Joni Mitchell, the Canadian songwriter behind Blue and “Big Yellow Taxi”, has been sworn in as a United States citizen at 82. She announced it on her official Instagram account this week with a photo from the ceremony and a single line:
“A journey that began 62 years ago.”
That was the whole caption. In the photo she stands before two flags, the Stars and Stripes and the banner of the Department of Homeland Security; a short clip from the swearing-in shows the room applauding. The post drew more than 40,000 likes within a day, with replies split between Americans congratulating her and Canadians saying they were sorry to share her.
Why 62 years?
The number does not line up neatly with her move south, which is part of what makes the caption interesting. Mitchell first crossed into the US in late April 1965, which is 61 years and roughly six months before this October. Count back a full 62 years from 2026 and you land in 1964, the year a 20-year-old Joni Anderson told her mother she was going to be a folk singer in Toronto and left western Canada for the first time, writing her first song, “Day After Day”, on the three-day train ride east.
Read that way, the journey she means started on a Canadian train, not at the US border. She has not explained the figure herself.
From Saskatoon to California
For readers who know the songs better than the biography, the short version runs like this. She was born Roberta Joan Anderson in Fort Macleod, Alberta, on November 7, 1943, and grew up mostly in Saskatchewan, calling Saskatoon her hometown. In 1965 she met the American folk singer Chuck Mitchell in Toronto, followed him to Detroit and married him that June, taking the surname she still uses. After their divorce in early 1967 she moved to New York and then to Southern California, where her 1968 debut and the run of albums that followed made her one of the defining songwriters of her generation.
She has collected eleven Grammy Awards, a place in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame since 1997 and a Kennedy Center Honor. After a brain aneurysm in 2015 forced her to relearn how to walk and talk, she returned to live performance in 2022 and headlined shows in 2023 and 2024.
What naturalization means, and what it does not
Becoming a citizen by naturalization is open to lawful permanent residents who meet the requirements Congress set in the Immigration and Nationality Act. The usual route is five years as a permanent resident, an application on Form N-400, an interview and finally the Oath of Allegiance, the ceremony shown in her post. She has not given up being Canadian, either: reference listings now give her nationality as Canada and, since 2026, the United States.
The timing also corrects the record. For years she was widely described as already holding dual citizenship, until reporting in Canada in March indicated she had never naturalized. She had pointed to the gap herself on stage at the Hollywood Bowl in 2024, telling the crowd she wished she could vote but could not because she was Canadian, and joking that she was one of those immigrants herself.
That line has now expired. The next date for her catalog is November 27, when a Live at Carnegie Hall 1972 double LP arrives on vinyl for the first time as a Record Store Day Black Friday release.
Further reading
Image: Elaina Finkelstein, Library of Congress, CC0 via Wikimedia Commons
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