Joni Mitchell Quotes

We are stardust, we are golden and we've got to get ourselves back to the garden.

Don't it always seem to go, that you don't know what you've got till it's gone.

We love our lovin'....but not like we love our freedom.

All romantics meet the same fate some day. Drunk and cynical and boring someone in some dark cafe.

you dont know what you got till its gone

Love is touching souls.

people will tell you were they have gone, they'll tell you where to go, but until you get there for yourself you never really know.

Chase away the demons, and they will take the angels with them.

So many things I would have done, but clouds got in my way.

It's life's illusions that I recall, I really don't know life at all

Will you take me as I am? Strung out on another man...California, I'm comin' home.

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.

I could drink a case of you, darlin'...and I would still be on my feet, yes I would still be on my feet...

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 And I would still be on my feet Oh I would still be on my feet

everything comes and goes; pleasure moves on too early and trouble leaves too slow

There are things to confess that enrich the world, and things that need not be said.

Daydreamin' drugs the pain of living.

We are stardust Billion-year old carbon And we've got to get ourselves back to the garden

If you're smart or rich or lucky Maybe you'll beat the laws of man But the inner laws of spirit And the outer laws of nature No man can

Won't you stay We'll put on the day And we'll talk in present tenses

Fear is like the wilderland - Stepping stones or sinking sand

This is the tale of Magic Alex, the man who was everywhere: with Leonard Cohen in Hydra; in Crete with Joni Mitchell; in a Paris bathroom when Jimmy Morrison went down; working as a roadie setting up the Beatles last rooftop gig; an assistant to John and Yoko when they had a bed-in at the Amsterdam Hilton; with the Stones when they were charged for pissing against a wall; the first to find and save Dylan after the motorcycle accident; having it off with Mama Cass hours before she choked the big one; arranging the security at Altamont; at Haight-Ashbury with George Harrison and the Grateful Dead; and in the Japanese airport with McCartney after the dope rap. He was the guy Carly Simon was really singing about and the missing slice of ‘Bye, Bye Miss American Pie’.

Americans are pushy, obnoxious, neurotic, crass - anything and everything - the full catastrophe as our friend Zorba might say. Canadians are none of that. The way you might fear a cow sitting down in the middle of the street during rush hour, that's how I fear Canadians. To Canadians, everyone is equal. Joni Mitchell is interchangeable with a secretary at open-mic night. Frank Gehry is no greater than a hack pumping out McMansions on AutoCAD. John Candy is no funnier than Uncle Lou when he gets a couple of beers in him. No wonder the only Canadians anyone's ever heard of are the ones who have gotten the hell out. Anyone with talent who stayed would be flattened under an avalanche of equality. The thing Canadians don't understand is that some people are extraordinary and should be treated as such.

I met a woman She had a mouth like yours She knew your life She knew your devils and your deeds And she said "Go to him, stay with him if you can But be prepared to bleed

And the seasons they go 'round and 'round And the painted ponies go up and down We're captive on the carousel of time We can't return we can only look behind From where we came And go round and round and round In the circle game.

But you know it's hard to tell When you're in the spell if it's wrong or if it's real But you're bound to lose If you let the blues get you scared to feel

We are stardust, we are golden, We are billion year old carbon, And we got to get ourselves back to the garden.

I never loved a man as far as I could pitch my shoe.

I see music as fluid architecture.

I don’t know if I’ve learned anything yet! I did learn how to have a happy home, but I consider myself fortunate in that regard because I could’ve rolled right by it. Everybody has a superficial side and a deep side, but this culture doesn’t place much value on depth — we don’t have shamans or soothsayers, and depth isn’t encouraged or understood. Surrounded by this shallow, glossy society we develop a shallow side, too, and we become attracted to fluff. That’s reflected in the fact that this culture sets up an addiction to romance based on insecurity — the uncertainty of whether or not you’re truly united with the object of your obsession is the rush people get hooked on. I’ve seen this pattern so much in myself and my friends and some people never get off that line. But along with developing my superficial side, I always nurtured a deeper longing, so even when I was falling into the trap of that other kind of love, I was hip to what I was doing. I recently read an article in Esquire magazine called ‘The End of Sex,’ that said something that struck me as very true. It said: “If you want endless repetition, see a lot of different people. If you want infinite variety, stay with one.” What happens when you date is you run all your best moves and tell all your best stories — and in a way, that routine is a method for falling in love with yourself over and over. You can’t do that with a longtime mate because he knows all that old material. With a long relationship, things die then are rekindled, and that shared process of rebirth deepens the love. It’s hard work, though, and a lot of people run at the first sign of trouble. You’re with this person, and suddenly you look like an asshole to them or they look like an asshole to you — it’s unpleasant, but if you can get through it you get closer and you learn a way of loving that’s different from the neurotic love enshrined in movies. It’s warmer and has more padding to it.

