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Reckless Daughter: A Portrait of Joni Mitchell
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Farrar, Straus and Giroux 2017
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"She was like a storm." —Leonard Cohen
Reckless Daughter is the story of an artist and an era that have left an indelible mark on American music.
Joni Mitchell may be the most influential female recording artist and composer of the late twentieth century. In Reckless Daughter, the music critic David Yaffe tells the remarkable, heart-wrenching story of how the blond girl with the guitar became a superstar of folk music in the 1960s, a key figure in the Laurel Canyon music scene of the 1970s, and the songwriter who spoke resonantly to, and for, audiences across the country.
A Canadian prairie girl, a free-spirited artist, Mitchell never wanted to be a pop star. She was nothing more than "a painter derailed by circumstances," she would explain. And yet, she went on to become a talented self-taught musician and a brilliant bandleader, releasing album after album, each distinctly experimental, challenging, and revealing. Her lyrics captivated listeners with their perceptive language and naked emotion, born out of Mitchell's life, loves, complaints, and prophecies. As an artist whose work deftly balances narrative and musical complexity, she has been admired by such legendary lyricists as Bob Dylan and Leonard Cohen and beloved by such groundbreaking jazz musicians as Jaco Pastorius, Wayne Shorter, and Herbie Hancock. Her hits—from "Big Yellow Taxi" to "Both Sides, Now" to "A Case of You"—endure as timeless favorites, and her influence on the generations of singer-songwriters who would follow her, from her devoted fan Prince to Björk, is undeniable.
In this intimate biography, drawing on dozens of unprecedented in-person interviews with Mitchell, her childhood friends, and a cast of famous characters, Yaffe reveals the backstory behind the famous songs—from Mitchell's youth in Canada, her bout with polio at age nine, and her early marriage and the child she gave up for adoption, through the love affairs that inspired masterpieces, and up to the present—and shows us why Mitchell has so enthralled her listeners, her lovers, and her friends.

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Street Date:
10/17/2017
Language:
English
ISBN:
9780374715601
ASIN:
B01N2JPREN
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APA Citation (style guide)

David Yaffe. (2017). Reckless Daughter: A Portrait of Joni Mitchell. Farrar, Straus and Giroux.

Chicago / Turabian - Author Date Citation (style guide)

David Yaffe. 2017. Reckless Daughter: A Portrait of Joni Mitchell. Farrar, Straus and Giroux.

Chicago / Turabian - Humanities Citation (style guide)

David Yaffe, Reckless Daughter: A Portrait of Joni Mitchell. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2017.

MLA Citation (style guide)

David Yaffe. Reckless Daughter: A Portrait of Joni Mitchell. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2017.

Note! Citation formats are based on standards as of July 2022. Citations contain only title, author, edition, publisher, and year published. Citations should be used as a guideline and should be double checked for accuracy.
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      • bioText: David Yaffe was born in Dallas, Texas, in 1973. He has written on numerous subjects (music, film, theater, dance, higher education) for The Nation, New York, Slate, The New York Times, The New Republic, Harper's Magazine, The New York Review of Books, The Paris Review, and other publications. He is currently a professor of Humanities at Syracuse University, and is the author of Fascinating Rhythm: Reading Jazz in American Writing and Bob Dylan: Like a Complete Unknown.
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title
Reckless Daughter
fullDescription

"She was like a storm." —Leonard Cohen
Reckless Daughter is the story of an artist and an era that have left an indelible mark on American music.
Joni Mitchell may be the most influential female recording artist and composer of the late twentieth century. In Reckless Daughter, the music critic David Yaffe tells the remarkable, heart-wrenching story of how the blond girl with the guitar became a superstar of folk music in the 1960s, a key figure in the Laurel Canyon music scene of the 1970s, and the songwriter who spoke resonantly to, and for, audiences across the country.
A Canadian prairie girl, a free-spirited artist, Mitchell never wanted to be a pop star. She was nothing more than "a painter derailed by circumstances," she would explain. And yet, she went on to become a talented self-taught musician and a brilliant bandleader, releasing album after album, each distinctly experimental, challenging, and revealing. Her lyrics captivated listeners with their perceptive language and naked emotion, born out of Mitchell's life, loves, complaints, and prophecies. As an artist whose work deftly balances narrative and musical complexity, she has been admired by such legendary lyricists as Bob Dylan and Leonard Cohen and beloved by such groundbreaking jazz musicians as Jaco Pastorius, Wayne Shorter, and Herbie Hancock. Her hits—from "Big Yellow Taxi" to "Both Sides, Now" to "A Case of You"—endure as timeless favorites, and her influence on the generations of singer-songwriters who would follow her, from her devoted fan Prince to Björk, is undeniable.
In this intimate biography, drawing on dozens of unprecedented in-person interviews with Mitchell, her childhood friends, and a cast of famous characters, Yaffe reveals the backstory behind the famous songs—from Mitchell's youth in Canada, her bout with polio at age nine, and her early marriage and the child she gave up for adoption, through the love affairs that inspired masterpieces, and up to the present—and shows us why Mitchell has so enthralled her listeners, her lovers, and her friends.

