He wrote that everything in her work was motivated by conjuring the visual. That was already evident to me from Joni’s lyrics, her uncanny ability to make a lyric about cold cuts resonate like jewels in a glass case. But he knew something more. He saw what the figurative did to her phrasing—how the extension of a vowel captured a sunset on water, or how a burst of staccato words echoed dashes on a canvas. It is widely recognized that she was a painter first. It is less widely known how much work she put into keeping one art form alive through the tools of another—was it a refusal to let go? A rejection of binaries? He knew these things, he felt them, and felt a desire to communicate them to someone. “A friend of spirit,” in Joni’s words. He wanted to know what I knew too.