Song So Wild and Blue (HarperOne, 2025), a book described as “part memoir, part biography, and part siren song” is a stunning collage of nonfiction that pieces together the lives of writer and artist. This book will revolutionize how authors forever explore music in their work. It will change the way we remember “that album, that song” that changed our life. Song So Wild and Blue will change the way we pay tribute to the people we love.
Grammy Award–winning singer-songwriter Joni Mitchell and Guggenheim Fellow and novelist and memoirist Paul Lisicky (Later, The Narrow Door, Unbuilt Projects, The Burning House, Famous Builder, Lawnboy) are interconnected, a tissue bonding Paul to Joni, musician to fan, artist to artist, distant friends. Throughout the span of this book, Paul experiences “becoming” or multi-era coming-of-age moments where readers both engage with the self and the muse, Joni Mitchell. Audiences will not only appreciate the lifelong influences of musical icons, but we will come to better understand ourselves and the roles our people play in forming our identities. Paul Lisicky continues to elevate the genre of memoir and has now—and also again and again—written a masterpiece of a book.
Paul Lisicky has taught me a great deal about how to exist as a writer, as an artist, simultaneously at moment and in memory, and after reading Song So Wild and Blue, I arrive as more complete, more whole, more in tune and in love with my life. Paul, thank you for this gift of a book.
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The Rumpus: From a craft perspective, I’m really interested in how you structured this book, toggling between memoir and biography, both on the chapter and the page-level. Therefore, did this sort of braided storytelling feel natural and organic? How much of the structure was an intentional construction, a beautiful work of labor that tied so many strands together?
Paul Lisicky: It helped to identify a string of pressure points before I started writing the book. I’d never written a book with such a wide time span—Later, for instance, covers three years. The Narrow Door covers one. It’s sort of like a long bridge across water, no shoreline in sight—think of the Lake Pontchartrain Causeway. It needed sturdiness. It needed pylons or else the central span would sag.
I sensed that the book could feel exploratory, could operate with a looseness on the sentence and chapter level, if the primary structure was strong. Then how to manage the Joni threads with my own autobiographical threads? The opening sections felt like rowing into dark, but I started to develop more trust once I gathered enough material. The work was to explore toward energy—where I was making discoveries on the line-to-line level. That’s how so many of Joni’s songs move.
It’s likely the case that each passage within a chapter is anchored by an image. There’s probably an image-to-image conversation happening between those sections. It sounds so mechanical when I put it like this! I was a huge Virginia Woolf reader when I was younger, and I learned so much from studying To the Lighthouse, Jacob’s Room, and Between the Acts, also her essays. I’m thinking of “The Death of the Moth” and “Street Haunting.”
The braiding in my work was much more foregrounded two books ago. The Narrow Door is in a way about the braiding—what might be discovered through cultivating a pattern of repetition? The braiding is likely quieter in this book, the motifs more subtle. I think I’ve just metabolized the strategy by now.
Rumpus: While reading Song So Wild and Blue, audiences may feel drawn to stepping outside of the text and to their ears. Sure, it’s not a necessity to be drawn to listening to Joni’s entire catalog, but we may feel tremendously drawn to her music, even if you are a lifelong fan or a new listener.
To understand your story, we have to learn Joni’s. Song after song, I listened to Joni because your book called me to her, and I think that is just another reason why readers will be captivated by Song So Wild and Blue, for it’ll make you love music, maybe again, and it might make a musician out of you.
So, how important is it for readers to become Joni fans? To appreciate her life, her music? To give Joni Mitchell a chance? Do you think your book demands this type of readership? I believe it does.
Lisicky: I’m glad to hear everything here about music and Joni! As I was writing, I was aware of writing to multiple audiences: the Joni fan who’s attached to one album; the hardcore Joni fan who knows the whole body of work, right down to the lyrics of every song; the reader who’s curious about her but doesn’t know where to begin; and maybe even the person who doesn’t respond to her work at all, dislikes it, or else has reservations. How to satisfy them all? I was especially interested in representing Joni through all of her changes. That’s what’s always captured me about her artistry: a person who keeps reinventing herself so she isn’t merely making up a new sonic vocabulary from album to album, but starting from scratch—a new person—over and over again.
The book wants, in part, to be a record of the creative process and how one sustains oneself as an artist over the long haul, so I hope it’s of delight and value to someone who isn’t even primarily motivated by music or Joni’s songs. Maybe there will be some readers who imaginatively substitute Björk for Joni, or Beyoncé for Joni. Taylor Swift—keep going. Or someone from a different art form. Who are your creative mentors? That’s the question I hope the book stirs up. How have they shaped you? How do they shape you now?
