Tag: 1970s

music

The A Side

Sue

“What’s magical, sometimes, has deeper roots than reason.” 
― Mary Oliver, Blue Horses: Poems

This year marks a milestone birthday for me. I suppose every year is a marker of some kind, first marking our starting point and then where we are now. This new marker has me feeling particularly nostalgic and I’m not sure that would be the case had the events of the past few years gone differently and made me less introspective. In any case, I have a story about nostalgia and it begins with music, yet again.

One Saturday in November my husband and I decided to visit a vintage holiday marketplace. We were there mostly for the retro atmosphere, to get into the festive spirit, and perhaps find some one-of-a-kind gifts. Most of the vendors were selling new and used Christmas decor, and we enjoyed ourselves for an hour or so, laughing over the many antique decorations we recalled seeing in our childhood homes and other people’s harvest gold or avocado green living rooms in the seventies. There was a lot of “do you remember this?” And “my grandma had one just like that!” Items we might have considered tacky as children were now whimsically magical and worthy of a second look. So on we went, browsing here and there, and sometimes gasping in unison at the elevated prices of those same tacky knickknacks. Eventually we grew tired and were heading for the exit door when a small booth caught my eye. It immediately drew me in like a magnet because it was filled with cardboard boxes of used records. That was it, nothing else, and not one sparkly holiday decoration in sight. Just a few portable tables lined with open boxes of vinyl. I flipped through one stack and the first album I happened to pull out for a closer look was Fleetwood Mac’s Rumours.

I held it in both hands and read all the song titles, probably with a sappy grin on my face. I have fond memories of that album. I heard it for the first time in an all-girls, junior high school gym class by way of a young and therefore cool female teacher, who played “Don’t Stop” on a portable record player at the start of every class, while we performed warm up exercises to it before heading outside for the long distance run we all dreaded. Even now, hearing that uplifting song makes me think about sideways stretches, jumping jacks, and high kicks in terry cloth gym shorts. Some administrator with a mean streak decided in the second semester to make us fourteen year old girls share gym time with grade twelve boys. They quickly took to stretching with us to Fleetwood Mac and only because our young teacher was attractive. Awkwardness ensued, mostly for the already awkward girls like me, who had no idea where to look and suddenly forgot the sequence of every move. One day the guys had a substitute teacher show up for their class. I heard all about Mr. Hot Teacher ahead of leaving the change room. The second I did, I spotted him and then excitedly called out his first name as I ran across the gym to envelope him in a fierce hug. He was my big brother’s best friend, ten years older than me, who’d first started hanging around our house when I was still in diapers. I didn’t stop to think how it must look to everyone gaping at us. Then I made it worse by loudly announcing in the echoing gym how much I missed him coming over to the house. Let’s just say there were whispers, raised eyebrows, and sidelong glances directed at me during that particular warm up. My brother’s friend and I laughed about it when we saw each other again several years later. Vivid memories like these prove that music is the soundtrack of life. At that time, a magical kind of marker made of shiny vinyl.

Strangely, I considered buying the record while standing in the marketplace booth. It was only five dollars for a bit of nostalgia that made me smile. I couldn’t remember the last time I looked at an LP, much less bought one. Yet there I was still gripping it with both hands, reluctant to let it go. The vendor was a woman about my age and for a moment we warmly reminisced about our favourite rock bands. She told me that she’d hung onto her teenage albums for many years. Then one sad day, she was involved in a highway motor vehicle accident in the Fraser Canyon while in the middle of moving house. Her box of records flew out of the back of her truck on impact and tumbled a long way down to the river at the bottom of a steep, rocky hillside. Lost forever. She said she was physically fine after the accident, but was sure her heart had broken a little that day, just like her records. Over the years since then, she’d rebuilt an even larger vinyl collection, but had far too many now and felt it was time to let some go. My husband was patiently waiting for me, so I tucked Rumours back inside the box, telling her I didn’t have a turntable. She told me that was easily fixable. Is it? I wondered. Then I thanked her for her time and carried on, thinking it might be kind of fun to have a turntable again. Silly, though. Why would I bother when I already had the ability to listen to Fleetwood Mac anytime I felt like it? What was the point of going back in time? Why add unnecessary clutter to a home already filled with too much stuff? So that was that. End of story. Until it wasn’t.

