Neil Young and Joni Mitchell represent opposite spectrums of the Canadian singer-songwriter movement that emerged from the late 1960s and carried on through the end of the following decade.

Young favored an unrefined, child-like, in-the-moment approach to both writing and performance, perfecting a vibrant, warts-and-all take on folk and what we'd later call roots rock and Americana; Mitchell started as the heiress apparent to Joan Baez and Judy Collins, and then proceeded to evolve into a progressive folk poetess and a jazz-informed siren capable of gracefully marrying significant musical sophistication to deeply emotional performances.

Though both Young and Mitchell commenced their musical lives drawing from the same pool of influences, the two took that inspiration in wildly different directions. And, as is apparent from a pair of new books released all but simultaneously, both view their lives in music from distinctly divergent standpoints.

"Special Deluxe: A Memoir of Life & Cars," is Young's second self-written offering, following the best-selling "Waging Heavy Peace." The son of renowned Canadian journalist and author Scott Young, Neil writes in a well-developed voice that never misses the mark in terms of tenor and tone. "Special Deluxe" reads like a great Neil Young song plays - it's a bit wistful, mildly bemused, deeply passionate, humble, direct, and only ever so slightly curmudgeonly.

"Joni Mitchell In Her Own Words: Conversations with Malka Marom" is an entirely different animal. While Young's book traces the path of his musical and personal life through his obsession with the cars he drove during each period in question, Mitchell's interview-as-autobiography is almost exclusively concerned with the creative process. How everything else in life - love, economics, the music business, children - affects that creative process is clearly the central concern.

Young is and has always been a first-take kinda guy, which is not to suggest that "Special Deluxe" is as sloppy as one of his perfectly disheveled guitar solos on a Crazy Horse epic like "Cortez the Killer." Rather, Young writes in an affable voice, a sort of "Aw shucks" demeanor only slightly masking an incredibly sharp mind.

Young prefaces each chapter with a watercolor rendering of the car that will carry the reader through the following chapter. This might seem quaint at first, but ultimately, Young turns the tables, and we realize that what at first seems to be a love letter to some truly cool old cars is in fact an essay on our need to accept responsibility for climate change, and the place our obsession with fossil-fueled transportation must claim within that climate change.

Many of the epic journeys Young has taken in these cars he so clearly loves are depicted in "Special Deluxe," but as he writes in the present day, Young takes the time to translate the amount of carbon blasted into the atmosphere during each of these joy rides. All of this leads to one of Young's current obsessions - the hybrid electric car known as the Lincvolt that he and his team have been developing over the past decade. The centerpiece of the book turns out to be a cross-country journey Young and Lincvolt - a 1959 Lincoln Continental retrofitted with a new power train design and hybrid system - take in order to convince investors of the feasibility of the project. To Young, the cars - Lincvolt in particular - - are clearly alive in some fashion, and so he speaks of them in animated terms: power train systems are "elegant," body designs are described in almost sensual terms, cars are given names like "Miss Pegi," a nod to Young's recently estranged wife.

Young does tie memories of cars to memories of the songs he wrote while he owned those cars, quite often while driving them, riding in them, or sitting in them. "I bought my cars for their soul," he writes. "...Cars carry their memories with them. To me, my cars are alive. All cars are."

His view of songs is not dissimilar - - Young clearly sees them as forces unto themselves, all but tangible "beings" he didn't so much create as aid in the birth of. "For me, it was not as important to create a technically perfect recording as it was to get the original performances and feelings of new songs on tape.... That was my method. Let someone else make the perfect record. I had to take care of my own songs."

Mitchell, in conversation with her friend, the musician, singer and broadcast journalist Malka Marom, reveals herself with frank insight throughout these interviews, conducted across the span of some 40 years, the first in 1973 and the final in 2012. It's fitting that the book is prefaced by a reprinting on Mitchell's beautiful "Black Crow," for the song perfectly encapsulates her journey: "In search of love and music my whole life has been/Inspiration, corruption/And diving, diving, diving, diving/Diving down to pick up on/Every shining thing/Just like that black crow flying/In a blue sky".

Like Young, Mitchell has long been sensitive to man's responsibility for the planet he inhabits. Mitchell recounts to Marom an encounter with the film "Bambi" as a pivotal experience: 'I think maybe that's the beginning of my contempt for my species and what it does.," she says.

That contempt for the species often extends itself to the music industry, which Mitchell sees as being anti-art and, by extension, anti-artist. This is a recurring theme throughout her conversations with Marom, most scathingly so during the final interview, in which Mitchell comes across as slightly embittered by her experiences in an industry that has never fully valued her contributions.

She is not a fan of industry award shows, as she makes plain to Marom:

"Canada... Canada gave me a Juno (award) finally after all these years. For best producer.(laughs) For best producer,after my whole career, at the end of my career. What I do best has never real been recognized in the award centre... Most of the award shows, you're forced into a position where you're supposed to be so humble when you're awarded, (while) people are making such horrendous mistakes up there... (But) you don't feel humble. You feel pissed off. And it's inappropriate to feel pissed off when you're being honored. (laughs) I've never really received an award for what I do best."

None of this comes across as arrogant, bit rather, what emerges is a portrait of Mitchell, at the end of her career, as one of the great artists of the 20th century who has never really taken much joy in her career path. The art itself has always been Mitchell's solitary concern. And there's a sadness and a sense of solitude in this realization.

Young ends his book on a wizened but optimistic note. "A few weeks ago, a big rain had just brought welcome relief and green to California's drought-ravaged landscape," he writes. "I was driving silently through the forest with the top down, listening to some beautiful-sounding classical music. As we broke out of the redwoods and into open farmland, I felt good. Heading into the sun, I was thankful to be alive and on my way home."

Mitchell, when Marom last interviews her, is all but a shut-in, ensconced in her home, illnesses resulting from a childhood bout with polio having combined with other ailments to make her too ill to perform or even socialize much any longer. Speaking of her illnesses, Mitchell says "I think this is one of the things that had to be done to me to hobble me, to slow me down in a certain way, to get me to fulfill my destiny, to use my depth to do these things - I think it was karmically necessary."

Which leads rather nicely back to "Black Crow" and the book's preface.

"I looked at the morning after being up all night/I looked at my haggard face in the bathroom light/I looked out the window, and I saw that ragged soul take flight/Oh, I'm like a black crow flying in a blue sky."

Jeff Miers is The News' Pop Music Critic.