Zadie Smith loves Joni Mitchell. I hear this in my head, sort of like “Joanie Loves Chachi,” but it’s a far more auspicious pairing in that I love the works of both Ms. Smith and Ms. Mitchell.

The idea that the former loves the latter just as I do made me feel the same kind of gratitude I did upon reading Ms. Smith’s acclaimed 2000 debut novel, “White Teeth”: Here is a smart funny black woman giving unapologetic voice to her passions and observations about life.

I learned of Zadie Smith’s love of Joni Mitchell from her latest work, “Feel Free: Essays.” Like her 2009 essay collection “Changing My Mind,” “Feel Free” is a gift; another guided tour inside Ms. Smith’s beautiful, busy, brilliant mind. The terms “criticism” and “commentary” don’t do justice to the humor, intimacy and heart that Ms. Smith, who is English-Jamaican, brings to her explorations of a broad range of subjects. This is commentary as art itself: enlightening and entertaining, brainy and accessible, but you have to keep up.

The offerings in the essay collection’s five sections — “In the World,” “In the Audience,” “In the Gallery,” “On the Bookshelf,” “Feel Free” — include an imagined meeting between pop star Justin Bieber and late Jewish philosopher Martin Buber; the fate of a neighborhood library in Ms. Smith’s native London; climate change; Brexit; an existential take on Facebook, the app and the movie about it, that will make you want to delete the app, almost; a profile of Keegan-Michael Key and Jordan Peele; and a lunchtime interview with Jay-Z. “He likes to order for people,” she says about the superstar recording artist. “Apparently I look like the fish-sandwich type.”

In the essay about loving Joni Mitchell, “Some Notes on Attunement,” Ms. Smith describes her previous assessment of Ms. Mitchell — “incomprehensible,” “horrible” — as philistinism. Fast forward a few decades to Zadie Smith, now in her 40s, being brought to “uncontrollable tears” these days when she listens to Joni Mitchell, the album “Blue” in particular. But of course, there’s more happening here than just a “progressive change in taste.” As with all the essays in “Feel Free,” this is an opportunity for Ms. Smith to muse more broadly, in this case on the concept of connoisseurship, Kierkegaard’s “Fear and Trembling,” and continuity in art (or the lack thereof).

Much of the richness of “Feel Free” comes from the fact that Zadie Smith’s musings are at once timeless and timely. In the text of a talk she gave in Berlin on the occasion of receiving the 2016 Welt Literature Prize (”On Optimism and Despair”), she expresses hope for our present moment. “All over the world — and most recently in America,” she writes, “the conductors standing in front of this human orchestra have only the meanest and most banal melodies in mind.”

But, Ms. Smith reminds us, there are those of us, Germans and others, who remember these “martial songs” and remember too “a finer music.” And we “must try now to play it, and encourage others ... to sing along.”

In an introductory essay Ms. Smith was asked to write for a book of Billie Holiday photos, she channels the voice of Lady Day, adopting an imagined second-person memoir style and drawing deftly on the jazz legend’s autobiography. The result is a heartbreaking, haunting homage. At the end of it, Ms. Smith has Billie Holiday, who didn’t read music, contemplating telling a “sneaky” reporter, “Mother—, I am music.”

Thankfully, Ms. Smith doesn’t shy away from provocative insights when she writes much closer to home. In “The Bathroom,” she has a name for those moments when “parental behavior that seemed completely mysterious ... thirty years ago now freshly clarifies itself” because you are now parent.

Ms. Smith calls this “retrospective swirl” and asserts that only once you understand your parents’ behavior can you “work out who was hurt, in what way, and how badly” in your family. Because, at varying degrees, “every family home is an emotionally violent place, full of suppressed rage, struck through with profound individual disappointments.” While Ms. Smith is able to give her own children more materially, she realizes — through the “retrospective lucidity” that follows the retrospective swirl — that her parents gave far more.

They gave Zadie Smith and her siblings their lives, forgoing their dreams and desires in service to children and domestic life.

“Feel Free” is full of such gems of deep understanding. Whether the reader is a parent or an artist or an art lover or simply someone who cares about the world around her, these essays are an invitation to examine more closely how we engage with art, with artists, with finite resources, with power, with time and, ultimately, with ourselves.

Deesha Philyaw is the co-author of “Co-Parenting 101: Helping Your Kids Thrive in Two Households After Divorce” (deeshaphilyaw.com).

First Published: March 11, 2018, 10:15 a.m.