In her texts, Mitchell maniacally explores her anxieties, sinking the knife and enjoying the pain of self-inflicted mental atrocities. Her poems are sentimental longings that always maintain composure in a limbo of universal sympathy, morbidly attached to a cosmic sense of loneliness and ecstasy.

Hers is poetry of fragments, particularly fragments of small daily events. She utilizes linear story development to create modern fairy tales with a tendency to mythologize that are impressionist watercolors, immediate and natural. Her songs have a conversational tone, a common plan, and are sculpted in the mind with the charm of a melody congealed to an image. Her voice, crystal clear, politely sung in a soprano, with clear diction and agile inflection, has an almost academic, alienating feel, pushing to extend vocal boundaries.

In addition to being part of a rock intelligentsia, Mitchell is also known for having a sophisticated and elegant attitude, in striking contrast with the characters of 1960s rock. Her high level of intelligence over time created an equally educated musician, able to get out of the cramped rooms of the folk scene and roam into the realm of avant-garde jazz.

Joni Mitchell (born Roberta Joan Anderson) started to play the guitar (or ukulele) in Canada during college. After completing her education (1965), Anderson married Chuck Mitchell, who gave her her name and brought her to the USA. In Detroit, the young Mitchell became known as a fine folk-singer, and the word spread quickly. Taking advantage of her 1966 divorce, she moved to Greenwich Village, where she was discovered and her songs became hits when sung by pop singers like Judy Collins.

She arrived in California in 1968 to be a part of the entourage of Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young. She rapidly became the girlfriend of Nash, which was the first of a series of romances between the stars of rock music. David Crosby taught her to play guitar featuring hyper-chromatic tunings. The music of Joni Mitchell (Reprise, 1968), later reissued as Song to a Seagull, is that of a pure folk-singer who is accompanied only by an acoustic guitar, and is striking for the kindly howling soprano (one vocal style more reminiscent of medieval songs) and for the sacred silence that surrounds her solemn stories. Typical of her style are the ineffable romantic ballad Michael from Mountains, the crackling honky-tonk piano and yodeling vocal counterpoints piece Night in the City, the impressionistic, ecstatic, and rarefied Song to a Seagull, and the lyrical and intense Cactus Tree.

Clouds (1969)is, if possible, even more austere. The songs run slowly and tenderly (the mythological ecstasy of Tin Angel, the Mediterranean suspense of Roses Blue) or are suspended in a sort of stunned soliloquy (The Fiddle and the Drum for one voice, the classical stream of consciousness I Think I Understand). The melodic peak is reached in two songs already released by other artists: Both Sides Now, dotted with arpeggios and impressionistic strokes, and Chelsea Morning, underlined by a lively and syncopated guitar playing.

The culminations of her “acoustic” period are the sweet lullabies of Ladies of the Canyon (1970), especially Morning Morgantown, one of her most gentle melodies, and Circle Game, which plays like a nursery rhyme. It is an album that alternates from rarefied pieces (For Free, one of her first formidable free-form piano ballads, and Rainy Night House) to more “public” songs: the anthem Woodstock and the ecological Big Yellow Taxi were marked by Mitchell’s first personal successes.

Joni Mitchell begins on this disc to expand her musical horizons, abandoning the “West-Coast sound” in favor of broader possibilities of expression. Her soprano is now a perfectly tuned instrument, capable of alternating recitatives with fluid ease, dramatic acuteness, and whispering trills of operatic falsetto.

With Blue (1971), Mitchell takes the lyrical and musical transformation that consecrates the zenith of her most introspective and autobiographical music. Blue is a king of vibrant travelogue following the end of a sentimental experience. Her voice, elegantly and vibrantly stretched, reaches its climax of the possibility of folk-singing, sinking in a continuous neurotic moan. The compositions are complex and convoluted, intentionally rugged and anti-spectacular, sonically skinny, verging on silence. The words are more lyrical and detached, and without false modesty face the problems of the new sexual ethic, like Erica Jong was doing around the same time with her fiction. The harmonies are more rhythmic and melodic when accompanied by a guitar (All I Want, Carey, California, This Flight Tonight) and represent the most serene and lively art of the Californian, with calls to CSNY and country rock. The other pieces, for ivory, rely on difficult balances between vocal inventions and strokes of a piano, and create an environment of “cultured” European art (Blue, My Old Man, River, The Last Time I Saw Richard) that is suffused in the brain. These piano pieces are real chamber sonatas, and represent the highest achievements of the harmonic music of Joni Mitchell. Though there are many digressions of theme on the album, the main conflict is one of a romantically attained wisdom, the conflict between love and freedom: love stifles freedom, and without freedom you cannot have creativity. Loneliness becomes a necessary evil for those who want to realize their own personality. In this abstract thesis, Mitchell sacrifices herself for her music, and is reduced to a mere witness of her own personal drama.

