A Toast to Joni Mitchell's 75th Birthday

“She’s had an amazing spirit, dealing with this horrific health crisis,” says her close friend and longtime art director, Robbie Cavolina, who saw her a good deal during her long recovery. “She is bright-eyed and happy that she’s alive.” She stopped her half-century three-plus-pack-a-day smoking habit, “and she watches old films on TV. We recently watched Three Coins in the Fountain together. She does physical therapy five days a week, she has been painting, she enjoys going out to dinner, and she gets along very well with her daughter, Kilauren.” A penniless, single folk singer in 1965, Mitchell gave newborn Kilauren up for adoption; in 1997 they reunited, along with Kilauren’s children (Mitchell's granddaughter, Daisy, and her grandson, Marlin, now in their early 20s).

Until recently, the nine-time Grammy winner dismissed her earlier, lovely and socially significant songs, which defined young, classy bohemian women in the late ‘60s — “Both Sides Now,” “The Circle Game” and “Chelsea Morning.” She preferred her later, musically innovative, often jazz-based work, from Don Juan’s Reckless Daughter on. “But now,” Cavolina says, she has “a really great appreciation of that early work of hers. She realizes that those songs were more than the ‘ingénue songs’ she had considered them to be.” At 75, Mitchell has perhaps come round and round in the circle game and looked at her own life from both sides now. What she so eloquently predicted in her early 20s has come true in her third act.

After the Nov. 7 concert, the Los Angeles Music Center will give Mitchell its award for excellence in performing arts, which only one other person has ever won: Rita Moreno, 86. It's not clear whether Mitchell will attend, though she did give James Taylor a hug at his Hollywood Bowl show this June. 

"Joni loves a great party,” several of her friends say. And this surely will be one.