Joni Mitchell, 82, marked her new status as a U.S. Citizen with an Instagram post Tuesday showing her clutching an American flag.
The Canadian-born singer accompanied the photo with a video from her naturalization ceremony at a Department of Homeland Security office. “A journey that began 62 years ago,” she wrote on the platform.
Graham Nash, her former romantic partner, was among the first to celebrate the news in the comments. “Congrats, Joan! Just in time to vote!” he wrote on the same post.
Mitchell was born in Fort Macleod, Alberta, and crossed into the United States at age 21 alongside her first husband, folk singer Chuck Mitchell, in 1965. The pair initially put down roots in Detroit before the marriage dissolved and Mitchell relocated to New York City in 1967.
She spent roughly a year living at 41 W. 16th St. In Chelsea, a period that yielded the song “Chelsea Morning.” By 1968 she had pushed west to Los Angeles, where the Laurel Canyon music scene became the backdrop for the next phase of her career. California has remained her base for most of her adult life, with stints in Bel Air and eventual settlement in Santa Barbara.
Mitchell married musician Larry Klein in 1982; the couple divorced in 1994. She has one daughter, Kelly Dale Anderson, whom she placed for adoption as an infant in 1965 and reunited with in 1997.
The citizenship announcement lands months after Mitchell made a rare trip back to Canada in March to accept the Lifetime Achievement Award at the 2026 Juno Awards. During that ceremony, Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney presented her with the honor, and Mitchell used the moment to comment on American politics while praising Carney’s leadership.
“LA is my workplace, BC is my heartbeat,” she told the Ottawa Citizen in 2006, capturing the dual pull she has long described.
At the Junos, she told the crowd that Canadians were “so fortunate” to have Carney in power, adding, “I’m living in the States and you know what’s happening there.”
The singer also reflected publicly at the Junos on the 2015 brain aneurysm that nearly killed her. “I had a [brain] aneurysm, which changed my life — oddly, for the better,” she said during her acceptance speech. “I went into a coma, which helped me to quit smoking. And my house filled up with the most wonderful nurses. I was on the road with men for years and years; now I live with a house full of women,” she added.
Mitchell’s health crisis had kept her largely out of public view for years, making her recent return to the stage and to Canada itself all the more notable.
The naturalization caps a decades-long process that started when Mitchell first entered the country as a young folk musician in 1965, carrying little more than her guitar and her songs. She has spent the intervening years becoming one of the most influential singer-songwriters in American music history, even as her legal nationality lagged behind her cultural identity.
Director Cameron Crowe is currently developing a biopic about Mitchell, with Meryl Streep attached to portray an older version of the music icon.