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\n\tThanks to A Complete Unknow<\/a>n<\/em> and the forthcoming Bruce Springsteen<\/a> biopic Deliver Me from Nowhere<\/em>, the concept of musicians intentionally throwing their audiences for a loop is back in the national conversation. But as Joni Mitchell<\/a> would be the first to tell you, no one made a fan base engage in more collective head-scratching and exasperation than she did nearly 50 years ago.<\/p>\n \n\tRecruiting serious jazz players instead of the usual.A. studio cats, Mitchell spent several years discarding the daily-journal lyric writing and folkish melodies of her early work and wandering into more musically lyrically abstract territory on albums like Mingus <\/em>and Don Juan\u2019s Reckless Daughter<\/em>. As she told <\/a>Cameron Crowe in Rolling Stone<\/em> in 1979, \u201cIt\u2019s just that at a certain point, my poetry began to spill out of the form and into something more relative to a jazz sense of melody, which was restating the melody in variation.\u201d<\/p>\n