When Joni Mitchell wrote songs, her lyrics told stories. When she sang, her music spoke truth.

But before composing more than two hundred songs, Joni was a young girl from a town on the Canadian prairie, where she learned to love dancing, painting, birdsong, and piano. As she grew up into an artist, Joni took her strong feelings—feelings of love and frustration, the pain of having polio, and the turbulence that came with being a young woman—and wrote them into vivid songs.

For her fans, few things compare with singing along to a Joni song—listening for the poetry in her music and lyrics and feeling their own connection to her strong and truthful voice.