When a 78-year-old Joni Mitchell took the stage at the 2022 Newport Folk Festival, seven years after a devastating brain aneurysm, the crowd wept. We explore the fiercely independent life of an artist who is far more than the 1960s folk singer many remember.

From childhood polio that weakened her hand and birthed over 50 alternate guitar tunings, to the confessional masterpiece Blue, her jazz-fusion pivots with Jaco Pastorius and Charles Mingus, and her triumphant communal comeback, Mitchell repeatedly tore down her own image and rebuilt it.

• How polio forced her to invent the alternate tunings she called Joni’s Weird Chords
• The secret adoption behind her early song Little Green
• Escaping folk-scene gatekeeping by writing generation-defining original songs
• Her genre-hopping from Court and Spark to Hejira, Mingus, and beyond
• The Joni Jams that became her physical therapy and led back to the stage