Mitchell toured with Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young, the supergroup du jour, and soon headlined on her own. But she still had a hard time reconciling her art to enormous, sometimes indifferent crowds. After a performance at London's Royal Albert Hall in 1970, she announced that she was quitting live appearances. Distance became a common refrain for the artist who was once described as a "Hans Christian Andersen Snow Queen."

Her next album, 1970's "Ladies of the Canyon," further showcased her musicianship. The arrangements -- already well beyond most singer-songwriter material -- were becoming more sophisticated and intriguing. Songs like "Rainy Night House" have inventive chord structures underlying deceptively simple melody lines. Mitchell included some "hits" -- "Woodstock" and the swooping, soaring "Big Yellow Taxi," which contains one of the few 22-note melodic spans in popular music.

"Blue," released in 1971, contains many of the same guitar and piano motifs as earlier albums, but the songs have more depth, introspection, raw emotion and nerve than anything Mitchell had done before. The album and title song were said to be named for then-current beau James Taylor, though she has said little about the album's romantic provenance.

Widely considered a masterpiece, "Blue" reached No. 15 on the charts. On "Carey," Mitchell's layered vocals blend perfectly with the masterful up-tempo, open-tuned strumming of guest guitarist Stephen Stills; Taylor is on hand for the gleaming "California" (featuring the pedal steel of Sneeky Pete), "All I Want" and "A Case of You." "The Last Time I Saw Richard," a song about hope in the face of disillusionment that works on another level (like most Mitchell songs) as a parable for the end of the hopes of the '60s, closes the album with an elegiac sense of loss:

Richard got married to a figure skater
And he bought her a dishwasher and a coffee percolator
And he drinks at home now most nights with the TV on
And all the house lights left up bright
I'm gonna blow this damn candle out
I don't want nobody comin' over to my table
I got nothing to talk to anybody about
All good dreamers pass this way some day
Hidin' behind bottles in dark cafes, dark cafes
Only a dark cocoon before I get my gorgeous wings and fly away
Only a phase, these dark cafe days

By 1974 Mitchell stood alongside Stevie Wonder as Rolling Stone's Artist of the Year. Critics had applauded "For the Roses" (said to be a possible farewell to the business at the time of its release) and "Court and Spark," her first all-electric L.P. Experiments with jazz followed, foreshadowed perhaps by Mitchell's sparkling cover of the 1952 Annie Ross song "Twisted" ("My analyst told me/That I was right out of my head"). The backlash wasn't far behind. Critics were taken aback by Mitchell's 1975 jazz album, "The Hissing of Summer Lawns," even though jazz-inflected chord phrasings had appeared in songs as early as "The Arrangement" and "Blue."

Her next album, "Hejira," returned to familiar form -- songs of personal journeys backed by a mellow, acoustic-jazz sound, with bass accompaniment from Jaco Pastorius and a little harmonica from Neil Young. The album finds Mitchell again striking universal themes -- restlessness, doomed love and mortality -- with self-deprecating honesty and humor: "There's a gypsy down on Bleecker Street/I went in to see her as a kind of joke/And she lit a candle for my love luck/And 18 bucks went up in smoke." The atmosphere is one of withdrawn brooding; Mitchell has admitted to using a lot of cocaine at the time: "Altered consciousness is completely tempting to a writer. I did some good writing, I think, on cocaine [but] it kills your heart -- takes all your energy, puts it up in your brain."

Subsequent albums met with mixed reviews, some deservedly so, but Mitchell has never lost the artist's hunger for originality. Of her 1979 album "Mingus" (which she has often defended), Mitchell noted, "It hammered the nail into my coffin which said: Mitchell is dead on pop radio, she's a jazzer." It took her a while to shake her image as a beret-wearing jazz dilettante, but at least she could count Charles Mingus as an admirer. The music on "Mingus" was a collaboration, requested by the great jazz bassist and composer.

By the end of the '70s, the reluctant superstar was flying on her own private Lear jet. After again threatening retirement, Mitchell returned in 1982 with "Wild Things Run Fast," for friend, former roommate and longtime record executive David Geffen's new label. (It was a replay of 1972, when Geffen brought Mitchell to Asylum Records, which he started with Mitchell's former manager, Elliot Roberts.) She married bassist Larry Klein, who played on the album, the same year. (They divorced in the early '90s.)

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