For The Roses (Asylum, 1972) closes the trilogy of the folk masterpieces. It is a decidedly feminine album that explores the issue of love from the point of view of the woman. If it is musically even more abstract than the last, in practice it is more accessible. The vocal contortions here are married in the most natural way possible, and music and lyrics avoid the petulance and self-pity of the litanies of Blue in favor of a more spontaneous romance. The arrangements, very savvy, for the first time split horns, strings, electric guitar, drums, and bass, although they are dosed with discretion. This record is a clear indication that Mitchell was changing direction, focusing on the music more than the lyrics.

The language of piano from Blue can still be heard in Banquet and Judgement, but in Blonde in the Bleachers one can observe the beginning of Mitchell’s transformation into a new sound, one that is more full-bodied and rhythmic. Cold Blue Steel and Sweet Fire fascinates with almost Hawaiian vocals and sophisticated arrangements. Electricity is her own version of a sentimental kitsch, and Let the Wind Carry Me is a rhythm and blues tune suffused with evocative blues. The catchy You Turn Me On and the personal manifesto of Woman of Heart and Mind, as well as giving a vivid picture, have the typical Californian setting, both in vocals and guitar phrasing.

Mitchell’s great trilogy consists of Ladies of the Canyon, the most folk, Blue, the most experimental, and For the Roses, a synthesis of intellectualism and progressive folk.

Coming to a point of perfect balance between folk, classical music, and pop music, and between anguish and ecstasy, Joni Mitchell now decides to assimilate jazz, too, in order to balance her softly unconscious weeps and latent neurosis with a fluent arrangement, even if it is at the expense of those dazzling images of painful, lapidary sensations.

Court And Spark (1974), the first and best in this direction, contains Mitchell’s only real hit, the soulful Help Me, complete with a brass kitsch in the background. Chamber strings, lively rhythms, and vocals on counterpoint dismantle the introspectiveness of Blue, thus fulfilling the natural progression from solo acoustic guitar to the ensembles pioneered on Roses. A more sinuous and less adventurous series of songs embroiders her stories of a betrayed lover on a colorful (Free Man in Paris, Car on a Hill, Same Situation) and sometimes even sparkling (the rowdy rhythm and blues of Raised on Robbery, the swinging scat of Twisted) harmonic tissue. Her stereotypical confessional piano style is replicated only in Down to You, tense and classical, and Court and Spark.

Hissing of Summer Lawns (1975) indulges in easy-listening with results that are far more mediocre. But, it does contain some brilliant ideas: Edith and the Kingpin, In France they Kiss on Main Street, Jungle Line, and Shadows and Light).

It would be another year before the artist would recover with a new album, Hejira (1976), dedicated to the journey of Muhammad from Mecca to Medina in 622 (the event that spurred Islam); it is an album conceived at the intersection between the flow of music and words found on Blue and the renewal of her folk program for jazz launched with Court and Spark.

The ballads are warm and lively (Refuge of the Road, with a cocktail jazz atmosphere, Coyote, with a Caribbean rhythm) or introverted and reserved (Amelia, a requiem for languid strokes of guitar and vibraphone, and Hejira, dreamlike and disconsolate due to the vortices of Jaco Pastorius). They are, for the most part, road-songs accompanied by a discreet instrumental texture. The common theme is the highway, a place of travel, of solitary meditations, of romantic adventures, of farewells and of memories. The peaks are the towering 8 minutes of the lyrical Song for Sharon, a sublimation of the Californian guitar and vocal style, and Furry Sings the Blues, with harmonica echoing Neil Young. On the other hand, the intensity of the previously naïve Mitchell is now completely deteriorated, and the singer seems eveer more absorbed in a form of paranoid self-pity.

The next record, Don Juan’s Reckless Daughter (1977) is an ambitious double-album, again with Pastorius on bass and now with Wayne Shorter on sax. It is lost in futile jazz swoons (16 minutes of planned orchestra on Paprika Plains, conducted by Mike Gibbs) and succeeds rarely (the convoluted and overwhelming soul of Jericho, the delirious and nearly Indian Don Juan’s Reckless Daughter, the tribal and occult Dreamland). Mitchell’s jazz breakthrough takes the form of collaboration with Charles Mingus on Mingus (1979), which contains only one piece by Mitchell herself (The Wolf that Lives in Lindsay). It was interrupted by the death of the great musician. The pretentiousness of these works, however, alienates the public.

In the 80s, Mitchell’s activities thinned considerably. Melodically similar to Court and Spark, exquisitely arranged like Hejira, yet with lyrics more measured, sincere, warm, and deep (although revolving around the same themes of love, anxiety, and fears of a single woman growing older), Wild Things Run Fast (Geffen, 1982) is located halfway between pleasant intellectual entertainment (Be Cool, You Dream Flat Tires, Love).

