I was pretty obsessed with Joni Mitchell at one time too. Probably the reason I listen to her less now, is that a lot of the early stuff was part of the self-revelation stuff, which was so overpraised in the early seventies. To be fair to her, she has gone a bit beyond that. She always was very original in both her words and her melodies.
I like the old quote, "Talk to a man about himself and he will listen for hours." The way I adopt it for performing, is that I try to talk about the audience, or people like themselves. The main problem with a lot of that "personal song" trend of the seventies, was that it was a lot of precious people talking about themselves. Tell a good story to an audience and they are usually interested. If you let your characters onto the stage, instead of just your own ego, the audience is likely to keep listening. Richard Thompson has always known that the audience's main concern is not to know how good or bad he feels today. They go to the gig to forget about their own problems - not to hear about his.