Joni Mitchell: The Travailer's Tale

At 41, Joni Mitchell remains to all appearances, very much the idealistic woman who embodied an era of pop music at its most wistfully self-absorbed and idyllically romantic. The wheaten hair and corn-flower-blue eyes, the air of winsome candour, are all intact. It was Mitchell, remember, who wrote the song 'Woodstock' (first, an event, later a film, a t-shirt and something of an embarrassment), and whose albums like Ladies of the Canyon, Blue and Court and Spark established her as America's first lady of confessional songwriting.