Electric Literature is pleased to reveal the cover of Song So Wild and Blue: A Life with Joni Mitchell, the new memoir by acclaimed writer Paul Lisicky, which will be published by HarperOne on February 4th, 2025. You can pre-order your copy here.
From the moment Paul Lisicky heard Joni Mitchell while growing up in New Jersey, he recognized she was that rarity among musicians—a talent whose combination of introspection, liberation, and deep musicality set her apart from any other artist of the time. As a young man, Paul was a budding songwriter who took his cues from Mitchell’s mysteries and idiosyncrasies. But as he matured, he set his guitar aside and lost himself in prose, a practice that would eventually take him to the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and into the professional world of letters. Here are his thoughts on Mitchell, his memoir, and its cover.
My book’s title comes from a line in Joni Mitchell’s song “Amelia,” which thinks about what it means to make a life in art. It’s about the solitariness of that life, the precarity—how easy it is to disappear, which was the fate of the aviator Amelia Earhart, who attempted to be the first woman to circumnavigate the world on a solo flight in 1937. The song is addressed to her, not simply as an aviator, but as a woman who struggled between the twin poles of achievement and desire. The song never reconciles this struggle. Instead, it calls on its listener to make their own connections through a chain of images, from six vapor trails in the sky, to an ascending Icarus, to a motel flung out in the desert.
Song So Wild and Blue uses that song (and others) as a starting point. It’s a book that wants to examine my development as a musician and writer through the frame of Joni’s music, but alongside that, it has questions to ask. How is art-making intertwined with self-making? How is art-making a call to connect with others? What happens when one comes up against the limits of self, and what lies on the other side of that? What are the costs of living with a drive you can’t say no to? How is performance a vehicle that both draws a stranger closer and keeps them out? What does the body have to tell us about our short time here? What does love, in all its variations, ask of us?
Here is the cover, designed by Stephen Brayda, with artwork by Marianna Tomaselli:
It’s widely known that Joni thinks of herself as a painter first. Even her phrasing summons up pictures, so the cover image had to be just right. I didn’t want it to mimic one of her paintings or her self-designed album covers. Instead, I thought of the graphic novel as a reference point, a form I love for all the ways in which the panel magnifies what it encloses. So many of Joni’s longer songs operate as sequences of panels— think of ‘Refuge of the Roads’ or ‘Song for Sharon.’ My book wants to play with that structure too.
I love the inviting palette of this image, the variations of blue, the contrast between light and dark, which suggests the oppositions that fire Joni’s lyrics and music. Love, too, the silhouette of Joni’s face in the sky, which conjures up “the hexagram of the heavens” in “Amelia.” Here Joni’s face is neither desolate nor hopeful, neither older nor younger, half human, half bird. If there’s a particular period of Joni’s arc referenced in this image, it’s 1988’s Chalk Mark in a Rainstorm, when her earlier reputation had ebbed for some years. With eyes closed, she’s attuned to her inner life, her specific vision for her work. She’s not giving over too much attention to her detractors. She’s an aspect of the landscape—all of Joni’s songs are of a piece with place, so that place reads as an emotional state—and this landscape is the Columbia River Gorge, in Washington state, where my boyfriend Jude and I traveled to see Joni perform as part of Brandi Carlisle’s Joni Jam in June 2023. The experience of that concert is central to the book, and that’s all I’ll say for now.
I’d always been drawn to the meticulousness of Joni’s songs, their sense of being sculpted line by line over time. But they’re also documents of process, seeking, exploration, spontaneity, the mutability of feeling. Little side trips. One would think that a belief in capturing spontaneity would be at odds with a commitment to technique, but Joni once again brings two contradictory perspectives into the same room. For that I thought it would be important for the cover image to suggest motion, brokenness. It shouldn’t be too fixed, too heavy or known. It should leave space for inquiry. I love the sheets of paper rising on the right, the curvature of their positioning, the handwriting on one, another folded into an origami bird, and still another too high up to be contained by any margin.
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