Access to the family piano and Mitchell’s 1972 album “For the Roses” served as gateway drugs; in high school, Lisicky started to compose his own songs, and when that proved too intimidating, shifted to writing stories without music. But the singer’s fluid singularity, her refusal to apologize or conform, made him feel electric and understood.

What follows plays out mostly in an intimate, impressionistic “Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man” mode, interwoven with Mitchell myths and parallels. Lisicky’s talents eventually earned him a spot at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and he went on to become a well-respected teacher and author, even the partner of a famous poet, with homes in Provincetown and New York. His devotion to Mitchell ebbed and flowed. (“The late ’80s didn’t seem to know what to do with Joni, nor she with the late ’80s.”)

Her presence in the pages of “Song So Wild and Blue” can feel similarly unresolved, tangled up in an unwieldy mix of musical critique, creative speculation — at one point, a whole inner monologue for Mitchell’s disapproving mother is conjured as she watches her daughter perform at Carnegie Hall — and tribute. There’s a lovely coalescence, though, in the book’s finale, a fraught cross-country trip to see Mitchell perform, post-aneurysm, at a spectacular outdoor concert bowl in Washington State in 2023.

If Alford is the witty friend leaning in to share good gossip at a dinner party and Lisicky is the ardent, eloquent professor, riffing on quarter notes and the petty politics of academia, they aren’t so far apart in the end. In a time when anyone who’s heard “A Case of You” at the drugstore or rewatched “Love Actually” at Christmas has at least some passing knowledge of Mitchell’s existence, to be a hard-core devotee still implies certain qualities: that one is soulful and a little against the grain, a defender of open tunings and difficult truths. (Also, yes, inordinately fond of cloud metaphors.)

At 81, Mitchell, though still vital and out in the world, is further from the forceps than the stone. She is stardust, she is golden; uncountable fans and self-styled experts have already tilled that garden. To go all in anyway as these two writers do, to keep trying to make art and sense of such a known, unknowable life, feels like about the most Joni thing you could do.

I DREAM OF JONI: A Portrait of Joni Mitchell in 53 Snapshots | By Henry Alford | Gallery Books | 345 pp. | $29.99

SONG SO WILD AND BLUE: A Life With the Music of Joni Mitchell | By Paul Lisicky | HarperOne | 259 pp. | $28