Joni Mitchell
Bandsplain is Back with Road Trip-Worthy Music and Talk
After almost four months off the air, cult music guide Bandsplain is back with new episodes each Thursday. The show went on hiatus when its parent company, Spotify’s Studio 4, disbanded earlier this year. But host Yasi Salek wasn’t ready to quit just yet, so she revived the program via Ringer Podcast Network last week. The first episode of the reboot: a four-hour, part-one crash course on Smashing Pumpkins. Bandsplain maintains its original mission of acquainting outsiders with subculture-spawning groups like Insane Clown Posse and My Chemical Romance. When it started in February 2021, the show operated under a somewhat traditional structure – it switched off between music and talk, but all episodes were roughly an hour long. They did open with an intro song composed and voiced by Bethany ...
Brandi Carlile to Release ‘Laurel Canyon-Inspired’ Re-Record of Latest Album
Brandi Carlile has re-recorded a “Laurel Canyon-inspired” version of her 2021 album In These Silent Days and will release it on Sept. 28 via Low Country Sound/Elektra. The project, dubbed In the Canyon Haze, also includes a new cover of David Bowie’s “Space Oddity.” Carlile says the idea was inspired by having befriended Joni Mitchell in recent years and absorbing the vibes of the fabled Laurel Canyon music scene of the 1960s and ’70s. As previously reported, Carlile was instrumental in encouraging Mitchell to return to live performance for the first time in more than a decade at the Newport Folk Festival in July. “I could see the cast of California Dreamers with embroidered flowers and peace signs on their backs drifting through a polaroid haze,” she says. “I could smell the marijuana and...
Joni Mitchell Makes Rare Concert Appearance at Newport Folk Festival
Joni Mitchell made a rare public performance tonight (July 24) at the Newport Folk Festival, her first at the event since 1969. Mitchell, 78, was helped onstage with the aid of a cane to join close friend Brandi Carlile during her set, and sat in a large chair while singing “A Case of You,” “Just Like This Train,” “Both Sides, Now,” “Big Yellow Taxi,” “Summertime” and “Circle Game.” She even stood up to play some electric guitar at one point. Carlile is a longtime Mitchell devotee and has even performed the latter’s classic album Blue in its entirety. Carlile also inspired Mitchell to perform two songs on stage at her own MusiCares’ Person of the Year tribute on April 1 in Las Vegas, her first multi-song appearance in public since 2013. [embedded content][embedded content] Last night Paul ...
The 50 Best Albums of 1972
Last year, when helping assemble SPIN‘s 50 Best Albums of 1971, I wondered if that year could have been popular music’s absolute peak. Now I’m asking myself that same question all over again. As I built a spreadsheet for 1972, gathering our writers’ votes alongside my own weird choices, I was once again struck by how many bronze-cast classics came out that year: LPs from David Bowie, Al Green, Aretha Franklin, The Allman Brothers Band, Yes, Stevie Wonder, Roxy Music, and on and on. Run down basically every genre – glam, soul, prog, art rock, Southern rock, metal, folk, MPB — and you’ll find the very best shit, whether eternally famous or sadly obscure. (My poor spreadsheet, swelling each day, originally had hundreds of worthy records. But you have to start chopping eventually.) Here’s wher...
Joe Rogan on Spotify Disclaimer on Podcasts: ‘I’m Very Happy With That’
Following the controversy surrounding Neil Young and Joni Mitchell removing their music from Spotify, Joe Rogan responded to the legendary musicians who are against Rogan’s alleged spreading of COVID misinformation on his podcast through the same streaming service. Last week, Young wrote an open letter claiming he wanted to remove his music from Spotify because of Rogan’s podcast, The Joe Rogan Experience, on which he has interviewed numerous people and discussed the COVID vaccine. Mitchell and Nils Lofgren also took their music off the service to support Young and his opinion. Last night, Rogan responded in an 11-minute-long Instagram video. Rogan said his podcast is a series of conversations intended to be entertaining. Alongside interviewing artists, Rogan has interviewed medical p...
Joni Mitchell Removes Her Music From Spotify in ‘Solidarity’ With Neil Young
Make it two. In a letter titled “I Stand With Neil Young!” posted on her website Friday evening, Joni Mitchell announced that she’s joining Neil Young in pulling her music from Spotify. Mitchell expressed her discontent about the platform’s willingness to spread “lies” that she says are costing people their lives. “I’ve decided to remove all my music from Spotify,” Mitchell’s note said. “Irresponsible people are spreading lies that are costing people their lives. I stand in solidarity with Neil Young and the global scientific and medical communities on this issue.” Additionally, Mitchell shared a letter that was written to Spotify by a number of doctors who were critical of an episode of the Joe Rogan Experience where he had Dr. Robert Malone on. You can read that here. On Monday, You...
