Now, this five-disc collection culled from the years before her 1968 debut album, “Song to a Seagull,” maps the precise topography of the cliff from which Mitchell leapt and took flight. She didn’t yet have her own guitar, so she played a four-string baritone ukulele. At the time of the collection’s earliest live performance, though, in October 1964, she had a secret: She was pregnant with a friend’s child. Free in that way that only men can be, the friend split for California (“hearing that everything was warmer there”); Joni stayed and gave birth alone in the frigid Canadian winter. “I think I started writing to develop my own private world,” she says in the film, “and also because I was disturbed.”

Source: New York Times October 29, 2020 18:00 UTC