Joni Mitchell Becomes an American Citizen After Six Decades

Joni Mitchell was sworn in as an American citizen. She marked it on Instagram with a photograph from the ceremony and a caption that dated the arc well past the paperwork: “A journey that began 62 years ago.”

That journey started in 1965, when Mitchell left Canada for the United States. She lived first in Detroit, then New York, and eventually settled in California, where she has stayed. For years the assumption ran the other way, that she carried dual citizenship, until CBC reported in March that she had never naturalized. The ceremony resolves a question that had been answered for a long time by consensus rather than record.

Her relationship to American civic life was never passive. At a 2024 show at the Hollywood Bowl, Mitchell told the crowd she wished she could vote, calling herself “one of those lousy immigrants.” The line drew a laugh and carried a harder edge underneath it.

The timing sits inside a wider revival of attention around her catalogue. Rhino High Fidelity has issued a new reel-to-reel edition of her 1974 album Court and Spark, duplicated in real time from a 1:1 copy of the original stereo master tape.

Mitchell has spent sixty years as one of the most exacting observers of American life, its roads, its weather, its compromises. On paper, the arrangement is now mutual.