Music books round-up: A riot grrrl memoir and a much-anticipated Joni Mitchell biography

Open this photo in gallery:

Years ago, Ann Powers received a call from a New York editor asking her to write about Joni Mitchell. Powers’s initial impulse was to pull the phone away from her face and laugh.

It just seemed so on the nose: Who else to write on the iconoclast but the critic who co-edited Rock She Wrote: Women Write About Rock, Rap, and Pop, and who had spent a career contemplating what it means to be called a woman in music?

Wondering if she was being typecast, it occurred to Powers that she’d never been asked to write about, say, the Beatles.

She later called the editor back, though, and agreed to make Mitchell’s career “the centre of my world for awhile,” as she writes in the introduction of the resulting book, Traveling: On the Path of Joni Mitchell.

Open this photo in gallery:

“Little did I know, as I set forth with her in mind, that this journey would take me into so many complicated spaces.”

The biography on the Big Yellow Taxi singer is due out on June 11, published by Dey Street Books. Powers – a long-time National Public Radio music critic whose books include the Tori Amos memoir Piece by Piece and 2017′s Good Booty: Love and Sex, Black and White, Body and Soul in American Music – could not have known when she undertook the Joni assignment that Mitchell, at age 80, would be in the middle of full-blown career revival by the time the book came out.

Indeed, in 2015, Mitchell had suffered an aneurysm that left her unable to speak. With the singer-songwriter silenced, Powers wrote her book, relying on interviews with Mitchell’s peers and extensive archival research. She considers the nature of biographies and offers the disclaimer that Traveling is not a standard account of Mitchell’s music and times.

Powers writes not as a chronicler but a critic – or, in her words, “a kind of mapmaker.” Millions watched Mitchell sing Both Sides Now for this year’s Grammy Awards broadcast. How did she get there? Traveling tracks the course.

More books on music

Mohawk Warriors, Hunters & Chiefs, Tom Wilson Tehoháhake (Goose Lane, out now)

Open this photo in gallery:

With his 2017 memoir Beautiful Scars, Hamilton singer-songwriter Tom Wilson eloquently and charismatically told the story of how he had recently discovered his Mohawk heritage. His follow-up, launched this month with a related art exhibit at Toronto’s Cultural Goods Gallery, collects images of his paintings (including vividly coloured guitars) that explore what it means to be removed and reconnected with one’s cultural heritage.

3 Shades of Blue: Miles Davis, John Coltrane, Bill Evans, and the Lost Empire of Cool, James Kaplan (Penguin, March)

A writer of fiction and non-fiction, James Kaplan fashioned his 2010 Sinatra biography Frank: The Voice with a novel’s drama and detail. A book about the rise and fall of American cool and the road to jazz’s most iconic album (1959′s Kind of Blue) deserves that same touch.

The Summer We Crossed Europe in the Rain: Lyrics for Stacey Kent, Kazuo Ishiguro (Knopf, April)

Bob Dylan is not the only lyricist who has won a Nobel Prize in Literature. Take novelist Kazuo Ishiguro, also a laureate, who moonlights as a songwriter with American composer Jim Tomlinson. Their songs are sung by well-known jazz vocalist Stacey Kent, Tomlinson’s wife. A volume of 16 lyrics comes with illustrations by Italian artist Bianca Bagnarelli and an introduction by Ishiguro.

Let Me Take You Down: Penny Lane and Strawberry Fields Forever, Jonathan Cott (University of Minnesota Press, April)

Open this photo in gallery:

While the Beatles’ Penny Lane and Strawberry Fields Forever were both surreal, psychedelic songs inspired by memories of Liverpool, they were opposites in many ways. The former, primarily written by Paul McCartney, was all piccolos, smiles and a sunbeam melody; the later, from Lennon, was brooding and philosophic. Rolling Stone writer Jonathan Cott uses the double A-side single from the Summer of Love to examine the band at a pivotal era in its short career.

There Was Nothing You Could Do: Bruce Springsteen’s “Born In The U.S.A.” and the End of the Heartland, Steven Hyden (Hachette, May)

One of 2023′s most acclaimed music books was Deliver Me from Nowhere, Warren Zanes’s deep dive into the making of Bruce Springsteen’s lo-fi masterpiece, 1982′s Nebraska. Now comes There Was Nothing You Could Do from classic-rock aficionado Steven Hyden. The book looks at Springsteen’s Born in the U.S.A. (the 1984 follow-up to Nebraska) and considers the loss of America’s soul.

Rebel Girl: My Life as a Feminist Punk, Kathleen Hanna (HarperCollins, May)

Open this photo in gallery:

“In her hips,” Bikini Kill’s Kathleen Hanna sang in 1993, “there’s revolution.” The song was Rebel Girl, a riot grrrl anthem that unavoidably now serves as the title to Hanna’s autobiography. The queer feminist group Boygenius just won three rock music Grammys, but in the 1990s being in an all-female punk band was more about survival than awards. There are many who stand on Hanna’s shoulders.

What a Fool Believes, Michael McDonald with Paul Reiser (Dey Street, May)

The yacht-rock icon (a high-school dropout from landlocked Missouri of all places) was a member of Steely Dan and the Doobie Brothers in the 1970s and 1980s. Do you think he partied? The throaty baritone voice of What a Fool Believes, Minute by Minute and Takin’ It to the Streets tells his life story with help from comedian friend Paul Reiser.