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‘She couldn’t walk, she couldn’t talk’: music therapy helped Joni Mitchell recover from a stroke – could it ward off depression and dementia too?

When his friend, the legendary songwriter, had a catastrophic stroke, neuroscientist Daniel Levitin put together a programme of music therapy. Now he’s recommending it for a whole range of conditions

Remarkably, he’d helped her compile a CD of her favourite tracks for a series of albums called Artist’s Choice back in the early 2000s (it was a short-lived project from Starbucks, which had bought a record label in order to pipe music into its coffee shops). He sent some extra material because he understood how getting in touch with a sense of herself would speed things along – Herbie Hancock’s River: The Joni Letters, and Our House, the song Graham Nash had written for and about her, with its opening lines: “I’ll light the fire / You place the flowers in the vase / That you bought today.” Born in San Francisco at the end of the 50s, he began his musical education in 1969, when he bought a stereo with money he’d earned weeding gardens and played Cream, the Rolling Stones and Chicago in his bedroom (the real epiphany came when his father insisted he get headphones.

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