Joni’s Blue Period

“I sing my sorrow and I paint my joy,” Joni Mitchell said in 2000, nearly 30 years after her manager, Elliot Roberts, and her agent, David Geffen, compiled a collection of her drawings and handwritten lyrics to give to friends at Christmas. “In the early 1970s I used to carry a sketchbook around with me everywhere I went,” she writes in the introduction to Morning Glory on the Vine, the 1971 Christmas present that Mitchell has finally decided to publish, with Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, on the occasion of her 75th-birthday year. Included in the book are landscapes, still lifes, a self-portrait, and portraits of friends James Taylor, Georgia O’Keeffe, and her fellow Canadian Neil Young. “I have always thought of myself as a painter derailed by circumstance,” Mitchell said; this new book casts her as the rare artist who doesn’t have to choose between disciplines. —Julia Vitale