A few weeks later, I was scrolling through online Black Friday deals when I came across a suitcase-style, portable turntable that was similar to the one I used to tote around with me when I was a kid. Only this new modern one was nicer and a much better colour than the plain, two-toned brown one that my parents gave to me one long ago Christmas morning. It was also on sale and a reasonable price by today’s standards for something frivolous. So I purchased it on a whim, then proceeded to forget about it over the days to come while busy gift buying for family and friends. It wasn’t until early December that I received a shipping notification for the purchase. I was surprised how quickly I’d forgotten about it, and then found myself daydreaming about setting up the turntable over the holidays to listen to the small collection of combined records that my husband and I had stored away…somewhere. I told him I remembered seeing them not that long ago, and he laughed at me because he said it had been years since we last saw them. Besides, he was pretty sure we’d sold them at a garage sale or donated them, he couldn’t remember which. I felt like an idiot and my embarrassment must have shown on my face because he made a valiant effort to go searching for what he knew had to be long gone. He wasn’t trying to prove a point. He was hoping that he was wrong about it. That maybe the years had blurred both our memories and somewhere a box was buried like a forgotten time capsule. No such luck. They were gone and I felt unreasonably sad about it. I was being silly again, no doubt about it. Clearly those records had meant little to me or they’d still be hanging around, just like the dusty, treasured books I’ve hung onto for years because I still can’t part with any of them.

So now I had a turntable on its way and nothing to play on it. I kept thinking about the Fleetwood Mac one I’d recently let slip through my fingers. My husband reminded me I could buy records in secondhand shops and even new albums, if I really wanted them. Problem was, I wanted my old ones back. I wanted to remember what I’d once decided to keep, even after there wasn’t a use for them anymore. The special ones. The soundtrack of my youth. But as hard as I tried, I couldn’t visualize the albums that were missing. Soon I realized this wasn’t about the lost records. It was about time moving too quickly to fully comprehend its swift passage. If I could forget about not holding onto those records, what else might I forget in the years to come? I thought about the woman who’d rebuilt her teenage album collection after everything had gone tumbling down a hillside. I didn’t want to rebuild my old collection. I didn’t even really want a new collection. What I was searching for was the girl who used to somehow balance a thick stack of albums under one arm, while also firmly clutching the handle of a suitcase turntable. Somewhere in time, she’s skipping her way to her best friend’s house to share the A side of a new record because every vinyl collector knows the A side has the best and most memorable songs.

As for the new turntable? It got lost in the mail over the Christmas delivery rush. Then it got rerouted and I forgot about it all over again. Miraculously, it showed up on my doorstep on New Year’s Day, of all days. A gift from past me to present me. And a reminder that everything important reveals itself again at exactly the right time.

Don’t Stop by Fleetwood Mac (Official Music Video) Hope the song makes you smile!

reading

Somewhere Else

Sue

We were walking toward the fountain, the epicenter of activity, when an older couple stopped and openly observed us. Robert enjoyed being noticed, and he affectionately squeezed my hand. “Oh, take their picture,” said the woman to her bemused husband, “I think they’re artists.” “Oh, go on,” he shrugged. “They’re just kids.” ~ From “Just Kids” by Patti Smith

I’ve been reading Patti Smith’s memoir “Just Kids” about an early time in her life during her relationship with famed photographer Robert Mapplethorpe. It’s a short book and I could probably read it in one sitting, but I’ve been taking my time because it’s one of those captivating stories that can’t be rushed. It wants to be pondered, with entire passages read and then reread. Their meeting is a chance encounter that happens shortly after Patti moves to New York in the late sixties to pursue her dream of being a poet and artist. These are the years before Patti became a singer-songwriter icon, a prelude to her fame. At the time, Robert Mapplethorpe was also a struggling artist and their different yet similar worlds collided one day when she was working in a shop and sold him a particular necklace she coveted for herself. When I wrapped it and handed it to him, I said impulsively, “Don’t give it to any girl but me.” I was immediately embarrassed, but he just smiled and said, “I won’t.”

Patti and Robert lived together on and off for several years. They were the definition of starving artists, working at low-paying jobs to survive, while fearlessly creating their art during a turbulent time when art, music and politics were at war with each other and sometimes free thinkers were violently assassinated. For a brief time, the two of them found a home at New York’s infamous Chelsea Hotel, where they formed friendships with other artists, poets, actors, musicians, writers and the many lost souls living there. Some residents were already well-known by the late sixties and early seventies, some died while chasing their dreams from the rooms of that hotel, and others, like Patti and Robert, became famous later on.

