Mitchell is also an accomplished visual artist. She has, through photography or painting, created the artwork for each of her albums and has described herself as a "painter derailed by circumstance". A blunt critic of the music industry, Mitchell had stopped recording over the last several years, focusing mainly on her visual art, but in October 2006 she announced that she is working on material for a new album.

During the war years, she moved with her parents to a number of air force bases in western Canada. Following discharge from the RCAF, her father began working as a grocer, and his work took the family to Saskatchewan to the towns of Maidstone and North Battleford. When she was nine, the family settled in Saskatoon, Saskatchewan, which Mitchell considers her hometown.

She began taking piano lessons at age seven, and immediately felt the creative instinct to write her own music. Meanwhile, she excelled at art in school. In grade 7 her English teacher, Mr Kratzman told her, "If you can paint with a brush, you can paint with words.

" At the age of nine, Joni contracted polio during a Canadian epidemic, but recovered after a stay in the hospital, during which she first became interested in singing. Mitchell was hospitalized in winter, and remembered, "They said I might no[t] walk again, and that I would not be able to go home for Christmas. I wouldn't go for it.

So I started to sing Christmas carols and I used to sing them real loud...

.The boy in the bed next to me, you know, used to complain. And I discovered I was a ham.

" Mitchell also took up cigarette smoking at the same age, which may explain the unique texture to her voice. As a teenager she taught herself guitar and ukulele and began performing at parties. This grew into busking and playing in coffeehouses and other venues in Saskatoon.

After finishing high school she attended the Alberta College of Art and Design in Calgary for a year, but then left and returned to the coffeehouse scene. As Mitchell prepared to leave her home in Saskatoon to relocate to Toronto, she became pregnant. Seeing no other alternatives, she gave her daughter, Kelly Dale Anderson (born February 19, 1965), up for adoption.

The experience remained a private part of her life during the ascendance of her career, but she made allusions to it in several songs, most notably the song "Little Green," (from "Blue") and, years later, the song "Chinese Cafe" from "Wild Things Run Fast" ("Your kids are coming up straight/My child's a stranger/I bore her/But I could not raise her"). Her daughter, renamed Kilauren Gibb, began a search for her as an adult, and the two were reunited in 1997. folk clubs and, by this time creating her own material, became well known for her unique songwriting and her innovative guitar style.

Personal and often self-consciously poetic, her songs were strengthened by her extraordinarily wide-ranging voice (with a range in pitch at one time covering over four octaves) and her striking guitar technique, which makes extensive use of alternative tunings. While she was playing one night in "The Gaslight South" [1], a club in Florida, David Crosby walked in and was immediately struck by her ability and her appeal as an artist. He took her back to Los Angeles, where he set about introducing her and her music to his friends.

Much of her initial acclaim was as a result of other artists covering her songs. Her first songwriting credit to hit the charts, "Urge for Going," was a success for country singer George Hamilton IV and for folk singer Tom Rush; it also appeared many years later as a B-side by the Scottish band Travis. Irish singer Luka Bloom also recorded the song to great effect, as has classical violinist Nigel Kennedy with a gentle, lilting instrumental version.

Mitchell's own 1967 recording of the song was released on the flip side of the 1972 single "You Turn Me On I'm A Radio", but was not released on an album until the compilation in 1996. In any version, "Urge for Going" was an audacious piece of songwriting, painting an extremely evocative picture of the oncoming of dread winter. Not surprisingly for someone from the Canadian prairies, Mitchell had a finely developed sense for the passings of seasons and comings of age, themes that would appear on her "The Circle Game", which Tom Rush recorded in 1968.

Mitchell's songwriting reached its highest visibility when Judy Collins had a top-ten hit in early 1968 with "Both Sides Now". British folk rock group Fairport Convention included "Chelsea Morning" and "I Don't Know Where I Stand" on their debut album, recorded in late 1967, and the otherwise unreleased "Eastern Rain" on their second album the following year. The songs on Mitchell's first two solo albums, Joni Mitchell (Song to a Seagull) (1968) and (1969), were archetypes of the nascent singer-songwriter movement of the time.

California in late 1967. By the time of her third album, (1970), maturity brought a record infused with the spirit of California life (the canyon of the title refers to perhaps both Topanga Canyon and Laurel Canyon, Los Angeles) as well as containing her first major hit single, the environmental "Big Yellow Taxi", and "Woodstock", about the music festival, which was later a hit for both Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young and Matthews Southern Comfort. Mitchell wrote the song after missing and then hearing about Woodstock.

She had cancelled her appearance at the festival on the advice of her manager for fear that she would miss a scheduled appearance on , and has since said the decision to miss the concert was one of the biggest regrets of her life. "For Free" is the first of Mitchell's many songs that underscore the dichotomy between the benefits of her stardom and its costs, both in terms of its pressure and of the loss of privacy and freedom it entails. Mitchell's confessional approach deepened on (1971), widely considered the best of this period, as well as a template for confessional songwriting.

Mitchell later said of the album, "At that period of my life, I had no personal defenses. I felt like a cellophane wrapper on a pack of cigarettes. I felt like I had absolutely no secrets from the world and I couldn't pretend in my life to be strong.

" Exploring the various facets of relationships, from infatuation on "A Case of You" to insecurity on "This Flight Tonight", the songs featured an increasing use of Appalachian dulcimer on "Carey" , "California", " ", and "A Case of You" and piano (due in part to her admiration for Laura Nyro's work). Some of the piano-led songs featured the rhythms associated with rock music. However, her Canadian past was not left behind: "River" found her in warm climes at Christmastime, only to say, "I wish I had a river / I could skate away on.

" In the 2000s "River" would be rediscovered by the plethora of all-Christmas-music holiday programming radio stations. Remakes of this song have been recorded by numerous artists including Aimee Mann, Indigo Girls, Robert Downey Jr., Allison Crowe, Sarah McLachlan, Dianne Reeves, Rachael Yamagata, James Taylor, and a duet by Madeleine Peyroux and k.

d. The more straightforward rock influence was still strong on her next two albums, recorded for new label Asylum. (1972), whose title track continued her exploration of the themes of "For Free", sold well, supported by the country-influenced hit single "You Turn Me On, I'm a Radio".

However, it was (1974), a hybrid of pop, rock, and folk with a jazzy sheen, that proved to be a huge success, producing such classic songs as "Free Man in Paris" (inspired by stories told by her manager, label founder and then-friend David Geffen), " " and, most notably, "Help Me", which, to this day, remains her best selling single (it reached the top ten). was also notable for the first echoes of the influence of jazz on Mitchell's work, and despite the commercial success of that album and the subsequent live record , backed by the 70s pop-jazz outfit L.A.

Express, she would spend the rest of the decade following that muse and creating more free-form, jazz-inflected music. was the first album to stylistically depart from the folk/pop foundation Mitchell had developed. It was also a lyrical departure, with the confessional style replaced by a series of vignettes, from mobsters and nightclub dancers ("Edith and the Kingpin") to the bored wives of the wealthy ("The Hissing of Summer Lawns" and "Harry's House/Centerpiece").

Prince has mentioned this album as one his favorites. The album was stylistically diverse, with complex vocal harmonies set with African drumming (the Warrior Drums of Burundi making up the foundation of "The Jungle Line"). Although many fans and other artists often cite as their favourite Mitchell work, it was not well received at the time of its release.

Mitchell is also an accomplished visual artist.