Which festival marked Joni Mitchell’s surprise comeback in 2022?
Joni Mitchell left hospital in 2015 after a brain aneurysm unable to walk unaided, let alone form the wide guitar shapes that defined her music. For three years she rarely touched an instrument, filling sketchbooks with charcoal portraits while friends like Brandi Carlile visited on Fridays to play her old tunes. In 2018 Carlile began “Joni Jams” at Mitchell’s house: circle-in-the-round sessions where Marcus Mumford or Phoebe Bridgers would strum her songs while she corrected a lyric or hummed a harmony. Someone propped an iPad on a stand; Mitchell watched grainy video of herself explaining alternate tunings in the 1970s and started experimenting with lighter-gauge strings and slide bars that shortened finger stretches.
By early 2022 she could manage slow chord changes in open-D. Carlile convinced Newport Folk Festival to leave a mysterious half-hour slot labelled ?. Stage crew dressed the riser like Mitchell’s living-room—rugs, floor lamps, fresh daisies—to ease nerves. When she walked on, cane in hand, the harbour crowd fell silent. She opened with the blues standard “Summertime,” testing the rebuilt contralto, then eased into “Both Sides Now,” using a turquoise Danelectro and letting the band cover tricky passing chords. She flubbed a change, laughed, and said, “We were never perfect in the old days either,” drawing the loudest cheer of the weekend.
That single appearance spawned the live album At Newport, which debuted at No. 1 on Billboard’s Folk chart and won a Grammy for Best Americana Performance. More importantly, it reframed Mitchell for Gen-Z artists as proof creativity can survive neurological disaster. The Library of Congress has since acquired her recovery notebooks; pencilled chord grids show tremulous lines that gradually straighten—musical rehabilitation in pencil strokes
