“I am not a biographer, in the usual definition of that term,” Ann Powers writes in her introduction to Travelling , describing herself instead as “a critic, a kind of mapmaker”. Her book follows Joni Mitchell’s trail across eight decades, mapping out not just the artist’s singular musical journey, but her misjudgments, musical and otherwise, in a discursive narrative that is peppered with critical theory and personal self-questioning. “I had to keep uprooting myself, rejecting any settled stances about who this woman is and why her music is so special,” Powers says of her often interrogative approach.
Her authorial presence, often illuminating, but sometimes distracting, is the defining undercurrent throughout, which means some passages have the feel of someone thinking out loud as they grapple with the more problematic aspects of Mitchell’s life and work. Then again, it is her “thorniness”, as Powers approvingly calls it, that also makes the singer an even more compelling subject. The journey begins unpromisingly with a prelude titled A Note on Naming, in which Powers frets over whether to call her subject “Joni” or “Mitchell”, the former potentially trivialising, the latter too austerely formal.
In the end, she decides to alternate between both depending on the context. This kind of fastidiousness is a constant throughout, but thankfully is put to much better use in Powers’s analysis of Mitchell’s songwriting and often startling musical in.