Will You Take Me As I Am: Joni Mitchell’s Blue Period, by Michelle Mercer
After enjoying Girls Like Us so much, I began looking around for other books about the most interesting of its three subjects, Joni Mitchell. Lucky for me, bios of Joni seem to be on the way to becoming a cottage industry. Will [...]
Complete Unknowns?
In unrelated but similar incidents, a trio of cultural luminaries were recently prevailed upon by authorities to prove their identities and explain their activities. The circumstances of the first event, involving Harvard professor Henry Louis Gates Jr., went down in history as one more scandalous abuse of white power against an innocent black man. [...]
In the latest salvo in the recording industry’s battle against those who think music should be free (count me in), Joel Tennenbaum has been court-ordered to pay $675,000 for sharing 30 songs, or $22,500 a pop. He got off cheap: in another recent case, Jammie Thomas-Rasset had to pay $80,000 per song for a total [...]
Netflix has me covered. I’m catching up with all the films I’ve missed the past decade or so. It’s a great service, don’t you think?
So this weekend I watched a trio of movies that have nothing in common with one another: Music and Lyrics, Holiday, and The Matrix.
Music and Lyrics: I adore both Hugh Grant [...]
…and who can blame her? She tweeted that she didn’t want to be part of “the whoopla” of Michael Jackson’s memorial, that her grief was a private thing between her and Michael, not to be shared with strangers.
I’ve lost enough people to know that I’d be the same in her position: I cannot imagine sharing [...]
It makes no sense to blog about anything today other than Michael Jackson—or even to talk or try to think about anything else, except perhaps an obligatory prayer for Farah Fawcett. If I blogged about anything else today, nobody would bother reading it.
I didn’t think I had anything to add to the dialog bouncing around [...]
Girls Like Us: Carole King, Joni Mitchell, Carly Simon, and the Journey of a Generation
By Sheila Weller
“When woven together, the strands of their three separate lives, identities and songs tell the rich composite story of a whole generation of women born middle class in the early to middle 1940s and coming of age in the [...]
Shine
Joni Mitchell
Hear Music, 2007
River: The Joni Letters
Herbie Hancock
Verve, 2007
Starting with Night Ride Home in 1991, the PR for Joni Mitchell’s new CDs has been pure hype. NRH was touted as a collection of “middle-aged love songs” (they weren’t), and Shine, just out, sports a sticker proclaiming it “The Radiant Return of One of the [...]
Regular readers may recall that last year I wrote new lyrics to old tunes, one for each Yankee player. Below are a few more, written for new players, plus one for Melky Cabrera, for whom I never came up with anything last season. Also, Robinson Cano’s song has been changed from “Anything you can do [...]