Rumpus: Thematically, nothing is clearer than that you are writing love book. This book is undoubtedly a book about love. Song So Wild and Blue is a love story that explores your love for Joni Mitchell but your lovers—past and present—your friends, like Denise from your 2016 memoir, The Narrow Door, your parents, and your places of becoming. And yet, this book is about love, and it doesn’t always feel like it—we’re angry, we’re lonely, we mourn. You write “Sometimes writing about love doesn’t look like love.”
Can you talk about the ways Song So Wild and Blue is in fact a love story?
Lisicky: Such a good question. I started writing the book at exactly the same month that Jude came into my life. Our relationship developed through our mutual attraction to Joni’s work—we owe ourselves, together, to her. The book is as much a love letter to him as it is to her. Along the way the book unexpectedly became a love letter to other mentors, some of whom seemed unlikely until I sat down to write the book. For instance: Oh, wow, you gave {X} to me, and I never realized it until now. It never occurred to me to hold that in my imagination.
I, of course, didn’t want the book to be dipped in syrup. I didn’t want to write about love without impediments and obstacles. Even three and a half years ago, I sensed that the book was going to go out to the world in a dreary, anxious time, in which people needed solace and nourishment, but I wanted it to offer those things in a way that wasn’t corny or manipulative. How to write about love—as a spiritual force, for lack of a better word—without falling back on any of the received and overly certain tropes common to religious institutions or new age culture?
It’s funny—I wonder whether all my books are love letters, even though they’re never addressed to a single person. I never write about anybody unless I love them, even if they might look a little messy and chaotic, and I’m exasperated. Sometimes that messiness has a lot to do with why I love them.
Rumpus: As someone who also grew up in South New Jersey, I feel connected to many aspects of the coming-of-age sections because we are nearly from the same town. Also, as a marginalized person, I too felt like I did not fit in with my classmates and community. But this feeling of marginalization changes as place changes. Your experiences in Provincetown are in complete contrast with Cherry Hill, New Jersey—and not just because you are a man then but because the community is different, is accepting in a way Cherry Hill was not.
Place serves as different markers in your life, and each equally influenced your becoming: Cherry Hill, the University of Iowa, Provincetown, Fire Island, Asbury Park. How does place play a role in developing your story? How does place ground us to personal, societal, and cultural context?
Lisicky: I love what you say about the fluidity of marginalization—that’s so astute and true, and something I never thought about consciously. Because I’ve lived so many places, city, rural, and in between, inclusion and connectedness hasn’t been a matter of forwardness or progress, and, at least in the world of the book, it’s impossible not to feel outside the norms of every culture, to different degrees, for entirely distinct reasons. The matter of exclusion is different in New Jersey than it is in, say, Iowa City, the circumstances always shifting.
My imagination is always activated by place, whether it’s the texture of the holly trees on Fire Island or the funk of the harbor in Provincetown or the sounds of the swamp near my parents’ place in Florida. All those places conjure up emotional states for me, which is often more about the stuff of landscape than it is the stuff of the social or cultural world. I’m never at odds with a landscape that stirs my imagination. Over time, I associate the quality of that place with a state of mind. I’m a different person at the ocean shore, looking out at the horizon, than I am thirty miles inland, in the woods. So, I rarely write about a place that I’m not already excited about, on an animal level.
I think anyone who reads does so because they want to travel, if not literally then figuratively. They want to do that without leaving where they are—usually. That seems central to both the experience of reading and writing. I write because I want to be in another place, out of my chair, looking up at trees.
Rumpus: Often, your biography reads “Paul Lisicky is an American novelist and memoirist.” What it does not say is “musician.” However, you were trained as a musician before becoming a writer. And yet, your work has never focused so much on your musical talents. I love those scenes when you were a child learning piano, like when your mother is cooking to the sounds of your piano playing from the other room, as well as the moment when you share the song you published with Albert.
In the chapter, “Moon at the Window,” you write, “I’d never intended to break up with music.” In a way, you did shed your skin as a musician and transform into this incredibly talented author. But Joni is what always pulls you back to the love of music, to lifelong lessons explored in the themes of Joni’s music. As readers, we experience your trajectory, this pupa to butterfly, this transformation from musician to songwriter to writer is really a masterpiece, like when you write “Reimagining language in chords and notes.”
