Celebrating Joni Mitchell, Who Has Sung Us through Pain and Onto Joy

"Oh, I wish I had a river I could skate awaaay on," Joni Mitchell mourned, in her most-covered song, "River." The pain she had felt at the time—1970, when she wrote it— was real. At 26, she was in a state of enormous depression. “I’m so selfish and sad. I’ve gone and lost the best baby that I ever had,” she sang. She had left Graham Nash, who had  loved her deeply, because, as her friend Estrella Berosini had told me, “She needed her life to be harder.” But from that risk-welcoming experience she had arrived at a beautiful song that had universal meaning about sorrow and what was filled with what might be called elegant self-deprecation and wonderment. “I’m so selfish and sad…”

That tough honesty had strained out lies and clichés and there dwelled idiosyncracy and beauty.