reviews
      • premium: False
      • source: Josephine Livingstone, The New Republic
      • content:

        "A vivid and dramatic book"

      • premium: False
      • source: Rachel Syme, The Nation
      • content: "The best chronicle to date of Mitchell's creative process and the specific way her songs were composed."
      • premium: False
      • source: Jack Hamilton, The Atlantic
      • content: "Yet whatever her listeners might dream or desire, Joni Mitchell was never in it for them, and she certainly wasn't like them: She was a genius. As David Yaffe shows in his new biography, Reckless Daughter: A Portrait of Joni Mitchell, to approach her as an open book waiting to be read is to miss the essence of that genius . . . [T]he best full-length treatment of Mitchell yet published."
      • premium: False
      • source: Dan Chiasson, The New Yorker
      • content: "Joni Mitchell's gift was so enormous that it remade the social space around her. As David Yaffe's new biography, "Reckless Daughter: A Portrait of Joni Mitchell" (Sarah Crichton Books), suggests, it is no small burden to possess something as valuable as Mitchell's talent, and it meant that this girl from the Canadian prairie would be in the world, whether she liked it or not . . . Yaffe, who teaches at Syracuse, charts these encounters with a sure hand, and is a brilliant analyst of how Mitchell's songs are made. "
      • premium: True
      • source: Kirkus
      • content:

        September 1, 2017
        A new biography of the luminous folk singer and musical icon.If you don't already believe that Joni Mitchell (b. 1943) is a genius without peer, you might have a hard time making the case from this effusive book, long on gossip but short on analysis, except of a kind of ethereal quality. As Yaffe (English/Syracuse Univ.; Bob Dylan: Like a Complete Unknown, 2011, etc.) writes, "Joni may have felt that she was the lone member of the Canadian lunatic generation, but it was her destiny to alchemize all that loneliness into music that made people feel they were not alone." Meaning, one supposes, that Mitchell, nee Roberta Joan Anderson, wrote songs geared to sensitive people that amounted to a corpus that, as David Crosby once proclaimed, "was the highest quality of songwriting that I'd run into. I liked her better than Dylan or anybody." Yaffe's book is a useful appreciation, but it doesn't delve enough into the whys and wherefore of that songwriting and its high quality--why an odd open tuning mixed with onrushing lyrics should alchemize into something like "Coyote," say, though we do learn that there was a lot of sex and cocaine in LA in the 1970s and that Jackson Browne and James Taylor may not be the nice guys their public images suggest. "Even if cocaine fueled some of Hejira's powerful songs," writes Yaffe, "the clarity of going off coke produced other songs that came from a different and equally compelling kind of power." That's a souffle of a sentence, and, like so much of the book, it needs more grounding in Mitchell's actual work and at a deeper level than, for example, "it is on the bridge about the 'lonesome blues' that the chords get interesting." Mitchell deserves more musically sophisticated treatment, though this is serviceable enough as a straight fan-notes homage. Readers wanting to go deeper into the art would do better to start with Malka Marom's Joni Mitchell: In Her Own Words (2014).

