Joni Mitchell

The Canadian singer / songwriter has always done things her way. She started off writing extremely poetic pop and folk songs back in the late sixties, using her very unorthodox guitar playing (mainly based on exotic open tunings) to create the haunting Blue (1973). She moved on to jazz, working with such geniuses as Jaco Pastorius and Charles Mingus, came back to pop for a while and finally retired to become a full time painter in the late nineties.