Dog Eat Dog (1985) is the most commercial album, full of electronic arrangements and topical themes. This record is sung like the soul of a yuppie businessman, and it takes a team of technologists and the adoption of a scratchy vocal style to carry it from track to track: the alienated funk of Fiction, the symphonic and chilling dissonances of Three Great Stimulants, the ethno-disco Shiny Toys, the sentimental soul and heavy-metal of Good Friends. All songs are subtended by a climate of suspense and impending catastrophe, in line with Peter Gabriel and Kate Bush. Dog Eat Dog and Impossible Dreamer act as a bridge to her classic style.

The change is dramatic, but not surprising. The modesty of the moral fables of the past reveals all of its cold and disenchanted anachronistic attitude with Mitchell observing the real world of the 80s, rife with tragedies, policies, urban neurosis, the power of the media, consumerism, ecological disasters, famine, and a thousand other evils of the century. The woman in Mitchell is suddenly awakened to realize that, while she was crying over her failures of love, the world suffered tragedies far more serious. The betrayals and the outrages of which she sang on her previous records were nothing compared to what was happening in the world. Aristocratically closed in her grief, Mitchell had never noticed. Her new didacticism still sounds hypocritical and out of place, always too abstract to be genuinely populist.

Chalk Marks in the Rain (1988) focuses on this new style of arrangement and brings it back to the sensitivity of the folk period, with exciting results in My Secret Place, The Beat of Black Wings, The Reoccuring Dream, Dancin’ Clown (with Billy Idol), and Snakes and Ladders , and a parade of special guests, from Willie Nelson to Peter Gabriel.

Night Ride Home (Geffen, 1991) finds Mitchell in a soulful mood, boasting a voice that has rarely been so warm and elastic. The humble overture of Night Ride Home sets the "domestic" tone. A couple of intruiguing meditations like Passion Play, with hypnotic guitar work, and Nothing Can Be Done, almost a neurotic version of Crosby Stills Nash & Young, and the harrowing, autobiographical account of sexual abuse of Cherokee Louise, take a few chances, but mostly Mitchell plays it safe with mellow tunes wrapped in charming arrangements such as Windfall and The Only Joy In Town. Of the two major work-outs, Slouching Towards Bethlehem is haunted by syncopated percussions, distant echoes and dancing guitar, while Come in From the Cold rolls gently in a soundscape of Enya-esque vocal effects and droning instruments. Mitchell is still faithful to her classic style (by the erratic standards of her colleagues), but seems to have re-discovered the power of melody and wed it to a more passionate perception of life. She has never sounded so "black" as in the closing Two Grey Rooms, one of her most challenging vocal exercises. This is easily her best album since Hejira.

Turbulent Indigo (Reprise, 1994), which almost stands as a sociopolitical concept album, is a weaker album, despite the fact that the arrangements are among the most sophisticated of her career. Turbulent Indigo is to Night Ride Home what Court And Spark was to Blue. The overall feeling is one of a priestess lecturing people from her pedestal. Where Night Ride Home was pure, palpable emotion, Turbulent Indigo is condescending attitude. That said, How Do You Stop is one of her simplest and most effective melodies, and she continues to take vocal chances in Last Chance Lost, another of her "black" songs (songs permeated by the feeling of black music). The jazz-rock instrumental wrapping is particularly charming in Sunny Sunday, that could have fit on Van Morrison's Moondance, and the sonic choreography is chillingly suspenseful in Sex Kills. But the heavy atmospheres of Turbulent Indigo, Borderline, The Magdelaine Laundries are more about ideas than music. The peak of pathos is reached at the end, with the lengthy The Sire Of Sorrow, featuring Wayne Shorter on sax, that reenacts the magic of her inner travelogues.

Unfortunately, Taming the Tiger (Reprise, 1998) was a mediocre collection, the Wild Things Run Fast of this phase.

Both Sides Now (Reprise, 2000) is an album of orchestral ballads, mostly jazz and pop covers.

In august 2000, Mitchell held the first retrospective of her paintings.

Travelogue (Nonesuch, 2002) is a two-disc anthology.

Coming almost a decade after the last studio album of original material, Shine (2007) proved that Mitchell had lost her inspiration. She had become the easy-listening muse (the instrumental overture One Week Last Summer, the laid-back Shine) of which she had been the antithesis in her heydays. Her vocals are opaque at best (certainly not suited for this kind of ballads) and her lyrics are so predictable that at times she sounds like the stereotypical grandmother nagging at everything new in society. Night of the Iguana displays the class of the consummate storyteller (and of a brainy guitar player), but it's the exception, not the rule.

Joni Mitchell suffered a brain aneurysm in 2015 and de facto retired from music.