Author Talk: Paul Lisicky on the music of Joni Mitchell

360°Sound attended the 2025 Texas Book Festival, which was held Nov. 8-9 in Austin. For the last six years, 360 has been publishing an interview series called “Author Talk,” in which we spotlight new music-related books. So, of course, we jumped at the chance to catch the Nov. 9 session, “Beyond the Music: Legendary American Musicians,” featuring author Peter Ames Carlin talking about his book Tonight in Jungleland: The Making of ‘Born to Run,’ and Paul Lisicky discussing Song So Wild and Blue: A Life with the Music of Joni Mitchell.

Paul Lisicky is a professor of English in the MFA Program in Creative Writing at Rutgers University-Camden. He is the author of seven books, including Later: My Life at the Edge of the World and The Narrow Door: A Memoir of Friendship. During the “Beyond the Music” session, Lisicky spoke about how Joni Mitchell has inspired his own writing, the imagery in his book Song So Wild and Blue, Mitchell’s distinctive guitar tunings, and more. The following highlights from Lisicky have been edited for length and clarity:

On his approach to the book…

Paul Lisicky: I got an invitation from an editor to write about Joni Mitchell. My editor knew that I was a huge Joni fan. He’d seen Joni’s appearances in my work. She comes in through the side door of all six previous books with references to lyrics, etc. And so, I said, ‘That’s a great idea.’ I felt really excited about being given this permission. And so, I thought, ‘How am I going to write this?’ I need constraints around this project.

My thought was to center the book around the album Hejira. I thought each of those songs could be a meditative entry point. And my editor said, ‘I like this, but I want you to be front and center in this book. I want this book to be about the artistic life and how this artist has informed and continues to inform your character as a writer and as a person and as a teacher.’

On Mitchell’s commercial peak with the 1974 album ‘Court and Spark’…

Joni was on the cover of Time magazine in 1974 and was a household name, and I think it was difficult for her. As much as she might have wanted to be in the spotlight, the spotlight was oppressive, and it felt like the next album, Hissing of Summer Lawns, was a reaction to that position. I’m going to try to test my audience and see if they’re willing to come along with me.

I know that must have come with some stress, because I’m sure the record company executive said that there are no obvious singles. It’s the beginning of a turn away from a more visible position, toward a trajectory in which she is trying to develop her own inner vision from album to album, knowing with each album that the sales were dropping. She’s an interesting artist in that she wants to be seen, and she wants to be relevant. But she wants to do it on her own terms, and that comes with friction.

On Mitchell’s idiosyncratic guitar tunings…

Joni writes music out of her own system of guitar tunings, and this began, in part, because she was excited by the different kinds of tones and modalities that she could introduce to the guitar by turning those tuning pegs. It also happened because she was dealing with post-polio syndrome and had lost strength in her left hand. To play the kind of music she wanted to play, she found a system of tunings that could accommodate her left hand.

A lot of people know about the open tunings and how that’s shaped the music, but there’s also the wealth of her piano music. And the piano music sounds as if it comes from open tunings, and she hasn’t changed the pitches of the piano. So, it’s complicated and rich and seems to come from a very idiosyncratic part of her brain.

On the imagery in the book…

I essentially wrote this book through a system of images, and I thought, ‘I can hold this section together if there’s a metaphor in this first section and the next section has another metaphor.’ The book is associated in that way – one section is talking to another section. It felt like juggling. Now, the speaker, the version of me is on the page. And now, Joni is on the page. And it was really intuitive.

What I love about Joni’s songs is that she takes no starting point for granted. They feel like records of process. I tried to do something that felt like a record of thinking, but I didn’t want it to feel arbitrary or too loose. It needed some kind of grounding. And for me, the grounding was in the images. There’s a lot of patterning and repetition in the book. There are things that I did that I see now that I wasn’t even aware of doing. I wanted to get down into the roots of the material, because I think that if Joni were going to write such a book, that’s what she would do.

On how writing the book affected his fandom…

My fear was that I was going to empty Joni out. What happens when you write your jet fuel directly? What happens when you write your muse, rather than allow the muse to stay in the air around you? I have much more respect for her work than I ever did. That’s the most gratifying thing of having written this book. I feel like I learn new things about her work all the time. I’m much more appreciative of the intricacy of her phrasing, which always feels like it’s out to alchemize the visual.

She started out as a painter, and she continues to bring that visual sense into her vocals. I feel like I’m learning about her experiments with rhythm on multiple levels. There are songs that I did not like early on or dismissed, and I appreciate them now more fully. She’s an artist who’s always been a couple of steps ahead of the culture’s ability to see it, appreciate it, and welcome it. There’s something deeply humbling about that.