It seems obvious and other than what we read in Song So Wild So Blue, how did music shape your writing? How important is it for readers to experience this overlap between literary and musical work? How does music: notes and chords, influence your prose? And importantly, do you still play today?
Lisicky: I’m always thinking about music when it comes to writing. The sounds of words, the cadence of a sentence, the wave of emotion in a passage. I read everything aloud, many times, sometimes when I’m writing the first draft. That wasn’t always the case. It started with my novel The Burning House. That narrator’s voice felt like it had a life of its own, distinct from my own speaking voice. And the trick was to both shape it and let it spin out on its own theatrical energy.
I think all writers, whatever their genre, can learn so much from musicians—poets already know this. I’m talking about phrasing, emotional arcs, paying attention to vowel sounds—all of it.
But melody is just the beginning. Whenever I hear any piece of music, I’m also drawn to its harmonic structures—as well as any move that disrupts the ongoing pattern. Shifts in key or time signatures. To me, harmony and description have a kinship. What happens when we place a description next to an unexpected description. Does it sound dissonant? Do the descriptions permeate each other?
As to whether I still play? Not as much as I would like to, but I’m always playing in my head. In my head I’m an incredible drummer!
Rumpus: Wherever you are in life, you come back to Joni. As your relationships change, as your writing career changes, as you love and lose, Joni is this one constant. You say, “This is what good musicians can do for us, can stay with us, as we age, and we grow to appreciate them differently.” There is not a statement more that I think resonates most with readers when you read a book about music, about musicians, about the personal connections we have to them. Replace Joni Mitchell with another artist that is as influential and the experience is the same; we grow, we age, we change, and our love for that artist changes, and we absolutely do appreciate them differently. The crescendo of this is when you got to Washington State to see Joni.
From your words, how is Song So Wild So Blue a tribute to Joni Mitchell?
Lisicky: Every word of it is a tribute to how she’s shaped my imaginative life. That’s true even when she’s not directly on the page. Her biggest lesson to me is one of longevity—she’s been at it, as an artist, over the long haul, even while threatening to leave the music business time and time again. So many Joni fans attach to a particular album above all others, and I wanted to write a portrait of her that attempted to capture the wide arc of her career, from the mid 1960s to the present, and highlight certain songs, certain periods of her work that are still overlooked. In this era of full-throttle Joni appreciation, people forget that, with few exceptions, many of her albums from The Hissing of Summer Lawns onward were faced with confusion, indifference, even derision. She was thought to be irrelevant for so long, somebody who had made a wrong turn into jazz or electronic or orchestral music. The thinking was she’d lost her way. But she didn’t stop. She kept on making work of integrity, discovering new sounds and tunings whether the audience was with her or not. In so many ways, she was ahead of her time, which is the story of all great artists. It takes a long time for the culture to catch up when the interpreters don’t have the tools. I wanted to write a book that honored all of that.
Rumpus: Toward the end of Song So Wild So Blue, you’re having a conversation with Jude about Joni. In this moment, Jude says, “‘Write all that down. . . . If you don’t write it now, you’re going to lose it all.’” I want to know if that was the decisive moment, the initiating incident, the epiphany when you decided to write this book.
In that moment, did you say to yourself, “I am writing this book”? Or was it after seeing Joni in Washington? Or was this book inside of you for your entire life and when you found Jude, you too found a place in your heart and in your life to finally write a book about Joni because you finally found love?
Lisicky: Jude is a fan of Thoreau and has quoted this line of his to me more than once: “Write while the heat is in you. The writer who postpones the recording of his thoughts uses an iron which has cooled to burn a hole with.” I’d already written several sections by the moment you’re referring to, but I’d been assuming that, after her brain aneurysm in 2015, Joni would never sing, perform, play the guitar again. And there she was, on the stage of the Newport Folk Festival—or at least on our laptops, on that July morning in 2022. It took off the top of our heads. We were witnessing a resurrection, even though it was ten hours after the performance. Wordsworth’s poetic standard of “emotion recollected in tranquility” couldn’t have felt more ancient, out of touch. Jude knew that, and his advice was on the mark. I started writing our reaction.
The funny thing is that Joni has been in nearly all my books, through references to lyrics and titles. There is even a character named Joan in The Burning House. So she’s always been there, always around the margins, or coming in through a side door. It was time to put her front and center.
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Author photograph by Jude Theriot