Ironically, their individual successes were reached by way of the very mediums they avoided at the time. Patti wanted to be a prolific poet, not a songwriter. It was others who encouraged her to perform, to sing the words she wrote in her notebooks. Robert created collages out of other people’s magazine photographs and claimed to not have the patience to take his own photos to depict his provocative art. Their love story was profound, tumultuous, often joyful, and also heartbreaking. We already know they didn’t stay together forever, but even over time and distance, they continued to support one another, calling each other their star, “the blue star of our destiny”. Early in the book Patti described Robert in one foreshadowing sentence: I thought to myself that he contained a whole universe that I had yet to know.

Patti & Robert at the Chelsea Hotel, NY – photo credit unknown

While Patti and Robert were in their early twenties, chasing their creative dreams in New York, I was a young Canadian child living in the suburbs, running around the neighbourhood with my friends, and also hiding myself in my bedroom for hours with stacks of library books. At the same time I scribbled my thoughts into composition notebooks that eventually formed my own long, rambling stories. “Just Kids” has brought me back to the beginning of my creativity. I didn’t take Patti’s starving artist route in my later writing years. I never really wanted for anything. I grew up comfortably, never going to bed hungry or feeling unloved or yearning to escape. But, like Patti Smith, I was a daydreamer and many times felt misunderstood. She said of herself, I was a dreamy somnambulant child. I vexed my teachers with my precocious reading ability paired with an inability to apply it to anything they deemed practical. One by one they noted in my reports that I daydreamed far too much, was always somewhere else.

I was always somewhere else, too. My paternal grandmother taught me how to read long before I went to school by reading with me all the time. Early on I discovered how to lose myself in a story. We read storybooks together first and then children’s classic novels. Once we completed a book, she never asked me if I enjoyed the story. She always asked me how it made me feel. I didn’t know it at the time, but what a gift she gave me in that simple question. Thinking about that put me directly into the story and set the course on how I view writing today. I observe all art with feeling. I can’t listen to music without thinking about what the lyrics mean to the songwriter and to me. I can’t look at a painting and not wonder what the artist was going through emotionally at the time. I always look beyond the layers to somewhere deeper, somewhere else.

I feel fortunate to have grown up at a time, and in household, where books and movies, art and music were discussed at length. There wasn’t an outside world of knowledge for me to Google. My opinions and interpretations were always my own and I was often encouraged to share them. Patti and Robert’s story has made me long to relive the hours I spent discussing a novel with another bookworm friend over many cups of Red Rose Orange Pekoe tea. How one single observation made me reread chapters because I was convinced I’d missed something important. I feel nostalgic for long ago car rides, trying to decipher lyrics in a song on the radio because I’d always heard it one way, while another passenger heard something else. How many times have I sat in a car in the dark, shivering, as I discussed and dissected a movie just seen in a theatre with a sibling, a best friend or a boyfriend? Countless times. Wondrous times.

These days I–and maybe we–consume and don’t take the time to reflect before we move onto the next interesting thing. I’m reminded of my husband’s grandfather, who lived with us for a short time when we were first starting our lives together. He’d yell upstairs to me from his downstairs suite whenever his failing memory couldn’t provide an answer he needed, usually from a book he read a long time ago. We shared a love of literature and poetry, and maybe we understood each other a little better than most. Kindred spirits. If we’re lucky, we get to meet a few of those over a lifetime. I’d always dig deep to try to remember whatever he was asking because there was no internet then, no external way of fact checking on the spot. I soon grew to understand he wasn’t really searching for an easy answer, anyway. He was looking to relive the experience, the feeling a particular story once gave him. It was his way of asking me to come downstairs to talk about it with him without telling me that’s what he needed. Companionship. Understanding. A brief moment somewhere else.

As this year comes to an end, I once again find myself surrounded by stacks of books, notebooks, and manuscript pages. I don’t think it’s a coincidence that I find myself here again. Back at the beginning, to the daydreamer I used to be. I rediscovered this year it’s an important part of me and I’ve been missing that key to myself. December feels like the perfect time to savour Patti’s words–her voice calling up from downstairs, reminding me to take more time to let my mind wander and ponder before moving onto the next interesting thing.

It occurred to me looking around at all of your things and your work and going through years of work in my mind, that of all your work, you are still your most beautiful. The most beautiful work of all. ~ Patti Smith, “Just Kids”

Just Kids by Patti Smith

music

Background Music

Sue

“Music is the soundtrack of your life.” ~ Dick Clark

September! It’s been a minute since my last blog past. I didn’t plan on taking a break. Lately I’m feeling the drive to write and research a novel I’m working on, so much of my attention has been wrapped up in that. Most of my current research is concentrated on the music industry, primarily from the 90s through the early 2000s. I feel less informed about this specific time period because back then I was preoccupied with babies and then busy school-aged children. That meant the background music was often Disney soundtracks and pop hits. I still remember the words to Spice Girls and a few boy band songs. And my grown children joke about remembering more 80s lyrics than they care to. Fair is fair.

