In the best full-length treatment of Mitchell yet published, Yaffe follows her from her childhood in postwar Saskatchewan all the way up to a Chick Corea concert last year, her first public appearance after suffering an aneurysm in 2015. Yaffe was granted extraordinary access to the famously standoffish Mitchell, as well as to many of her closest friends and collaborators, including Wayne Shorter, Herbie Hancock, Joan Baez, David Crosby, Judy Collins, and the late Leonard Cohen. Making the most of his proximity, he pulls off the feat that has eluded so many of his predecessors: He forges an intimacy with Mitchell on her own, uncompromising terms by truly listening to her, as closely and as generously as she’s always deserved ... Yaffe’s greatest accomplishment in Reckless Daughter, stuffed though it is with insightful reporting, is to shed light not just on the artist but also on the art. Yaffe brings a sophisticated and exceptionally careful ear to music that demands nothing less.
Yaffe wants to 'understand the mind' that wrote Mitchell’s songs. He creates his portrait using biographical information and extensive quotations from interviews that Mitchell has given to him and others...Though this format allows us to see multiple sides of Mitchell, it also tests our opinion of her as an artist and as a person. Regardless if one likes or dislikes her, no one can dispute that courage and vulnerability have been the motivating forces in both her life and art ... Yaffee seldom comments on Mitchell’s abrasiveness, but he’s quick to point out the rampant sexism in the music industry that may have prompted it, most notably when Rolling Stone named Mitchell the 'Queen of El Lay.' Where Yaffe should intervene is when Mitchell makes outlandish and self-serving statements about music ... Yaffe solidly traces the glory and gloom of a musical career that expanded our ears and hearts...To his credit, Yaffe treats every album, even the nonsellers of the 1980s — what Mitchell called 'The Lost Years' — with respect and equanimity, nor does he shy away from detailing her miscalculations.
Reckless Daughter is thoroughly researched, with original interviews with Mitchell as well as friends and collaborators across her life span. But its flaws in craft, tone, and focus leave it short of definitive, and a little maddening to read ... The book is at its best on Roberta Joan Anderson’s childhood in repressive, rural, postwar Saskatchewan, and her life-altering experience of being bedridden by polio and quarantined for long, lonely months at age ten ... Reckless Daughter often loops and shuffles chronology in confusing ways, failing to set up important anecdotes or figures. Meanwhile, it belabors its motifs and themes, in ways that are either pompous or disorganized ... He also buys in too much to Mitchell’s own rearview demonizations of her relationships, instead of maintaining a broader perspective on the ways she repeatedly felt compelled, as an extraordinary woman caught in a sexist society, to flee rather than limit herself for any man ... Nevertheless, Reckless Daughter does encompass the sweep of Mitchell’s complicated life. It left me with a fuller sense of her creative process and her relationships with her collaborators. For now it’s the strongest account we have.
...a vivid and dramatic book … Yaffe dedicates substantial space to what we could call the second Joni Mitchell. This artist is the one who comes after the waifish early years of her creative apex, an ex-folksinger trying to make her way through the ‘80s, getting narcissistic and angry and broke … Young Mitchell, the one who spat out ‘The Circle Game’ at 23, is such an icon to music fans that she seems to lie beyond the grasp of acceptable criticism. This Joni Mitchell, not the person but the icon, is a fantasy of the bohemian woman, a goddess, a person no more human or connected to the rest of culture than the Virgin Mary … Idealizing women into smaller versions of themselves is destructive, even, or especially, when the full picture contains details we’d rather ignore.
Yaffe conducted two sets of interviews with Mitchell: one in 2007 for a profile in The New York Times (which she hated), and the second eight years later (by which time she’d forgiven him). These form the core of his contribution to Mitchell studies, for as a biography Reckless Daughter is definitely not to be preferred to Karen O’Brien’s much better written Shadows and Light: Joni Mitchell (2001). Still, the excerpts from his extensive interviews are revealing in a range of ways: there is much settling of old scores—with Dylan, for instance, who fell asleep when Mitchell first played him Court and Spark back in 1974, getting accused by her of plagiarism. Ex-lovers and ex-husbands also have their cards harshly marked. But why, I found myself wondering, should one expect Mitchell, alone on her pedestal as the grande dame of North American singer-songwriters, to have mellowed? For how could she have achieved what she did had she not both trusted her insights and been full of fight?
That well-known narrative, capped by the angry political Joni who challenged but never alienated her loyal listeners, is essentially the outline of David Yaffe’s new biography, Reckless Daughter: A Portrait of Joni Mitchell ...a pleasant journey through the handed-down tales we’ve already heard, peppered with a few perhaps lesser-known vignettes... This portrait doesn’t try to be definitive or challenging; it’s comfort food for fans who can’t get enough of her brilliant career ... The more original and inquisitive material in Reckless Daughter is Yaffe’s literary analysis of each Mitchell album... The book ends in 2015, when Mitchell suffers an aneurism and lies unconscious on her kitchen floor for three days.
Yaffe, a music critic and a professor at Syracuse University, has immense respect for his subject’s stamina and for the talent that Cohen recognized even in the speed with which she tuned her guitar ... I can’t think of another biography in which I felt so strongly that the writer was worried about preserving the good opinion of his subject. Perhaps as a consequence, Yaffe declines to question some problematic choices such as Mitchell’s appearance in blackface on the cover of her 1977 album, Don Juan’s Reckless Daughter ... Uncritical admiration can make Reckless Daughter seem like a 400-page fan letter, though one certainly prefers Yaffe’s approach to that of biographers who despise their subjects. Championing Mitchell, right or wrong, and trying to stay on her good side is not exactly the same as taking her seriously as a composer and performer.
