JoniMitchell, the Canadian singer / songwriter / guitarist / pianist / genius, turns 80 today.
Here she is playing “Big Yellow Taxi” (“You don’t know what you’ve got till it’s gone”):
Rolling Stone recently ranked her the 9th greatest guitarist of all time, saying:
Joni Mitchell has reigned as rock’s ultimate acoustic guitarist for over 50 years, using alternate tunings to devise her own complex guitar language. “I wanted to play the guitar like an orchestra,” she told Rolling Stone in 1999. “I know I have a unique way of playing, but nobody seemed to notice. I found it kinda silly that they kept describing it as folk guitar when it was more like Duke Ellington.” After childhood polio weakened her left hand, she compensated by using over 50 different tunings. “I always thought of the top three strings as a horn section and the bottom three as a rhythm section.”
Here’s a transcendently beautiful song, “Both Sides Now” (from the same concert as the first video). The way she changes just one word in the last line of each chorus is so moving.
The English conductor Sir John Eliot Gardiner was born on April 20, 1943. When I was starting to become a fan of classical music, his fresh, energetic approach got me excited about listening to Beethoven’s complete symphonies.
Something he says in that interview is very relevant to Beethoven’s Ninth:
There is a difference in conducting a choir and an orchestra, but I try to minimize it, because part of my aim is always to try to get the orchestra to imitate voices, to “speak their lines” … to give a sense of rhetoric, a sense of the underlying narration of the music. So I try to make [the orchestra] as choral as possible, and I try to make my choir as orchestral as possible.
Kate Bush in 1978 at the Dickens Inn in London. Photo by Anwar Hussein/Hulton Archive/GI.
Kate Bush, the daring, eclectic British singer/songwriter, has been in the news for having a resurgence of popularity since her 1985 song “Running Up That Hill” has been featured on the Netflix show Stranger Things. She wanted to call that song “Deal with God,” but was told she couldn’t because the song could be censored in some countries.
She wrote the song to say that she wished she could make a deal with God for women and men to switch places so they could understand each other better.
Here she is playing “Running Up That Hill” live, with David Gilmour of Pink Floyd on guitar and backing vocals:
It’s hard to say what’s better about Kate Bush: her own body of work, or the massive influence she’s had on so many other musical artists, including Tori Amos, Björk, Regina Spektor, Goldfrapp, Florence + the Machine, St. Vincent, Bat for Lashes, Ellie Goulding, Antony and the Johnsons, Tegan and Sara, Lorde, Outkast, the Cure, Stevie Nicks, and Rufus Wainwright.
If you love some of those artists but don’t know much Kate Bush, I recommend her albums The Dreaming (1982) and Hounds of Love (1985), both of which she also produced. This is “Cloudbusting” from Hounds of Love:
Quotes on Kate Bush:
Alison Goldfrapp of Goldfrapp: “Lots of hippies liked Kate Bush where I grew up, so I associated her with bongs and incense and everything disgusting. Then I heard this album [Hounds of Love]. I realised that she was beautiful and interesting, which is not a common combination. It seems very deep somehow.”
Björk: “I think what is really underrated is the production. I think it’s really original and really feminine. … She created her own look and she produced her own sound.”
Tori Amos: “When I first heard her, I went, ‘Wow, she does things that I’ve never heard anybody do, much less me.’ But I could hear a resonance in the voice where you’d think we were distantly related or something.”
Kele Okereke of Bloc Party: “The first time I heard [the song ‘Hounds of Love’] I was sitting in a reclining sofa. As the beat started I was transported somewhere else. Her voice, the imagery, the huge drum sound: it seemed to capture everything for me. As a songwriter you’re constantly chasing that feeling.”
Big Boi of Outkast: “[Kate Bush] became my favorite artist of all time. Her and Bob Marley would tie for first. I used to listen to ‘The Kick Inside’ and ‘Wuthering Heights’ and ‘This Woman’s Work’ … just admiring the style of music she was making, from the production side of it to the lyrics. It was kind of mind-blowing. I was like OK, I wanted to be like her.”
Nerina Pallot on why she started playing and writing music: “It was Kate Bush. I was around 14 when The Sensual World came out and she played ‘This Woman’s Work’ on Wogan [a British talk show]. I remember watching her and being transfixed and understanding that was what I wanted to do. … I had to write songs and get under the skin of the music.”