While I’m not ready to share the plot specifics of the novel quite yet, I will say I’m having fun revisiting classic rock favourites and discovering fascinating tidbits of music trivia along the way. If you follow my Instagram stories, then it might make more sense now why I keep sharing music-related posts about rock band crushes and singer-songwriters I’ve long admired. I suppose, like many people during these troubling times, I’ve been living a little more inside of my head. Reflecting on and listening to music has kept me feeling grounded and warmly connected to memories of more carefree days.

My generation (and I feel about a hundred years old as I write that) forged tight relationships over sharing new record albums and dance moves in basement rec rooms. I’ve mentioned before that I’m the youngest in a large family. My eldest brother was sixteen when I was born, and the rest of my siblings all fall in line behind him, a year or so apart in age, with the closest to me being ten years older. My brothers used to tease me about being left on the doorstep as a baby and how they so generously took me in so I wouldn’t freeze to death because it was February. I went crying to my mom about it once and I still remember her response: “Do you really think we’d bring another kid inside this crowded household if you weren’t ours?” Point taken. So it meant I naturally entered that well-established and chaotic household of primarily teenagers by way of surprised parents, who were older than my friend’s parents. I didn’t know it at the time, but that broad age range greatly blessed me with a plethora of music experiences.

Before the older kids started moving out, I shared a bedroom with two sisters who were vastly different from each other, yet agreed on one important factor: The Beatles. Some of my earliest memories include giant wall posters of John, Paul, George and Ringo and the absolute conviction that their eyes were following me, so I’d better get dressed quickly behind the closet door! They were Team Paul and I was Team George because (wow those expressive eyebrows!) and he had the cheekiest smile. I spent many nights falling asleep to my sisters whisper-arguing while also harmonizing to Motown hits until our mother eventually stuck her head in the door to tell them to “cut it out”.

Down the hallway, my four brothers were squeezed into one bedroom with two sets of bunk beds that were so close together it was possible to jump from one top bunk to the other, which I did frequently and gleefully. They fascinated me because they were so much louder and wilder than my sisters, and their record collections clearly reflected that. I’m positive my deeply-rooted love of rock band music began in that very small room while listening to The Stones and hearing them trade insults, punch each there and then laugh it off. One brother with a gentler soul used to play Cat Stevens on repeat, and to this day hearing “Morning Has Broken” instantly lightens my mood.

My second eldest brother died when he was nineteen and I was four years old. The music and the laughter in our house disappeared for a very long time after that day. My memories of him are hazy, but I do remember his kindness and how sometimes he’d let me curl up with him on the mornings he was too sick to get out of bed to go to school. Many years later I heard “Unchained Melody”, The Righteous Brothers’ version, and my mind instantly connected the dots to my lost brother. At the time of his passing he was deeply in love with his high school sweetheart, and I wonder if perhaps that was their song, or maybe just his alone. It’s a tender, melancholy song. Today is his birthday and he would be turning seventy-three.

During the early 70s our household began to quickly downsize until only three of us kids remained. It was then that my parents decided to get rid of the ping pong table in the basement and turn our rec room into a more glamorous adult-friendly hangout. My dad built a very elaborate bar with mirrored shelves and colourful lights to illuminate the hard liquor bottles that lined them. Padded bench seats were built-in along the walls and speakers somehow got wired meticulously into posts and ceilings, long before surround sound existed. It was a rather strange thing to do because both of my parents rarely drank and Dad was the most unsociable one in the family. Regardless, for awhile they were downstairs until late most Saturday nights, laughing with friends, drinking out of cut glass crystal tumblers, smoking endless cigarettes and playing card games.

Dad spent countless hours taping a wide variety of music from our records onto his reel-to-reel tape recorder. Sometimes on weekend afternoons he’d play current hits like The Archies’ “Sugar, Sugar” in that basement barroom so that me and my friends could hold our own Kool-Aid dance parties. Ah, it was a great time to be a kid! Mom, who really loved to dance, finally had more free time to teach me how to jitterbug and hand-jive. I get my swooning fondness for crooners from my mother. She adored the Rat Pack, big band music, and she hero-worshipped Streisand–all of Barbra’s music and movies. My dad introduced me to the kind of country music that’s considered old-school now. The likes of Dolly, Loretta Lynn, George Jones, Johnny Cash and Charlie Pride, just to name a few of the greatest country singers who ever lived.