Yaffe’s book is partly a study of what happens when a great artist, emerging as part of a scene, resists that scene’s assumptions and categories ... Yaffe charts these encounters with a sure hand, and is a brilliant analyst of how Mitchell’s songs are made. But he leans a little heavily on quotations familiar to fans...He also seems to have let Mitchell get inside his head. In a strange preface, Yaffe describes interviewing Mitchell for a New York Times piece in 2007, going to her house, and talking through the night, but getting 'bitched out' by Mitchell once the piece was published. Then silence from 'Joni' until years later, when, through a back channel, he’s taken back into her good graces. At times, his book feels as if its main objective were for him to never again be rebuffed by the 'strong, resilient, defiant' woman he admires who looked 'more beautiful than she did in the ads for Yves St. Laurent that were in all the magazines.' Add Mitchell’s biographer to the list of men she played like a paddleball.
Woven throughout this tale are the details: the development of a signature sound, the stories of how our favorite songs were written. The encounters with other famous names of the time, including the rundown of what other notables the star slept with and what drama ensued … Mitchell’s unimpeachable status as subject rather than object, artist rather than muse, earns her the right to be honored with a biography of this kind despite her usually incompatible gender. The raw material is all there for the taking, right down to the subject’s cranky unwillingness to cooperate in the operation. Mitchell naturally inhabits the archetype of revered, difficult artist whose life and work invite scholarly examination … But it still feels like there’s an understanding that’s frustratingly absent. Yaffe seems to understand Mitchell’s life and her music, and makes a good attempt at drawing the connections, but they still don’t resonate.
David Yaffe is one such writer who had a dinner with her, and his biography, Reckless Daughter: A Portrait of Joni Mitchell, is essentially his extended riff on that encounter ...some deft musical analysis of her albums but is not above 'the occasional bit of good old-fashioned gossip' ... Yaffe writes in the first person, and his narrative voice when he’s describing Mitchell’s albums can be effective ... But that same narrative breaks down when tackling her personal life, in part because Yaffe is mostly culling from other sources, 'gossip' ... Mitchell is an elusive quarry. Yaffe’s scattershot approach to bio as portrait, with selected source material thrown into much analysis, doesn’t ultimately snare her.
Until David Yaffe's Reckless Daughter: A Portrait of Joni Mitchell, Mitchell had never before cooperated with previous biographers. And based on the interviews she gave Yaffe for his book, the legendary singer-songwriter seems eager to finally spew ... In prose that shifts between chatty, impressionistic and reportorial, Yaffe sympathetically traces the outline of the musician's life... Working his way through her albums, he offers up detailed takes on recording sessions, song tidbits... Still, it's Mitchell's candor and often startling memories that propel the book ... Insane or not, Reckless Daughter looks at Mitchell's life through all sides now.
Yaffe has given us the best chronicle to date of Mitchell’s creative process and the specific way her songs were composed. He is especially good on her unique tuning methodology and her myriad influences, from classical composers to the swingy American Songbook. He breaks down her songs in encyclopedic detail, from inspiration to cultural reception to the intimate moments of their composition. But one has to wonder how much of Reckless Daughter would feel like yet another glamorous misunderstanding to the artist. Mitchell has said in many interviews that she longs for the kind of creative carte blanche that she sees afforded to her artistic equals, and Yaffe’s deep study does contain a new level of granular, obsessive analysis that treats her songwriting as great art. Yet many of the passages in Yaffe’s book read like a swoony valentine to Mitchell, or at least to the effect that her music can have on the spirit.
...while fans and critics often gloss over the ensuing 40 years, nostalgic for an earlier version of their icon, those subsequent decades are granted equal treatment by author David Yaffe in his new biography, Reckless Daughter: A Portrait of Joni Mitchell ...Mitchell’s life gets an honest retelling befitting her music ...a comprehensive portrait of the 73-year-old singer, starting with her childhood on the windswept plains of Saskatoon, Canada, and concluding with her final healthy years in Los Angeles before she suffered a brain aneurysm in 2015... Yaffe maintains reverence and respect for Mitchell — almost to the point of fawning, at times — even as he tells the more problematic parts of her story... The deeply felt Reckless Daughter, dedicated to Mitchell's immense intellect and caustic wit, is a celebration worthy of the artist and her music.
If you don’t already believe that Joni Mitchell is a genius without peer, you might have a hard time making the case from this effusive book, long on gossip but short on analysis, except of a kind of ethereal quality ... Yaffe’s book is a useful appreciation, but it doesn’t delve enough into the whys and wherefore of that songwriting and its high quality ... Mitchell deserves more musically sophisticated treatment, though this is serviceable enough as a straight fan-notes homage.
Drawing on in-depth interviews with Mitchell, her friends, and her musical associates, Yaffe (Fascinating Rhythm) paints a colorful and riveting portrait of a songwriter who has continually broken boundaries and explored new musical territories ...lively, bright prose... He brilliantly guides readers through Mitchell’s evolution as a musician with vivid descriptions of the making of each of her albums... The combination of fine writing and extensive access make this the definitive biography of a gifted songwriter and musician.
For his biography Reckless Daughter: A Portrait of Joni Mitchell, David Yaffe interviewed dozens of musicians, friends and lovers from her past, but more impressively he conducted long interviews with the press-shy legend in person. He found her provocative from the start … He shows a deep appreciation for her music, analyzing every album as she evolves from folk to pop to rock ’n’ roll to jazz. And though Joni Mitchell lost some of her early fans with her switch to experimental, jazz-infused work, Mr. Yaffe fell more in love with her … While rabid Joni Mitchell fans may already know the details of her ‘reckless’ life, Mr. Yaffe paints a vivid portrait of this bold artist.
