Most female singer-guitarists in folk and pop genres … are primarily interpreters of songs others—usually men—write. The Canadian Joni Mitchell, often grouped with them, is exceptional however not so much because she is her own composer and lyricist, but because of the persistence with which she has, at her most characteristic, pursued through five record albums the sexual theme she treats with sophistication surprising in a mass artist. Love songs are nothing new, but the love-hate song is probably Mitchell's invention….

Mitchell celebrates the moral virtue of strength—or, rather the collection of qualities once referred to as "character"; her parallel virtue as composer is tight, economic construction, with chords and words seldom wasted….

Mitchell sings fiction, and complex fiction at that. But though she dedicated her first record to "Mr. Kratzman who taught me to love words," it is her musicianship that stretches the pop form...