When Paul Lisicky happened upon the online video of Joni Mitchell singing at the 2022 Newport Folk Festival, he watched through tears of amazement and gratitude.
That’s probably not so different from how the rest of the 5.5 million people who’ve since watched that surprise performance have felt. Wearing a blue beret and perched in a throne-like chair next to her champion, Brandi Carlile, Mitchell was luminous in her first performance since recovering from a 2015 brain aneurysm that had left her unable to walk or speak, let alone sing.
But Lisicky had an unusual perspective: he was nearly finished writing a book about Mitchell. Song So Wild and Blue: A Life With the Music of Joni Mitchell, his seventh book, out now, is not a biography but a hybrid of memoir and love letter and a very personal take on how one artist affects another.
That’s perhaps a fitting approach for someone who in the early 1990s came of age as a Fine Arts Work Center writing fellow. Lisicky, who lives in Brooklyn but still teaches at FAWC every summer, was in Provincetown when he saw Mitchell’s Newport performance.
“I did not have any idea when I began the book that she’d ever come back to us,” Lisicky says. “I saw the video, and I just thought, well, this must be old. And then I saw that it was the night before, and I wept and wept.”
Then he went out to the patio of the Captain’s House, where he was staying, and wrote about seeing that performance after a lifetime of Joni worship. “We’d reconciled ourselves to losing her, and now she was back, sly thing,” he wrote. “She’d always had plans to outsmart us.”
Song So Wild and Blue came as the result of kismet, Lisicky says. He tweeted a photo of Mitchell and Carlile, and an editor who was familiar with his work sent him a message to ask if he’d be interested in writing a Joni-themed book.
It felt inevitable. Mitchell’s influence took hold of Lisicky when he was in fourth grade, a budding pianist growing up in Cherry Hill, N.J., who taught himself to play “Both Sides Now” by ear after singing it in music class at school. He then found her albums and was mesmerized. As a teen, he even tried to work her magic into the liturgical songs he wrote and published in a magazine for church musicians.
Eventually, Lisicky traded song writing for fiction and nonfiction, attending the Iowa Writers Workshop before becoming a FAWC fellow. Today, he’s a professor of creative writing at Rutgers University-Camden.
Mitchell is still his artistic beacon.
“I think on a gut level, I respond first to her harmonic structures,” he says of what draws him to her. “The songs do not sound like other people’s songs.” They’re just close enough to the mainstream to subvert and open it up, he says.
In Mitchell’s lyrics, and even more in her phrasing, she paints a picture for the listener. “It’s a fun project to listen to one song and think about how she’s trying to evoke light on water by wavering an elongated vowel,” he says. An example is heard at the end of the second verse of “Lesson in Survival” from For the Roses, when she sings, “Fresh salmon frying and the tide ROLL-ing in,” rippling that vowel.
“I love the warmth in her voice,” Lisicky says, “the smokiness of it. I love how it’s changed over time. She’s been probably 10 or 12 artists over the decades.” And it’s that evolution from album to album, “the freedom and fluidity of self-making,” he says, that has always been a thrill to listen to.
Listening to Mitchell, Lisicky writes, “is a way to mourn everything first.” It’s true in almost every song, he says, though particularly in “Amelia,” “The Last Time I Saw Richard,” “Jericho,” and “Blue.” That last one, he says, evokes “anticipatory grief.”
For Lisicky, who has written plenty on the subject of loss, including My Life at the Edge of the World, about how the AIDS crisis swept through early-’90s Provincetown, and about the death of his dear friend to cancer in The Narrow Door, Joni’s ready access to grief feels like a bond.
“There seems to be some alchemy in Joni’s work between crucial losses and art making,” Lisicky says. “I never thought about Joni’s spirituality until recently, but you know, for her, it seems like the faith is about music, it’s about art, it’s about love in its purest sense.”
And, he added, “I think that’s true for me, too.”
Wild and Blue
The event: Paul Lisicky discusses his new book
The time: Tuesday, July 22, 7 p.m.
The place: Wellfleet Public Library, 55 Main St.
The cost: Free
