Shadows and Light: Joni Mitchell, The Definitive Biography

Renaissance woman, painter and poet, one of the great formative influences on contemporary popular music, Joni Mitchell is a true icon. In an artistic career spanning four decades, she inspired the 1960s baby-boomers, created a soundtrack for the Woodstock generation and received critical acclaim for a succession of ground-breaking albums including Clouds, Blue, Court and Spark and The Hissing of Summer Lawns. By the late 1970s Mitchell had been largely written off by the mainstream music industry and the critics but, in the years that followed, she came to be acknowledged as a pivotal inspiration for a new generation of musicians and songwriters: women like Suzanne Vega, Rickie Lee Jones, Sheryl Crow, Tori Amos and Alanis Morissette, as well as male artists including Prince, Elvis Costello, Morrissey, Seal and Beck.
Shadows and Light is the first book to chart comprehensively the life of this extraordinary woman. Mitchell's story is told with an unrivalled degree of access, through revelatory interviews with those closest to her (many with Mitchell's blessing), including her friends and musical collaborators. Broad in scope and full of fascinating detail, Shadows and Light is the definitive biography of a musical legend.

Karen O'Brien is a music journalist, a BBC World Service radio producer and a lifelong Joni Mitchell devotee. She writes primarily for broadsheet newspapers including the Independent. Karen's previous book, Hymn to Her, a collection of writings on women musicians, was published by Virago in 1995.