Well something's lost but something's gained in living every day.

I'm an individual, and an individual can't follow and doesn't want to lead.

There'll be icicles and birthday clothes And sometimes there'll be sorrow

There's a man who's been out sailing In a decade full of dreams And he takes her to a schooner And he treats her like a queen Bearing beads from California With their amber stones and green He has called her from the harbor He has kissed her with his freedom He has heard her off to starboard In the breaking and the breathing Of the water weeds While she was busy being free

Whatever it was that I felt was the weak link in my previous project gave me inspiration for the next one.

If you’re smart or rich or lucky Maybe you’ll beat the laws of man But the inner laws of spirit And the outer laws of nature No man can No, no man can... “The Wolf That Lives in Lindsey” — Joni Mitchell

Art is short for artificial…so the art of art is to be as real as you can within this artificial situation… In a way it’s a lie to get you to see the truth.

In search of love and music my whole life has been Illumination Corruption And diving, diving, diving, diving down To pick up on every shiny thing

To Canadians, everyone is equal. Joni Mitchell is interchangeable with a secretary at open-mic night. Frank Gehry is no greater than a hack pumping out McMansions on AutoCAD. John Candy is no funnier than Uncle Lou when he gets a couple of beers in him. No wonder the only Canadians anyone’s ever heard of are the ones who have gotten the hell out. Anyone with talent who stayed would be flattened under an avalanche of equality.

You've got to shake your fists at lightning now, you've got to roar like forest fire You've got to spread your light like blazes all across the sky They're going to aim the hoses on you, show 'em you won't expire Not till you burn up every passion, not even when you die Come on now, you've got to try, if you're feeling contempt, well then you tell it If you're tired of the silent night, Jesus, well then you yell it Condemned to wires and hammers, strike every chord that you feel That broken trees and elephant ivories conceal

I have a tremendous joie de vivre... alternating with irritability of course.

THE SOUNDTRACK OF WES AND LIZ Someone Like You | Van Morrison Paper Rings | Taylor Swift Lovers | Anna of the North ocean eyes | Billie Eilish Bad Liar | Selena Gomez Public Service Announcement (Interlude) | Jay-Z Up All Night | Mac Miller How Would You Feel (Paean) | Ed Sheeran Hello Operator | The White Stripes Paradise | Bazzi Sabotage | Beastie Boys Feelin’ Alright | Joe Cocker Someone Like You | Adele Monkey Wrench | Foo Fighters Bella Luna | Jason Mraz Forrest Gump | Frank Ocean Electric (feat. Khalid) | Alina Baraz Kiss | Tom Jones Enter Sandman | Metallica Death with Dignity | Sufjan Stevens We Are Young | fun. feat. Janelle Monáe New Year’s Day | Taylor Swift River | Joni Mitchell

A woman I knew just drowned herself The well was deep and muddy She was just shaking off futility Or punishing somebody My friends were calling up all day yesterday All emotions and abstractions It seems we all live so close to that line and so far from satisfaction

we are stardust, billion year old carbon. we are golden, caught in the devil's bargain.

Fold your fleet wings I have brought some dreams to share A dream that you love someone A dream that the wars are done

Daisy was Carole King, she was Laura Nyro. Hell, she could have been Joni Mitchell. And they wanted her to be Olivia Newton-John

I've looked at life from both sides now From up and down and still somehow It's life's illusions I recall I really don't know life at all

It’s just that I suffer very eloquently

to live is to suffer, to survive is to find some meaning in the suffering.” Nietzsche

You've got to shake your fists at lightning now. You've got to roar like forest fire.

