What drew me to Traveling: On the Path of Joni Mitchell (HarperCollins) wasn’t the author or her bylines (I’d never heard of Ann Powers), it was of course the subject—Joni Mitchell. After reading Traveling, my question is: what (apart from money) compelled Powers to write it? Powers makes it clear from the outset that she never had an interest in Mitchell’s work, mainly because she couldn’t get over Joni’s good looks (this somehow impeded her from taking the music seriously, an odd admission from a supposed feminist and music journalist). The book is unquestionably well-researched, and it occasionally shines when Powers manages to pull herself out of the narrative. But the entire premise—Powers travelling down the path of Joni Mitchell—feels like a device cooked up by an editor to make the project more enticing to a writer with no real interest in the subject. Also, there is very little shift in Powers’s perspective, and she admits as much: she begins a skeptic and ends a skeptic. Powers points out how she avoided any direct contact with Mitchell over the years, even while writing the book. She also has a disturbing habit of conjecture (“I’m pretty sure she tried psychedelics”) and of projection (“This familiarity, I realized, was a projection—as my original hostility toward Joni the Ice Queen had been.”). Maybe this internal struggle is what she means by “the path”? But, to me, the most readable parts are where Powers distances herself, not where she overlays her own process of understanding (and of not understanding) on Mitchell’s life work. Do we really learn anything new about Mitchell or anything interesting about Powers on this path? I’m not convinced. I would suggest that if you want to learn about the artist herself—Mitchell, that is—you’re better reading the original sources than reading Powers’s paraphrased versions of them, and if you want to gain insight into Mitchell’s work, you are better off listening to her music.