Publishers Weekly
★ 03/04/2024
NPR music critic Powers (Good Booty) paints a dazzling portrait of a legendary musician whose restless creativity fueled her multifaceted career in the folk, jazz, rock, and soul genres. Powers traces Mitchell’s musical evolution beginning with a childhood bout of polio that weakened her left hand and led her to fashion a style of open tunings and fingerpickings on guitar. From there, Powers documents Mitchell’s immersion in folk music, forays into jazz in the early 1970s, romances and collaborations with fellow musicians James Taylor and Don Alias, and recovery from a 2015 brain aneurysm. Throughout, Powers foregrounds Mitchell’s penchant for journeys both literal (she penned songs on road trips) and metaphorical. Of the sense of experimentation that animated Mitchell’s 1970s songs, Power writes, “this was the sound of the brain inquiring about itself.” The view of Mitchell that emerges is expansive, nuanced, and generally admiring, without letting her off the hook. For example, though Powers criticizes Mitchell’s decision to wear blackface on the cover of her 1977 album Don Juan’s Reckless Daughter, she takes care to acknowledge the complexities involved, citing scholar Miles Grier’s suggestion that Mitchell’s “desire to claim Black masculinity” was, in her mind, a “way out of the... trap” of being a “maligned woman artist.” The result is a dynamic portrayal of an artist whose “journey would be, throughout her life, her destination.” (June)
From the Publisher
A vibrant critical assessment of the eclectic and enigmatic folk/jazz/pop icon...Those simply looking for loving commentaries on Mitchell classics like Blue will find them, but Powers offers more than mere hagiography, positioning Mitchell as ‘an embodiment of freedom and singularity, of sorrow and of play.’ A top-notch music critic set loose on a worthy subject.” — Kirkus Reviews (starred review)
“Powers turns the act of documenting someone’s life into an artistic endeavor, which makes this book unlike most other titles in the genre…Experiencing this book is more akin to wandering down a scenic path than traveling a timeline of someone’s life, and there is no other musician better suited for this style of biography than the ever-changing Mitchell.” — Library Journal (starred review)
“A dazzling portrait of a legendary musician.” — Publishers Weekly (starred review)
"Powers, one of the very best music critics we’ve got, masterfully guides readers through Mitchell’s life and work at a fascinating slant, her approach both sweeping and intimate as she occupies the dual roles of biographer and fan." — Sophia Stewart, associate news editor, Publishers Weekly (starred review)
"Powers, one of the very best music critics we’ve got, masterfully guides readers through Mitchell’s life and work at a fascinating slant, her approach both sweeping and intimate as she occupies the dual roles of biographer and fan." — The Millions
“A daring, intimate book about a daring, intimate artist, Traveling is a thrilling provocation from Ann Powers, one of the greatest cultural critics of our time. Merging biography, memoir and analysis, Powers paints a gorgeous map of the artist’s influence over a lifetime, puncturing myths and finding electric new connections, always in search of the deeper meaning.” — Emily Nussbaum, The New Yorker
"NPR’s music critic offers an exploration of how Joni Mitchell came to her sense of self and music, while at the same time reflecting on Powers’s own engagement with Mitchell’s journey. Based on interviews and archival research, she offers a peripatetic biography that is as questioning of the genre as it is of its subject." — Library Journal
“An exhilarating ride down the lonely roads where Joni Mitchell has led the way. Ann Powers, the most brilliant of music critics, illuminates so many different sides of the artist—the ambitious young folkie, the rock star, the timeless fan obsession—with poetic ingenuity. For anyone who’s ever been transfixed by a Mitchell song, Traveling is full of fresh revelations and insights.” — Rob Sheffield, author of Dreaming the Beatles
"The Joni Mitchell book we've all been waiting for. Ann Powers gives us a brilliant guided tour through the history, myth, and music of an icon. Traveling provides a seemingly unending supply of treats: canny critical assessments of Joni's beloved catalogue; fascinating nuggets of history; immersive descriptions of the American scene; feminist revisions of received Joni wisdom. And did I mention it's funny? Powers writes with great wit, imagination, and vulnerability, unpacking her own relationship to Mitchell, and to rock music itself. I absolutely loved this book." — Claire Dederer, Bestselling author of Monsters: A Fan's Dilemma
"Thick with the funk of making folk, Traveling climbs from deep sigh to primal scream and then takes a glorious, long way home. This is Ann Powers' intimate, fortifying, and sometimes soul-crushing story of how life becomes songs, how songs chart lives, and how Joni Mitchell became Joni Mitchell." — Danyel Smith, author of Shine Bright: A Very Personal History of Black Women in Pop
“In this rich, meticulous, feminist tome, Ann Power plunges us deep into the Joni-verse. Every page is a revelation. THIS is the book Joni fans have been waiting for.” — Jessica Hopper, documentarian and author of The First Collection of Criticism By a Living Female Rock Critic
Library Journal
★ 05/01/2024
NPR music critic Powers (Good Booty: Love and Sex, Black and White, Body and Soul in American Music) has written a lyrical biography of 80-year-old singer-songwriter Joni Mitchell's life, career, and legacy. In her surprisingly personal account of Mitchell, Powers turns the act of documenting someone's life into an artistic endeavor, which makes this book unlike most other titles in the genre. She executes this by merging biography, memoir, and investigation. Even readers who know the basics of Mitchell's life will find much more to gain from this volume. Readers will leave with a sense of Mitchell's interesting past and a new perspective on why she's relevant now and will likely always be. VERDICT Experiencing this book is more akin to wandering down a scenic path than traveling a timeline of someone's life, and there is no other musician better suited for this style of biography than the ever-changing Mitchell. Powers's highly anticipated title lives up to the hype and is sure to be on many lists of the best books of the year.—Emily Kubincanek
Kirkus Reviews
★ 2024-02-01
A vibrant critical assessment of the eclectic and enigmatic folk/jazz/pop icon.
Veteran NPR music critic Powers, author of Weird Like Us and Good Booty, clearly admires Mitchell's creative restlessness, but she also challenges some of the received wisdom about Mitchell’s life and career and calls out her more problematic moves. To avoid retracing Mitchell’s “official portrait,” the author eschewed interviewing the artist herself, but she tracked down friends, lovers, and fellow musicians (the three groups tended to intermingle) like David Crosby and James Taylor to explore her career in depth. A childhood bout with polio was likely less formative, Powers surmises, than Mitchell’s decision in 1965 to give up a child for adoption. She had storied relationships with powerful men in the music industry, but was no pushover; Powers finds correspondence in which she pushed back against sexist marketing campaigns around her. Far from needing her virtuoso collaborators to guide her, she was an accomplished “studio rat” pushing for new ideas on her own behalf. The author writes about these themes thoughtfully and thoroughly, but her appreciation doesn’t cloud her frustration with Mitchell’s missteps—most infamously, her mid-1970s invention of a blackface character, Art Nouveau, and various attempts to appropriate Native American culture. (Powers invites Miles Grier, a Black scholar, to put Art Nouveau in a musical and cultural context.) The author covers Mitchell’s remarkable comeback from an aneurysm in 2015, and she expands her appreciation beyond Mitchell’s much-lauded comeback (with Brandi Carlisle’s support) to show how her influence extends to jazz, country, pop, and drag performance. Those simply looking for loving commentaries on Mitchell classics like Blue will find them, but Powers offers more than mere hagiography, positioning Mitchell as “an embodiment of freedom and singularity, of sorrow and of play.”
A top-notch music critic set loose on a worthy subject.
