Joni: The Lyrical Life of Joni Mitchell

Written and illustrated by Selina Alko

Harper (An imprint of HarperCollins)

978-0-06-267129-5

48 pp.

Ages 4-8

February 2020

Of course there is music in a book about singer-songwriter Joni Mitchell. But Selina Alko brings her own music through her words and collage art resplendent with textures and colours. She tells Joni's story of music with her own.

Joni Mitchell painted with words.

Sitting at her piano or strumming the guitar, she turned the words into songs.

The songs were like brushstrokes on a canvas, saying things that were not only happy or sad but true.

From Joni: The Lyrical Life of Joni Mitchell by Selina Alko

Beginning with Joni's childhood as Roberta Joan Anderson, Selina Alko reveals how a restless child who spent time dancing in nature, painting on her walls and creating melodies on the piano ("Rainbows tipped and jumped and skipped in her head") grew into the musician whose hauntingly emotive songs weave a tapestry of longing, environmentalism and home. After Joni's polio treatment, she continued to paint and also write poetry, while learning to play ukulele and finally guitar.

With a trip to a folk festival in Toronto, she began writing songs, performing and marrying Chuck Mitchell, to become Joni Mitchell.

There was a thunderstorm of feelings, anger and tears, and performing her own songs for the very first time.

Selina Alko makes Joni's life into a musical journey of experiences and events that fuelled each song. There's the plane ride from which she noticed the clouds, leading to the song "Both Sides, Now." And looking out the window on her New York neighbourhood she wrote "Chelsea Morning." Later Joni "painted her feelings" into "Big Yellow Taxi" when she saw the destruction of the natural world for buildings and cars.

From Joni: The Lyrical Life of Joni Mitchell by Selina Alko

With each life experience and song, whose lyrics are embedded in the fabric of Joni's life, Selina Alko reveals the influences that made Joni the singer-songwriter she became. Countless recognizable musicians, including Mama Cass, Neil Young, Graham Nash and Charles Mingus, are showcased as being part of her story, influencing the creation of numerous albums.

From Joni: The Lyrical Life of Joni Mitchell by Selina Alko

CBC radio documentarian Selina Alko stays true to her roots of telling stories about real things and real people with her new picture book, Joni: The Lyrical Life of Joni Mitchell. She tells it with honesty and emotional detail, evoking a story of creativity and musicality. But her storytelling, albeit biographical, is more than about a life's timeline. It is an expressive record of a musician's odyssey, filled with highs and lows, the mundane and the extraordinary, and the artistry. Selina Alko reflects that style of storytelling in her own words, packed with feeling and nuance, but also, perhaps even more so, in her artwork. The illustrations in Joni: The Lyrical Life of Joni Mitchell have depth of colour and shape. The darkness and lightness of Joni's music and the richness of her life are all there in Selina Alko's collage art.

A single reading of this picture book will not suffice for older readers who will want to explore the depth of influences and expression in Joni Mitchell's music, art and life but it will introduce young readers well to an iconic Canadian singer-songwriter who helped shape music with her art.

The Circle Game

Text by Joni Mitchell

Illustrations by Brian Deines

Dancing Cat Books

978-1-77086-042-1

32 pp.

Ages 3-6

2011

Turning song lyrics into children's books is not unusual, especially for those tunes that were originally written for children such as nursery rhymes and camp-fire songs.  There are wonderful children's performers like Eddie Douglas who take poetry (e.g., Dennis Lee's poems from Alligator Pie (Macmillan, 1974), Garbage Delight (Macmillan, 1977),  Jelly Belly (Macmillan, 1983) and The Ice Cream Store (HarperCollins, 1991) and adapt it for children's music.  But, in Canada, we don't have a long history of taking the poetry in song or hymn lyrics and adding graphics to produce children's books. Until now, I can only think of two such songs:

• The Huron Carol by Father Jean de Brebeuf, illustrated by Frances Tyrrell (Key Porter, 2003) 
• The Huron Carol by Father Jean de Brebeuf, illustrated by Ian Wallace (Groundwood, 2006)
• Canadian Railroad Trilogy by Gordon Lightfoot, illustrated by Ian Wallace (Groundwood, 2010)

Now we can add Joni Mitchell's song, The Circle Game, to that list. 

The lyrics of Canadian-born Mitchell's song describe growing up and looking forward to new experiences, apparently in response to Neil Young's lament of lost youth in "Sugar Mountain". (1) The honest but hopeful words are beautifully embodied by Deines' paintings in complementary colours of purples and oranges.  Although impossible to tell whether Deines' medium is oil or pastel on canvas, the softness of his illustrations, whether the warm joys of capturing a dragonfly or the dark tremors of thunder and falling stars, always with uniquely dotted backgrounds, capably expresses the joys with the uneasiness of new experiences.  Moreover, just as our perspective of these experiences change as we grow up (dare I say it, age), so does the view of and from the carousel, never allowing one to return but accessible in our memories.

(1) Joni Mitchell interview notes