I am not so much a writer as I am a songwriter at a loss for notes. When I say that not being a musician is the central tragedy of my life, I'm not exaggerating, merely supplying my parents with a healthy dose of the I-told-you-so's. We were a family for whom music was the primary language—books were rarely discussed with any degree of rigor, but by age seven I could tell you the key of the anima mea from J. S. Bach's Magnificat (Magnificat—Niffy, for short—was also the name of our orange tabby). A few years later, relegated to a high-pressure adolescent oboe career, music had become both an expression of familial snobbery and a source of personal dread. My parents were both serious musicians. My younger brother, by then, was a professional child singer. I was sufficiently better than average at the oboe to know that I needed it to help me get into a college that might not otherwise take me, given my grades in math. Beyond that, music felt to me more like a blood type than an actual passion.

But when I was sixteen, my father dug up a copy of Joni Mitchell's 1974 album Court and Spark. By that time the recording was thirteen years old, another beige artifact of the Watergate era. Rather begrudgingly, I put it on the turntable. Nothing was the same after that. Within four hours, my brain had begun the process of rewiring itself into the person I would eventually become.

I quickly moved on to a battered cassette of Joni's 1974 live recording, Miles of Aisles, which I discovered in the discount bin of the local record store filed alphabetically next to Johnny Mandel's soundtrack to Escape to Witch Mountain (unbelievable the way memory works). Listening on my Walkman, I discovered songs like "Woodstock" and "Blue" and "A Case of You" while walking to school, where later I'd sit in algebra class and silently recite Joni's taut, angular poetry as a way of mitigating the humiliation brought about by my relationship to trigonometry. "Acid, booze and ass / Needles, guns and grass / Lots of laughs . . ."

I would know in those moments that those words were totally about me. Then the bell would ring and I'd go upstairs to French class.

I realize I was roughly the forty-nine millionth teenage girl to experience an existential transformation courtesy of Joni Mitchell (though I deserve some credit for preferring her complex, jazz-inspired middle period to her folksy earlier work). But the influence she had on my writing had less to do with her lyrics than with the music itself. As swept away as I was by lines like "send me somebody who's strong and somewhat sincere," which parodied sentimentality while cleverly cashing in on its visceral pleasures, what really got me was the way those lines folded into her chords and harmonies to create almost a third entity. These weren't so much songs as elaborate suggestions about life's contradictions and confusions. And it wasn't so much words and music that were doing the suggesting as the power of their hybrid force; in three minutes (and sometimes seventeen) Joni could capture an entire decade, an entire cultural movement, a scent, even. Her much maligned record Mingus (1979) is to me a largely olfactory experience. It's full of wolves and cops, images of the Hollywood hills and downtown slums and lines like "the stab and glare and buckshot of the heavy, heavy snows." When Joni strings these words together it's like granite and sapphire clanging against each other on a charm bracelet. It makes no logical sense. It's still perfect.

When I teach writing, I sometimes tell my students that the really killer, quiver-inducing sentences are the ones that seem to circle the earth. You start with the little detail (the woman in the makeup mirror, the shape of a teacup) and accelerate to a bigger one (rain, naked flesh, gardenias). Then you leap over the ocean, hit on a few ambitious metaphors about the sky or ancient gods, and glide back down to where you started, where the woman in the mirror suddenly has a line or two on her face. Joni does this again and again. Most of what I learned about metaphor I learned from her. Drunk, anonymous lovers head home for a one-night stand "clutching the night to you like a fig leaf." The next morning, as if passing on the street, they "brush against a stranger and both apologize."

It's not Auden. These are, after all, song lyrics. But I've always thought that Joni Mitchell is too easily dismissed as an emblem of weepy female solipsism, the heroine of New England dormitories and vegetarian lasagna parties. She's often called a poet, but, to me, the combination of all those funky chord changes and all those funky metaphors makes her a sort of divine essayist. She doesn't merely tell stories or recite verse, she offers up hundreds of versions of the world and plays witness, interpreter, and anthropologist along with the guitar. What this means for me is that there will always be something missing from my own work, the music. To say I regret not learning the guitar instead of the oboe would be both an understatement and an occasion for real grieving, so I will say only that songwriting, for me, wasn't meant to be. But in some ways I do it every day, am doing it right this instant, and will never complete an essay or piece of fiction without knowing, in some sense, what key it's in and what its tempo is (this one: C-sharp minor, in case you were wondering). That last sentence had forty-nine words. That's another trick I learned from Joni. She has a way of cramming too many words into a just few bars of music and still making you wish there were more. I probably fail at that more often than I succeed, but it's really all any writer can ask for, along with a dad who knows how to pick the tunes.

Meghan Daum is the author of the novel The Quality of Life Report and the essay collection My Mispent Youth.