“The boy in the bed next to me, you know, used to complain. And I discovered I was a ham,” Mitchell told Cameron Crowe in 1979. “That was the first time I started to sing for people.”

When she was nine years old, Joni Mitchell gave her first public performance in a Canadian polio ward. It was the holidays, and Mitchell, one of thousands of children stricken during the country’s polio epidemic of the early 1950s, couldn’t be at home to celebrate with her family. So, laid up in bed, she sang Christmas carols, loudly.

“I wrote songs from the time I lost my daughter to the time she came back,” Mitchell, who reunited with her child in 1997, told NPR in 2004. “Since my family has returned to me, I don’t write anymore. It seems like I mothered the world until I got my own family to mother or befriend.”

Born Roberta Joan Anderson to a Canadian military family, Mitchell and her parents settled in rural Saskatchewan during her adolescence. Her interest in visual art—Mitchell painted the majority of her album covers—brought her to art school in Calgary, where she stayed for a year before moving to Toronto. It was here, in 1964, that she became pregnant out of wedlock at age 20. With abortion then illegal in Canada, and unwed motherhood anathema to polite society, Mitchell gave the baby, a girl, up for adoption. The experienced fueled her next 30 years of songwriting.

But Joni Mitchell is also peerless, with her open guitar tuning—”I don’t know the name of it,” she once responded when asked what chord she was playing, “I tune my guitar this way, to make myself stupid,” that is, to not fall into predetermined patterns—and her unmistakable three-octave voice seeming to emanate from both her guts and her third eye. Perhaps most crucially, it’s Mitchell’s words that captivate, with her lyrical poetry creating vivid scenes—the river to skate away on, the big yellow taxi, a lurking coyote, a case of you to imbibe—in which lived emotions and dormant ideas are freely rekindled. Whether traversing or defying genres, Mitchell’s catalog is connected by the essential spirit—contemplative, cool, vivid, sensual, funny, frustrated, honest—she delivered to each, obvious and unmistakable.

In this way, Mitchell’s body of work manifests the progression of American music since the late 1960s. But hers is also a path that could never have been schemed up by the star-maker machinery Mitchell often lamented. Supremely self-possessed and embodying a fierce, unapologetic artistic vision, Joni Mitchell’s musical storytelling, experimental song structures, and social critiques were every bit as mold-breaking as her male counterparts of the era—Bob Dylan, James Taylor, Neil Young, and Crosby Stills & Nash among them.

It was an inauspicious but telling beginning for one of the most prolific musicians of the twentieth century. With 19 studio albums released since her 1968 debut Song to a Seagull, Mitchell—who turns 75 this week—never really stopped singing, with pain and hard circumstance catalyzing some of her most beloved output. The public would sit captivated as she forged an uncharted route through the folk scene of her youth, into pop mega-stardom, to avant-garde jazz, to an 80s rock incarnation for which she embraced the sound and technology of the era—all on her own, distinctly Joni Mitchell terms.

After divorcing her first husband Chuck Mitchell in 1967, Mitchell moved from Detroit to New York, where her songs like “Urge For Going,” “The Circle Game,” and “Michael From the Mountains” would become hits for folk heroes Tom Rush, Buffy Sainte-Marie and Judy Collins. (Her music would go on to be covered by everyone from Bjork to James Blake to Prince, the latter of whom wrote Mitchell fan mail as a teenager.) She then flipped coasts to California, where Crosby, Stills & Nash (and sometimes Young), along with The Mamas & the Papas, Gram Parsons, Linda Ronstadt and more, were forging the SoCal sound Mitchell would help catalyze as her music entered, and eventually came to dominate, mainstream consciousness.

Her work is simultaneously delicate and sturdy, with spare, often skeletal guitar and piano creating a foundation for her rich, feathery voice, the lightness of which often betrayed the seriousness of what she was singing about. Mitchell is the quintessential singer songwriter, creating the template for countless future artists—Feist, Fiona Apple, Neko Case, and Elliot Smith among them—who would take inspiration from her work.

Ultimately, there are millions of ways to consider Mitchell’s catalog, and all of them are correct. For as specific as many of her lyrics are, listening to Joni Mitchell is an intensely personal experience. When she sings, she sings to you, about you. Much like Joan Didion revealed generations of largely female readers to themselves, with the deep emotions evoked by her instrumentation and lyrical poetry that presented new and nuanced ways of thinking and being, Joni Mitchell has showed us how we feel, how to feel, and who we are and what we might be. Getting into her requires nothing more than a willingness to let her affect you. Listen, and you’ll find that you don’t often have a choice.

So You Want to Get Into: Ingenue Folk Poet Joni?

Mitchell was, by her own admission, not actually a folk musician for all that long. “I was only a folk singer for about two years,” she told Rolling Stone in 1979 , “and that was several years before I ever made a record. By that time, it wasn’t really folk music anymore. It was some new American phenomenon. Later, they called it singer/songwriters. Or art songs, which I liked best.”