Will you take me as I am? Will you? JONI MITCHELL, “California

The words are purposes.       The words are maps. ADRIENNE RICH, “Diving into the Wreck”       Will you take me as I am?       Will you? JONI MITCHELL, “California

And the seasons they go'round and'round And the painted ponies go up and down We're captive on the carousel of time We can't return we can only look behind From where we came And go round and round and round In the circle game

Joni Mitchell had it right: "They paved paradise / and put up a parking lot." But perhaps, in the near future, we could add a line of hopeful epilogue to that song: then they tore down the parking lot / and raised up a paradise

They’d been raised on Flint Public Library books and Joni Mitchell cassettes by an agnostic mother. They were goodish-looking, prone to solitude, and considered themselves too clever for their blue-collar lives. They weren’t heaven people.

Depression can be the sand that makes the pearl,” she later said. “Most of my best work came out of it. If you get rid of the demons and the disturbing things, then the angels fly off, too. There is the possibility, in that mire, of an epiphany.

The apartment is a laboratory in which we conduct experiments, perform research on each other. We discover Henry hates it when I absentmindedly click my spoon against my teeth while reading the paper at breakfast. We agree that it is okay for me to listen to Joni Mitchell and it is okay for Henry to listen to the Shaggs as long as the other person isn't around. We figure out that Henry should do all the cooking and I should be in charge of laundry and neither of us is willing to vacuum so we hire a cleaning service.

Back in Svetlana’s room, we listened to the CDs she had bought—Joni Mitchell’s Blue and Bach’s St. Matthew Passion—and made necklaces, periodically holding up the strands and comparing them. Svetlana explained how her necklace was characteristic of her and mine was characteristic of me, and I thought about how probably, as long as civilization had existed, women had been threading beads onto strings or reeds or whatever. Then I wondered whether it had always been women. Maybe in ancient times men had been into beads. Today, though, it was hard to imagine boys sitting around on beanbags, listening to Joni Mitchell, holding necklaces against each other’s necks, and talking about Svetlana’s sister. Some part of me worried that this was why women would never amount to anything, that we were somehow holding ourselves back.

The way you might fear a cow sitting down in the middle of the street during rush hour, that’s how I fear Canadians. To Canadians, everyone is equal. Joni Mitchell is interchangeable with a secretary at open-mic night. Frank Gehry is no greater than a hack pumping out McMansions on AutoCAD. John Candy is no funnier than Uncle Lou when he gets a couple of beers in him. No wonder the only Canadians anyone’s ever heard of are the ones who have gotten the hell out. Anyone with talent who stayed would be flattened under an avalanche of equality. The thing Canadians don’t understand is that some people are extraordinary and should be treated as such.

Depression can be the sand that makes the pearl,” she

And the seasons they go round and round

I never saw a sky so green, never so blue

We are stardust, we are golden And we've got to get ourselves back to the garden.

Sitting in a park in Paris, France, Reading the news and it sure looks bad. They won't give peace a chance. That was just a dream some of us had.

If you're smart or rich or lucky Maybe you'll beat the laws of man But the inner laws of spirit And the outer laws of nature No man can No, no man can...

I looked a coyote right in the face On the road to Baljennie near my old home town He went running thru the whisker wheat Chasing some prize down And a hawk was playing with him Coyote was jumping straight up and making passes He had those same eyes just like yours Under your dark glasses Privately probing the public rooms And peeking thru keyholes in numbered doors Where the players lick their wounds And take their temporary lovers And their pills and powders to get them thru this passion play No regrets Coyote I just get off up aways You just picked up a hitcher A prisoner of the white lines on the freeway Coyote's in the coffee shop He's staring a hole in his scrambled eggs He picks up my scent on his fingers While he's watching the waitresses' legs He's too far from the Bay of Fundy From appaloosas and eagles and tides And the air conditioned cubicles And the carbon ribbon rides Are spelling it out so clear Either he's going to have to stand and fight Or take off out of here I tried to run away myself To run away and wrestle with my ego And with this flame You put here in this Eskimo In this hitcher In this prisoner Of the fine white lines Of the white lines on the free freeway

On the radio a DJ was going through the best albums of the century, and somewhere, I think around number thirty, was Joni Mitchell's "Blue". The DJ played, "River," and said that its greatness lies in the fact that no woman ever said it so clearly and unapologetically before: "I'm so hard to handle, I'm selfish and I'm sad." Progress! I thought. Then came the song's next line: "Now I've gone and lost the best baby the best baby that I ever had. ".,

