Will You Take Me As I Am: Joni Mitchell's Blue Period

Joni Mitchell is one of the most celebrated artists of the last half century, and her landmark 1971 album, Blue, is one of her most beloved and revered works. Generations of people have come of age listening to the album, inspired by the way it clarified their own difficult emotions. Critics and musicians admire the idiosyncratic virtuosity of its compositions. Will You Take Me As I Am -- the first book about Joni Mitchell to include original interviews with her -- looks at Blue to explore the development of an extraordinary artist, the history of songwriting, and much more.In extensive conversations with Mitchell, Michelle Mercer heard firsthand about Joni's internal and external journeys as she composed the largely autobiographical albums of what Mercer calls her Blue Period, which lasted through the mid-1970s. Incorporating biography, memoir, reportage, criticism, and interviews into an illuminating narrative, Mercer moves beyond the "making of an album" genre to arrive at a new form of music writing.In 1970, Mitchell was living with Graham Nash in Laurel Canyon and had made a name for herself as a so-called folk singer notable for her soaring voice and skillful compositions. Soon, though, feeling hemmed in, she fled to the hippie cave community of Matala, Greece. Here and on further travels, her compositions were freshly inspired by the lands and people she encountered as well as by her own radically changing interior landscape. After returning home to record Blue, Mitchell retreated to British Columbia, eventually reemerging as the leader of a successful jazz-rock group and turning outward in her songwriting toward social commentary. Finally, a stint with Bob Dylan's Rolling Thunder Revue and a pivotal meeting with the Tibetan lama ChÃ-gyam Trungpa prompted Mitchell's return to personal songwriting, which resulted in her 1976 masterpiece album, Hejira.Mercer interlaces this fascinating account of Mitchell's Blue Period with meditations on topics related to her work, including the impact of landscape on music, the value of autobiographical songwriting for artist and listener, and the literary history of confessionalism. Mercer also provides rich analyses of Mitchell's creative achievements: her innovative manner of marrying lyrics to melody; her inventive, highly expressive chords that achieve her signature blend of wonder and melancholy; how she pioneered personal songwriting and, along with Bob Dylan and Leonard Cohen, brought a new literacy to the popular song. Fans will appreciate the previously unpublished photos and a coda of Mitchell's unedited commentary on the places, books, music, pastimes, and philosophies she holds dear.This utterly original book offers a unique portrait of a great musician and her remarkable work, as well as new perspectives on the art of songwriting itself.

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Title of ebook: Will You Take Me As I Am: Joni Mitchell's Blue Period
ISBN: 9781416566557
parent-ISBN: 9781416559290
Publisher: Free Press
Pages: 256
Published: 04-2009
Released online for download: 04-07-2009
Author of eBook: Mercer, Michelle

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Will You Take Me As I Am

Joni Mitchell's Blue Period
1

In the Manner of the Ancients

THE SPRING OF 1970 WAS A LITTLE LATE FOR Joni Mitchell to be dropping in on Matala. In 1968, Life magazine had printed a lavishly illustrated seven-page cover story on the town's flourishing expatriate hippie culture. In a rocky beach cove just outside the village of about seventy-five people, Life reported, America's disaffected youth was taking up residence in a merry beehive of cliff caves. The freckled and wholesome Rick Heckler and Cathy Goldman, a kind of countercultural Adam and Eve, adorned the cover: "Young American nomads abroad, two Californians at home in a cave in Matala, Crete." Some of the kids were "merely off on a lark, doing what the young have done for generations," sympathized Life writer Thomas Thompson. But there were "too many others caught up in some sort of aimless journey toward an unknown destination." Even Ulysses, who was fabled to have stopped off at Matala, had been trying to get home. This self-indulgent generation, the writer's tone suggested, was rejecting everything his re ... read full excerpt from: Will You Take Me As I Am: Joni Mitchell's Blue Period ebook

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