Me at 13 with my parents at a brother’s wedding, rocking the 70s vibe! I clearly inherited my dad’s dimples and my mom’s smile. My dad was 6’5″ so his head was often in the streamers at parties. Someone once paid me the sweetest compliment about me being the very best of both of my parents. Oh, how I miss them.

During my early teen years, when I always seemed to be at odds with my dad because either my cut-offs were too short or my makeup was too heavy, music magically kept us connected. I would roll my eyes at his 8 track country cassettes and he’d ask me, “what good is music if the volume’s so high you can’t understand the words?” Still, we firmly agreed on this: ABBA and Fleetwood Mac were (and still are) sublime. I credit the iconic Rumours album for getting me through the painfully awkward junior high years.

The first concert I was allowed to attend with a group of friends and without a parent in sight was April Wine. I’m a Canadian girl, so I feel pretty nostalgic about April Wine. The most memorable concert of my youth was Supertramp’s 1979 Breakfast in America Tour at the Empire Stadium in Vancouver. I was sixteen and hadn’t even gone on a real date yet, but I reluctantly agreed to let a friend set me up on a blind date (double date) with her boyfriend’s cousin who managed to score four concert tickets. All that trouble, just so I could see Supertramp and hear “Take The Long Way Home” live with about 40,000 other people. He turned out to be a nice enough guy, but by then I already had my eye on someone else…a broody, sharp-witted boy of Scottish descent with long feathery layers in his dark hair, just like mine. He ended up being my first love, and in my mind he still looks exactly the same as he did when we broke up three years later at nineteen for the second and final time. That day I ran a very long way home after stubbornly refusing a ride, while trying to lose him as he followed me in his car until the moment I breathlessly reached my front door. For hours I played “Don’t Let The Sun Go Down On Me” over and over and over until I felt completely, irrevocably done with him.

That first serious boyfriend introduced me to Pink Floyd, punk rock, and Scottish singer Gerry Rafferty. (What an eclectic mix!) Hearing “Right Down The Line” immediately stuffs me back inside a time capsule along with Bonne Bell Lip Smackers (root beer was my favourite and always the hardest to find), Love’s Baby Soft perfume, Seafarer high waisted flares, and the even higher drama of angst-fuelled teenage love. If you ask me, the rock band that readily springs to mind from that era is Nazareth, and only because I swear every girl I knew at one time or another sobbed out her poor broken heart to “Love Hurts”. My personal blast-it-until-you-get-past-it rock anthem was Heart’s “Crazy on You”. The ah-mazing guitar intro to that song still makes my heart race in anticipation.

Dust off your shoulder pads because here comes the 80s! To be continued…

In case you fancy a listen, here are Youtube links to the music mentioned (or thought about) during the writing of this post. Have you ever noticed that back in the day song titles could be very long? I hope watching and listening to the videos is an uplifting experience. Please leave a comment to share some of your memorable classics!

I Want to Hold Your Hand – The Beatles

Stop! In the Name of Love – The Supremes

Paint It Black – The Rolling Stones

Morning Has Broken – Yusuf / Cat Stevens

Unchained Melody – The Righteous Brothers

Sugar, Sugar – The Archies

The Way We Were – Barbra Streisand

He Stopped Loving Her Today – George Jones

Dancing Queen – ABBA

Go Your Own Way – Fleetwood Mac

You Won’t Dance With Me – April Wine

Take The Long Way Home – Supertramp

Don’t Let The Sun Go Down On Me – Elton John

Comfortably Numb – Pink Floyd

Right Down The Line – Gerry Rafferty

Love Hurts – Nazareth

Crazy On You – Heart

reading

July & Joni

Sue

I’ve looked at life from both sides now, from win and lose and still somehow, it’s life’s illusions I recall. I really don’t know life at all. ~ Joni Mitchell, Both Sides Now.

The first song that springs to mind when I think about life in the early 1970s is “Both Sides Now”. Originally recorded by Judy Collins, the song was written by Canadian singer-songwriter Joni Mitchell and, in my opinion, should only ever be performed by Joni. If you listen to it now, then listen to Joni sing it and you will hear the clear poetic difference in how she feels her own words.