        COPYRIGHT(2017) Kirkus Reviews, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

      • premium: True
      • source: Library Journal
      • content:

        October 15, 2017

        Joni Mitchell (nee Roberta Joan Anderson in 1943 Alberta) is the subject of two books this fall. An anthology of articles about the singer/songwriter, edited by Barney Hoskyns, is also pubbing this month. But Yaffe (Bob Dylan: Like a Complete Unknown), a longtime fan who met with Mitchell often between 2007 and 2015, takes the traditional biography route and starts at the beginning, with her less-than-satisfying childhood, her bout with polio, and her self-taught musicianship. Mitchell eventually left home, singing in coffeehouses in Toronto, and on her way to her own legendary status crossed paths with every rising star in the folk and rock firmament: Judy Collins, Bob Dylan, Leonard Cohen, David Crosby, Neil Young, Buffy Sainte-Marie, and Jimi Hendrix among them. Her songwriting magic was as much a lure to these fellow troubadours as her ethereal beauty and original sound. Yaffe follows the music and the stories behind them, covering the marriages and love affairs, the record company woes, and the child she gave up for adoption. Fans won't see her star diminished as much as her brilliance and frailties revealed. VERDICT All music collections need this one. [Illustrations and index not seen.] [See Prepub Alert, 4/24/17.]--Bette-Lee Fox, Library Journal

        Copyright 2017 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

      • premium: True
      • source: Publisher's Weekly
      • content:

        Starred review from October 23, 2017
        Drawing on in-depth interviews with Mitchell, her friends, and her musical associates, Yaffe (Fascinating Rhythm) paints a colorful and riveting portrait of a songwriter who has continually broken boundaries and explored new musical territories. In lively, bright prose, Yaffe traces Roberta Joan Anderson from her birth in Alberta, Canada, in 1943, through her early bout of polio, her marriage to Chuck Mitchell in 1964 (when she changed her name to Joni Mitchell), and the birth of her daughter in 1965. Yaffe describes Mitchell’s steely resolve to make her own art, her emergence as a voice of her generation, her creative struggles in the 1980s and 1990s, and her recent recovery from a brain aneurysm. He brilliantly guides readers through Mitchell’s evolution as a musician with vivid descriptions of the making of each of her albums from Song to a Seagull (“If drums and an electric guitar had been added to the mix, Joni would have produced some acid rock herself”) through Shine in 2007. Yaffe introduces readers to the musicians with whom Mitchell worked, including Leonard Cohen, Graham Nash, Judy Collins, and Charles Mingus. The combination of fine writing and extensive access make this the definitive biography of a gifted songwriter and musician.

      • premium: True
      • source: Booklist
      • content:

        Starred review from October 15, 2017
        In this dazzling biography, Yaffe so aptly calls Joni Mitchell (born Roberta Joan Anderson) our eternal singer-songwriter of sorrows. Ironically, Mitchell considered herself a painter first, according to Yaffe. He perfectly captures not only the singer's urban-inflected and American-influenced lyrics but also music that is deeply rooted in Canadian prairie soil (she was born in Alberta and raised in Saskatchewan). Like fellow Canadian Neil Young, Mitchell was struck by polio at a young age. The disease scarred her emotionally, but it also made her resilient and rebellious. She moved to Toronto as an unwed mother and gave up the baby for adoption. Her marriage to the American folksinger Chuck Mitchell, while pursuing her career on the folk music/coffeehouse circuit, was a disaster, but she was writing songs while in her twenties, including the timeless Both Sides, Now. Yaffe offers critical observations on of all her albums (including Blue, Ladies of the Canyon, The Hissing of Summer Lawns, Court and Spark, Hejira, Don Juan's Reckless Daughter, and Mingus); recalls her halcyon and artistically fruitful days in the Los Angeles neighborhood of Laurel Canyon; and discusses her relationships with the late Leonard Cohen, David Crosby, Graham Nash, James Taylor, and Jackson Browne, among others. A shimmering portrait of one artist's life, illusions and all.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2017, American Library Association.)

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shortDescription

"She was like a storm." —Leonard Cohen
Reckless Daughter is the story of an artist and an era that have left an indelible mark on American music.
Joni Mitchell may be the most influential female recording artist and composer of the late twentieth century. In Reckless Daughter, the music critic David Yaffe tells the remarkable, heart-wrenching story of how the blond girl with the guitar became a superstar of folk music in the 1960s, a key figure in the Laurel Canyon music scene of the 1970s, and the songwriter who spoke resonantly to, and for, audiences across the country.
A Canadian prairie girl, a free-spirited artist, Mitchell never wanted to be a pop star. She was nothing more than "a painter derailed by circumstances," she would explain. And yet, she went on to become a talented self-taught musician and a brilliant bandleader, releasing album after album, each distinctly experimental, challenging, and revealing. Her lyrics...

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