I don’t think about the Joni Mitchell albums I’ve lost over the years due to water damage, roommates, and give-aways. A lot of my favorites were owned by roommates, too, so I never had to buy them to hear them. Just to get a few favorite songs in my collection, sometime over recent years I bought the Joni Mitchell Hits CD pictured above, which includes the following songs (years reflect first copyright rather than recording dates):
“Urge for Going” 1966, “Chelsea Morning” 1967
“Big Yellow Taxi” 1970. “Woodstock” 1969
“The Circle Game” 1966. “Carey” 1971
“California” 1971, “You Turn Me On, I’m a Radio” 1972
“Raised on Robbery” 1973, “Help Me” 1973
“Free Man in Paris” 1973, “River” 1971
“Chinese Café (1982)/Unchained Melody” (1955)
“Come in from the Cold” 1991, “Both Sides, Now” 1967
There are some of my favorite songs missing from that list (“Coyote” and “A Case of You” come to mind immediately), but thanks to YouTube and other streaming services, I can hear my favorites anytime I think of them and want to listen to them again.
Joni has enjoyed a resurgence/renaissance over the past few years, in no small part because of all the contemporary female artists who’ve paid homage to her in their music as well as appearing in concerts with her. After she suffered an aneurysm in 2015, she had to relearn physical mobility and speech. Her return to performing has received a warm and enthusiastic welcome from her fans and earned her plenty of admirers from a new generation.
I was a little reluctant to start Paul Lisicky’s book after my recent spate of reading fiction. I wanted to be in the right mood for a memoir connected to his deep respect for and relationship with the music of Joni Mitchell. But as soon as I opened it and began reading, I remembered why I so admire his gift with prose, whether in fiction or memoir. I repeatedly found myself wanting to reach for a highlighter and mark passages the way I once did as a student. My first reaction was to tell myself, “Don’t fuck up a book with your markings.” My second was to ask myself, “Is there a thread among these passages that resonate with you?”
I woke up around 4:30 this morning, not with Joni Mitchell or Paul’s memoir in my brain, but the nagging tune of a George Harrison song. It took me a while to remember enough of the lyric to pick up my phone and confirm the source of my ear worm. For the first time after fallow weeks, a version of the song performed by Harrison’s son Dhani wove itself into a scene in the novel I haven’t been working on. Thinking backwards from that possible scene got me focused on the chapter where I left off because it wasn’t engaging me. It’s also really hard for me to tap into my creative writing energy when the world is…being what the world is being right now.
I want to try, and now halfway in to Song So Wild And Blue, I intend to go back to the beginning of the book, reread for those passages so I can mark them, and use whatever struck me about them in this week’s posts with the optimism that it’ll somehow all get me writing again. If so, let me completely thank in advance Paul, Joni Mitchell, and George and Dhani Harrison. Muses, always muses…
I remember that time you told me
You said, “Love is touching souls”
Surely you touched mine
‘Cause part of you pours out of me
In these lines from time to time
Oh, you’re in my blood like holy wine
You taste so bitter and so sweet
Oh, I could drink a case of you, darling
Still I’d be on my feet
I would still be on my feet
I love Joni Mitchell, too. I’m going to have to look for this book.
Let me know if you enjoy it!
Apparently, uni-life drags all students into “reading with a pen.” We lifetime students should set up global support groups and group therapy sessions, where those who are ready can share such life altering experiences, artisms, graffiti and all such highlighter organizing compulsions, can do so with like-affected individuals.
One passage in Lisicky’s book reminds me of something my friends and I did as teenagers: we took our music to one another’s houses. In fact, special boxes were sold as traveling cases for 45s. But Riley, for example, never showed up at my house without a few albums under his arm.
It felt imperative that we share our music with each other.
Technology then changed so that we could make and give each other mix tapes and then CDs. And now people publish their playlists or sync their phones’ music libraries to their friends’ bluetooth in their cars.
So, too, do readers ache to share passages from books that make us think. Laugh. Gasp. Cry. As students of literature, we get to do that when we finally are taking those classes by choice (e.g., post-high school) and our professors find and read passages in their lectures. I suppose it’s why people like to go to booksignings or join book clubs/book groups. Reading is solitary, but our passion for what we read makes us wish for community.