Joni Mitchell, After Six Decades in America, Becomes a Citizen

Joni Mitchell, the Canadian-born singer and songwriter whose records helped define American popular music in the 1970s, is now an American citizen.

Mitchell, 82, announced the news on Instagram on Tuesday, posting a photograph of herself with an American flag and a short clip from her citizenship ceremony. She described it as “a journey that began 62 years ago.” She did not give the date or the location of the ceremony, and her post did not say why she chose to take the step now.

Mitchell moved to the United States in the summer of 1965, NBC News reported, with her then-husband, the folk singer Chuck Mitchell. The couple lived in Detroit, and she later moved to New York City before settling in the Laurel Canyon neighborhood of Los Angeles, the hillside enclave where she became a central figure in the singer-songwriter movement of the late 1960s and early 1970s.

California runs through her work. Her 1971 album “Blue” includes the song “California,” a homesick traveler’s love letter to the state she adopted, and the record cemented her association with the West Coast. Her songs have also carried political edges: she wrote “The Fiddle and the Drum” in 1969 as a protest against the Vietnam War, and in the 1980s she took aim at tax exemptions for religious institutions in “Tax Free.”

In recent years Mitchell has returned to the stage alongside younger admirers, including Brandi Carlile, with whom she performed at the Hollywood Bowl in 2024. At that show she made a pointed, profane remark criticizing Donald Trump, according to Billboard’s reporting at the time, a reminder that her outspokenness has not faded with age.

Her new status is largely symbolic for an artist who has lived and worked in the United States for roughly six decades, and who has long been claimed by audiences in both countries. For many longtime residents, though, naturalization is a formal step with practical meaning: citizens can vote in federal elections, and citizenship offers a permanence that a green card does not.

Mitchell’s post was brief, and she did not elaborate on what prompted the decision or whether she had kept her Canadian citizenship. For a writer who has spent a career turning private moments into public songs, the announcement was characteristically spare: a flag, a ceremony and a single line about how long the road had been.