Regina Spektor on her influences: “I grew up on classical music, the Beatles, and Queen. But then all this other stuff came into my life. … Nirvana, the Ramones, Madonna, Eminem, Rufus Wainwright, Tom Waits, Patti Smith, Kate Bush, David Bowie. … I love music that takes chances.”
Kate Bush: “Every female you see at a piano is either Lynsey de Paul or Carole King. And most male music — not all of it but the good stuff — really lays it on you. It really puts you against the wall. And that’s what I like to do. I’d like my music to intrude.”
This is my favorite Kate Bush song: “Hounds of Love,” from her album of the same name.
Thanks to my brother Chris for video suggestions … and for introducing me to Kate Bush’s great music.
He wrote so many great songs, often seeming simple but with subtle sophistication. “Good Vibrations” stretched the envelope of pop/rock music beyond the usual verse/chorus/repeat formula. Wikipedia says it influenced the Beatles’ “A Day in the Life” and Queen’s “Bohemian Rhapsody.” I’d also suggest it could have inspired Radiohead’s “Paranoid Android” — think of how both songs get slower and quieter with an interlude in the middle: “Gotta keep those lovin’ good vibrations happening …”
More from Wikipedia:
The making of “Good Vibrations” was unprecedented for any kind of recording. Building on his approach for Pet Sounds, Wilson recorded a surplus of short, interchangeable musical fragments with his bandmates and a host of session musicians at four different Hollywood studios from February to September 1966, a process reflected in the song’s several dramatic shifts in key, texture, instrumentation and mood. Over 90 hours of tape was consumed in the sessions. … Band publicist Derek Taylor dubbed the unusual work a “pocket symphony.” It helped develop the use of the studio as an instrument and heralded a wave of pop experimentation and the onset of psychedelic and progressive rock.
“Don’t Talk, Put Your Head on My Shoulder,” from Pet Sounds, is a beautiful song for when words feel beside the point.
All four of the Beatles are/were so great, but as time goes on it’s become clearer and clearer to me that Paul is my favorite Beatle. Why? Partly because of his songwriting, his singing, and his playing of multiple instruments; he’s one of the all-time great innovators on bass.
Paul McCartney and John Lennon both can’t be pigeonholed. They worked together and took on each others’ qualities. Yes Paul wrote soft, lovely pieces like “Yesterday” and “Blackbird” …
… but he also pioneered heavy rock with “Helter Skelter” on the White Album in 1968 (before Led Zeppelin put out their first album).
And sometimes we get both sides in one song: “The End.”
He was the clear extravert of the Beatles … yet “For No One” is beautifully introspective, and even a song as extraverted as “Hey Jude” has a contemplative side.
John rightly gets much of the credit for “A Day in the Life,” which is often said to be the artistic high point of the Beatles’ oeuvre — but it wouldn’t have achieved those heights if it had been all John. Music is all about context, and the dissonant orchestral frenzy wouldn’t have been as interesting if it had gone from John back to John again. It needs to give way to Paul waking up and reeling off the details of his ordinary life, before drifting off into a dream.
When paying tribute to a singer/songwriter, the natural tendency is to focus on that person’s songs, but Paul also helped make other people’s songsgreat. John’s “Dear Prudence” is grounded by Paul’s bass line, before reaching ecstasy through Paul’s drum fills. George Harrison’s “Something” sounds so wonderful thanks in part to Paul’s melodic bass playing and tenor harmony vocals.
Beyond his stunning talents, there’s something more intangible about Paul: a sense of humility and decency. He puts aside rock ’n’ roll bombast and arrogance to sing about ordinary people like Eleanor Rigby and the residents of Penny Lane — the nurse who “feels as if she’s in a play …”
I like knowing that whenever I buy Beatles products, such as my Abbey Road guitar strap, I can be assured they’re not made from animal products. That’s because of Paul’s commitment to fighting cruelty to animals. While some stars glorify themselves, Paul puts a spotlight on the other inhabitants of our world.
Paul has been writing songs for over 6 decades, since he was a teenager. It’s hard to believe he was only 27 when the Beatles broke up — by that point they had evolved so much. Sir Paul was still evolving in his late 70s when he wrote “Deep Deep Feeling,” an epic musical and emotional journey. Amazing that in 2020, he sang and played everything on this song:
The parts where he sings “So intense the joy of giving/How does it feel?” give me chills.