5 Albums I Can’t Live Without: David Crosby
Name David Crosby Best known for Probably harmony. I do good harmonies. Current city Central California. Really want to be in No, I really like it here [in California]. I do like Western Europe. I like England and France and Italy and Spain, particularly Italy. Excited about New album For Free (July 23). What’s exciting about it is that this is the fifth one. I’ve done five records in the last six years, which I don’t know anybody who has. Not young people or old people or anybody. Frankly, they’re good records. That’s what excites me. I love good music. I love good songs, and I think that’s what we’re doing. I think we’re presenting a bunch of really good songs. My current music collection has a lot of Probably more singer-songwriters than anything else, but there’s a lot of jazz, a lot o...
The 50 Best Live Albums of the 1970s
The concert industry exploded in the 1970s, and the live album, a stopgap project once reserved for only the biggest artists, became a compulsory ritual and a pivotal moment for many artists. Live albums captured legendarily loud bands like The Who and The Ramones in their natural element. Once obscure regional acts like Bob Seger, KISS and Cheap Trick exploded into the mainstream with live albums. The Band, The Stooges, and Velvet Underground put their final gigs on vinyl. Jimi Hendrix, Neil Young (as his ongoing archive series shows), and Jackson Browne recorded entire sets of new songs onstage. The Grateful Dead released several official live albums (and continue to do so) that only made fans want to bootleg shows on their own more. With the 50th anniversary of a landmark live album, Th...
Watch Brandi Carlile Cover Joni Mitchell’s ‘A Case Of You’
In 2019, Brandi Carlile performed Joni Mitchell’s entire Blue album at a show at L.A.’s Disney Concert Hall, however, the praised performance wasn’t captured on camera. So on The Late Show with Stephen Colbert on Monday night, Colbert, apparently gutted that he missed that show, asked Carlile if she’d perform a song from Blue and she obligingly grabbed an acoustic guitar to do “A Case of You.” Carlile was on The Late Show to promote her book, Broken Horses: A Memoir, where the six-time Grammy winner opens up about a life shaped by music. They discussed her “stream of consciousness” approach to writing the memoir, and Carlile shared that she “wanted to write the experience with my faith journey as a queer person.” Carlile also spoke to Colbert about her friends...
Joni Mitchell and Me
Last night, a friend alerted me to a filmed concert on the Isle of Wight in 1970 where Joni Mitchell performed. She said it was on YouTube. It was one of those post-Woodstock ridiculous assemblies of thousands of people who seem to be walking around, talking, getting high, eating, and every once in a while, listening to the music. Onto the stage walks Joni Mitchell and sadly tries to sing her quiet little song “A Song About the Midway” from her second album, Clouds, to this sea of people in an advanced state of distraction, and suddenly my weeks of working on this piece about her seems overblown and out of proportion. Maybe I am not, in all of this, writing about Joni Mitchell? Maybe I am writing about me and my reactions to things as I change and they change; the times, and me. I don’t th...
The 50 Best Albums of 1971
It’s become a cliché, even for post-Baby Boomers, to look back wistfully on the early ’70s as some kind of untouchable golden age for popular music. But when you survey all the era’s best albums in list form, it’s hard not to trust that instinct. I mean…holy shit. In 1971, the psychedelic era hadn’t completely wilted; prog was nearing its popularity apex; Motown was still a revolutionizing soul music; the folk-rock movement was in full flight. The possibilities were limitless. You know it’s a banner year when 50 albums don’t begin to scratch the surface — when both John Lennon and Paul McCartney release definitive LPs and neither make the top 10. Was 1971 the greatest album year ever? We’ll save that debate for another time (or maybe another list). For now, we present 50 stone-cold cl...
Joni Mitchell Launches Archives Series, Shares Acoustic Version of ‘House of the Rising Sun’
Joni Mitchell is launching her own archives series. The singer-songwriter will be delivering a bunch of archival releases in the coming years, beginning with Vol. 1: The Early Years (1963-1967). It will feature a number of rarities in the build-up to her first proper release that encompasses a deluxe 5-CD set that includes unreleased home, live, and radio recordings. Of those recordings, 29 are previously unreleased. “The early stuff, I shouldn’t be such a snob against it,” Mitchell said in a statement. “A lot of these songs, I just lost them. They fell away. They only exist in these recordings. For so long I rebelled against the term, ‘I was never a folk-singer.’ I would get pissed off if they put that label on me. I didn’t think it was a good description of what I was. And the...
