While the year in music was dominated by a handful of female powerhouses, Harry Styles, Bad Bunny and Jack Harlow all found success while offering refreshingly subversive challenges to old-school masculinity.

Reading Reckless Daughter, I was struck by how many of Mitchell’s greatest successes sprung directly from her ability to tune out the men who so authoritatively doubted her—who told her, simply, assertively, that the way she did things wasn’t the way things were done. With all of the stories we currently hear about men in creative industries using power to silence women, this quality in Mitchell feels especially valuable. But it also makes you mourn for how much music by women didn’t get written just because not everyone can be as nervy and impervious to male authority as Joni Mitchell.