The meaning of this song for me represents childhood slipping away. Hearing Joni sing it always makes me teary, and it shifts my mind back inside long ago summer days spent zipping along the streets of suburbia with neighbourhood friends. Black Cat gum and brand-new white Keds, grass-stained within hours of taking them out of the box. A pocket transistor radio strapped with hair elastics to the plunging handlebars of my sparkly purple Mustang banana-seat bicycle, tinnily blasting the top ten CFUN summer hits in my wake. The earthy tar smell of hot black topped pavement melting in July. Hopscotch, kick ball, and red rover. Flimsy roller skates that tighten around shoes with a special key that I wore on a string around my sun-warmed neck. For me, all of this nostalgia and more are in the lyrics of Both Sides Now. Even the opening line “rows and flows of angel hair” is a tender reminder that I’d first misinterpreted it as bowls and bowls of angel hair. Perhaps I’d been hoping pasta was on the supper menu that evening.

Although Both Sides Now is Joni’s song of my childhood, my longtime favourite has always been A Case of You from her iconic album Blue. It’s rumoured to be written about her break-up with either Graham Nash or Leonard Cohen. I like to think it’s about Cohen because it doesn’t get more Canadian than that. The opening verses are heartbreak wrapped in biting savagery and I adore it:

“Just before our love got lost you said
I am as constant as a northern star
And I said, ‘Constantly in the darkness
Where’s that at?
If you want me I’ll be in the bar’

On the back of a cartoon coaster
In the blue TV screen light
I drew a map of Canada
Oh, Canada
With your face sketched on it twice…”

Recently I came across an article written about a new novel that’s loosely inspired by the early rise of Joni Mitchell’s career and her love affair with singer James Taylor. Of course I had to read it! Songs in Ursa Major by Emma Brodie (publisher: Alfred A. Knopf, 2021) begins in the year 1969 at a fictional folk music festival where we are first introduced to local singer Jane Quinn and her band the Breakers. Jane and the band are the last-minute replacement performers on the main stage after the headline performer, folk singer Jesse Reid, is injured in a motorcycle accident on his way to the festival.

“James Taylor” by Joni Mitchell from her book Morning Glory on the Vine

Jane and Jesse develop a relationship while he is recovering from his injuries that first begins as a shared love of songwriting and quickly develops into a passionate, often torturous love affair that spans many years. The story follows Jane’s rocky ride in the 1970s music industry and her deeply personal relationships with Jesse, her band members, and her family. All of this unfolds around her desire to be recognized for her talent and still remain in control of her career at a time when women’s opinions were the least heard in a room of male executives.

The heart of this novel is a love story, but the backbone for me is a young woman’s search for the illusive balance between self-fulfillment and obligation to loved ones. I read Songs in Ursa Major in one day because I had to know what becomes of Jane from the first pages when she steps barefooted onto the stage and her life instantly changes. I related so much to this feisty character and her determination to remain true to her young self.

I kept thinking about Joni Mitchell’s country-inspired hit You Turn Me On I’m A Radio while reading Jane’s story. Music industry execs want Jane to write catchy hits for the radio instead of honest music inspired by her life experiences. Joni’s response to the same request in her career famously mocked her recording label manager with these lyrics:

“I’m a broadcasting tower
Waving for you
And I’m sending you out
This signal here
I hope you can pick it up
Loud and clear
I know you don’t like weak women
You get bored so quick
And you don’t like strong women
‘Cause they’re hip to your tricks
It’s been dirty for dirty
Down the line
But you know I come when you whistle
When you’re loving and kind
But if you’ve got too many doubts
If there’s no good reception for me
Then tune me out, ’cause honey
Who needs the static
It hurts the head…”

The complete lyrics are here.

Untitled (and my favourite drawing) by Joni Mitchell: Morning Glory on the Vine

Another book I enjoy immensely is Joni Mitchell’s Morning Glory on the Vine: Early Songs & Drawings (publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2019). In 1971, as her groundbreaking album Blue became a commercial success all around the world, Christmas came along and Joni struggled with what presents to give her nouveau riche friends. In the end she decided to give them each a handmade book filled with a collection of her songs, poems and drawings that she called “The Christmas Book”. The edition remained private amongst friends until it was recently published, a present to all of her fans.

There have been many creative influences in my life and sometimes hearing a song or reading passages from a poem or book reminds me to be thankful for those brave souls who put their whole hearts into words, even knowing that some might not understand a single word of it.

Joni Mitchell says it best in a letter to her friends, “Well I know you can’t really knock something till you know it–inside and out–all sides. And I find that then, when you understand it, it’s hard to knock it. You just feel it–laugh or cry.”