Rain comes from the east one night We watch it come To hang like beaded curtains Till the morning sun Water dripping from our clothes You with raindrops on your nose Ask me sadly "Please don't go away now" Till the rain is done, I say "I'll stay now" Rain outside but inside we don't mind at all Shadows by the fire slowly climb and fall Kisses fade and leave no trace Whispers vanish into space The dawn will send me on a chase to nowhere Why cry as if I were the first to go there And I know I shouldn't be here Yes, I know I should go home But that eastern rain drones in my brain And I'm so all alone, so all alone Morning comes up from the east We watch it come And far away now rolls the ancient rain God's drum You with daybreak in your eyes Afraid to speak for telling lies I watch you search for some reply to lend me But when the rain is done There's no pretending "Eastern Rain" from Second Fret Sets

I always think poetry is kind of like cracking sunflowers with your nails to get the meat out. It’s a lot of work for very little reward, in most cases. Even the hallowed ones among them. I didn’t see that it had any kind of great pertinence

I am on a lonely road and I am traveling Traveling, traveling, traveling Looking for something, what can it be Oh I hate you some, I hate you some, I love you some Oh I love you when I forget about me I want to be strong I want to laugh along I want to belong to the living Alive, alive, I want to get up and jive I want to wreck my stockings in some juke box dive Do you want - do you want - do you want to dance with me baby Do you want to take a chance On maybe finding some sweet romance with me baby Well, come on All I really really want our love to do Is to bring out the best in me and in you too All I really really want our love to do Is to bring out the best in me and in you I want to talk to you, I want to shampoo you I want to renew you again and again Applause, applause - Life is our cause When I think of your kisses my mind see-saws Do you see - do you see - do you see how you hurt me baby So I hurt you too Then we both get so blue. I am on a lonely road and I am traveling Looking for the key to set me free Oh the jealousy, the greed is the unraveling It's the unraveling And it undoes all the joy that could be I want to have fun, I want to shine like the sun I want to be the one that you want to see I want to knit you a sweater Want to write you a love letter I want to make you feel better I want to make you feel free I want to make you feel free

Peridots and periwinkle blue medallions Gilded galleons spilled across the ocean floor Treasure somewhere in the sea and he will find where Never mind the questions there's no answer for The roll of the harbor wake The songs that the rigging makes The taste of the spray he takes And he learns to give He aches and he learns to live He stakes all his silver On a promise to be free Mermaids live in colonies All his sea dreams come to me City satins left at home I will not need them I believe him when he tells of loving me Something truthful in the sea all lies will find you Leave behind your streets he said and come to me Come down from the neon lights Come down from the tourist sights Run down till the rain delights You do not hide Sunlight will renew your pride Skin white by skin golden Like a promise to be free Dolphins playing in the sea All his sea dreams come to me Seabird I have seen you fly above the pilings I am smiling at your circles in the air I will come and sit by you while he lies sleeping Fold your fleet wings I have brought some dreams to share A dream that you love someone A dream that the wars are done A dream that you tell no one but the gray sea They'll say that you're crazy And a dream of a baby Like a promise to be free Children laughing out to sea All his sea dreams come to me

I was only a folk singer for about two years…. By that time, it wasn’t really folk music anymore. It was some new American phenomenon. Later, they called it singer/songwriters. Or art songs, which I liked best. Some people get nervous about that word. Art. They think it’s a pretentious word from the giddyap. To me, … the word art has never lost its vitality.

Albert Camus, from Leonard Cohen’s reading list, makes an appearance here, from Notebooks, 1935–1951: “What gives value to travel is fear. It is the fact that, at a certain moment, when we are so far from our own country … we are seized by a vague fear, and an instinctive desire to go back to the protection of old habits. This is the most obvious benefit of travel. At that moment we are feverish but also porous, so that the slightest touch makes us quiver to the depths of our being.” (emphasis added)

