Joni Mitchell Becomes a U.S. Citizen After 60 Years in the Country

Joni Mitchell, the Canadian singer-songwriter, became a U.S. citizen this year after roughly 60 years of living in the country. The naturalization follows an earlier appearance in Hamilton, Ontario, where she accepted a lifetime achievement award at the Juno Awards.

The 60-year timeline is unusually long for a foreign resident in the United States. The standard U.S. path requires five years of permanent residency (a renewable legal status that lets a non-citizen live and work indefinitely), followed by an English test, a civics exam, and an oath of allegiance. Most immigrants who settle for the long haul naturalize within a decade.

What does this change for her?

In practical terms, very little. Mitchell has worked, lived, and built her career inside the United States for six decades. The new status adds only the right to vote in U.S. elections and access to an American passport.

The bigger shift is symbolic. A singer born in Canada has now made her adopted country her formal one. That she did so while still accepting a lifetime honor from her native country points to a clean dual identity rather than a renunciation (a formal giving-up of one citizenship in order to take another).

The dual signal is rare in practice. The United States taxes citizens on worldwide income, and Canada does much the same. For Mitchell, a retired artist who's lived mostly in the United States for decades, the new status likely adds more symbolic weight than tax complexity.

How does the Juno award fit the same story?

The Juno Awards are Canada's equivalent of the Grammys, and they gave Mitchell a lifetime achievement trophy in Hamilton, Ontario, earlier this year. The Canadian honor arrived in the same season as her American naturalization, marking a quiet closing of a circle.

The two events frame a late-career arc (the long, reflective shape of an artist's final chapter) in which Mitchell consolidates her life across two countries without giving up either. For a songwriter whose catalog has long straddled the Canada–U.S. border, the timing reads as a deliberate bookend (a final gesture that closes a long career arc).

She kept the Canadian honor. She took the American passport. She didn't have to choose — the citizenship doesn't add a new chapter so much as it rubber-stamps (formally approves) the one already written.