue: Miles Davis, John Coltrane, Bill Evans and the Lost Empire of Cool, James Kaplan (Penguins, March)

Fiction and nonfiction author James Kaplan created his 2010 Sinatra biography, Frank: The Voice, with the drama and detail of a novel. A book about the rise and fall of American cool and its path to jazz’s most iconic album (1959’s Kind of Blue) deserves the same touch.

A summer across Europe in the rain: Lyrics by Stacey Kent and Kazuo Ishiguro (Knopf, April)

Bob Dylan is not the only lyricist to win the Nobel Prize in Literature. Novelist Kazuo Ishiguro, also a recipient of the award, works as a songwriter along with American composer Jim Tomlinson. Their songs are sung by Tomlinson’s wife, renowned jazz vocalist Stacey Kent. The 16 volumes of lyrics are accompanied by illustrations by Italian artist Bianca Bagnarelli and a foreword by Ishiguro.

Let Me Take You Down: Penny Lane and Strawberry Fields Forever, Jonathan Cott (University of Minnesota Press, April)

The Beatles’ “Penny Lane” and “Strawberry Fields Forever” were both surreal, psychedelic songs inspired by memories of Liverpool, but they were opposites in many ways. The former was written primarily by Paul McCartney and was all piccolos, smiles, and sunbeam melodies. The latter, from Lennon, was dark and philosophical. Rolling Stone writer Jonathan Cott looks at the double A-side single from Summer of Love to examine the band at a pivotal point in their short career.

There Was Nothing You Could Do: Bruce Springsteen’s “Born in the USA” and the End of the Heartland, Steven Heiden (Hachette, May)

One of the most acclaimed music books of 2023 was Deliver Me from Nowhere, Warren Zanes’ deep dive into the making of Bruce Springsteen’s lo-fi masterpiece Nebraska (1982). Introducing “There Was Nothing You Could Do” by classic rock aficionado Stephen Heiden. The book examines Springsteen’s Born in America (a sequel to 1984’s Nebraska) and the loss of America’s soul.

Rebel Girl: My Life as a Feminist Punk, Kathleen Hanna (HarperCollins, May)

“There’s a revolution in her hips,” Bikini Kill’s Kathleen Hanna sang in 1993. The song is a riot group anthem called “Rebel Girl,” now the inevitable title of Hannah’s autobiography. Queer feminist group Boygenius just won three Grammys for rock music, but in the 1990s being in an all-female punk band was more about survival than winning awards. There are many who stand on Hannah’s shoulders.

What a Fool Believes, Michael McDonald and Paul Reiser (Day Street, May)

The yacht-rock icon, a high school dropout from landlocked Missouri, was a member of Steely Dan and the Doobie Brothers in the 1970s and 1980s. Do you think he partied? The throaty baritone voice of What a Fool Believes, Minute by Minute, and Takin’ It to the Streets tells the story of his life with the help of comedian friend Paul Reiser.