Big Yellow Taxi They paved paradise Put up a parking lot With a pink hotel, a boutique And a swinging hot spot Don't it always seem to go That you don't know what you've got till it's gone? They paved paradise Put up a parking lot They took all the trees Put 'em in a tree museum And they charged the people A dollar and a half just to see 'em Don't it always seem to go That you don't know what you've got till it's gone? They paved paradise Put up a parking lot Hey farmer, farmer Put away the DDT now Give me spots on my apples But leave me the birds and the bees, please Don't it always seem to go That you don't know what you've got till it's gone? They paved paradise Put up a parking lot Late last night I heard the screen door slam And a big yellow taxi Took away my old man Don't it always seem to go That you don't know what you've got till it's gone? They paved paradise Put up a parking lot I said, "Don't it always seem to go That you don't know what you've got till it's gone? They paved paradise Put up a parking lot" They paved paradise Put up a parking lot They paved paradise Put up a parking lot

Painting, you express it more broadly, more childlike. Here’s the basic thing: like all that a painter—a painter at best because of their juvenile qualities. The reason painters live, I think, to be quite old is because they’re children, maybe more than any of the arts, that never grew up, never put their crayons away. And the painting at best is supposed to rejuvenate a person. It’s the work of a juvenile, perennial juvenile, intended to rejuvenate. You should get a wonderful “Oooh!” It should make you want to get out your crayons, a good painting, more than anything else.

and were willing to suffer pain if necessary.” A young woman in the spring and summer of 1967 was walking toward a door just as that door was springing open. A stage was set for her adulthood that was so accommodatingly extreme—so whimsical, sensual, and urgent—that behavior that in any other era would carry a penalty for the daring was shielded and encouraged. There was safety in numbers for every gorgeous madness; good girls wanting to be bad hadn’t had so much cover since the Jazz Age. San Francisco—glowing with psychedelic mystique, the whole city plastered with Fillmore and Avalon posters of tangle-haired goddess girls—was preparing for a convocation (of hapless runaways from provincial suburbs, it would turn out), the Summer of Love, through which the term “flower children” would be coined, while in harsh, emotion-sparking contrast, helicopters were dropping thousands of U.S. boys into the swamps of Vietnam.

From: Bernadette Fox To: Manjula Kapoor Oh! Could you make dinner reservations for us on Thanksgiving? You can call up the Washington Athletic Club and get us something for 7 PM for three. You are able to place calls, aren’t you? Of course, what am I thinking? That’s all you people do now. I recognize it’s slightly odd to ask you to call from India to make a reservation for a place I can see out my window, but here’s the thing: there’s always this one guy who answers the phone, “Washington Athletic Club, how may I direct your call?” And he always says it in this friendly, flat… Canadian way. One of the main reasons I don’t like leaving the house is because I might find myself face-to-face with a Canadian. Seattle is crawling with them. You probably think, U.S./Canada, they’re interchangeable because they’re both filled with English-speaking, morbidly obese white people. Well, Manjula, you couldn’t be more mistaken. Americans are pushy, obnoxious, neurotic, crass—anything and everything—the full catastrophe as our friend Zorba might say. Canadians are none of that. The way you might fear a cow sitting down in the middle of the street during rush hour, that’s how I fear Canadians. To Canadians, everyone is equal. Joni Mitchell is interchangeable with a secretary at open-mic night. Frank Gehry is no greater than a hack pumping out McMansions on AutoCAD. John Candy is no funnier than Uncle Lou when he gets a couple of beers in him. No wonder the only Canadians anyone’s ever heard of are the ones who have gotten the hell out. Anyone with talent who stayed would be flattened under an avalanche of equality. The thing Canadians don’t understand is that some people are extraordinary and should be treated as such. Yes, I’m done. If the WAC can’t take us, which may be the case, because Thanksgiving is only two days away, you can find someplace else on the magical Internet. * I was wondering how we ended up at Daniel’s Broiler for Thanksgiving dinner. That morning, I slept late and came downstairs in my pajamas. I knew it was going to rain because on my way to the kitchen I passed a patchwork of plastic bags and towels. It was a system Mom had invented for when the house leaks.

Suddenly, Joni was at the door and nothing else mattered. It had been a few months since we'd last seen each other - and that was, in fact, the first time we'd met - but our connection was instant. Joni Mitchell was the whole package: a lovely, sylphlike woman with a natural blush, like windburn, and an elusive quality that seemed lit from within. Her beauty was almost as big a gift as her talent, and I'd been pulled into her orbit, captivated from the get go.

I figure, if you’re going to be depressed anyway, you might as well listen to Joni Mitchell.

They paved paradise Put up a parking lot ​—Joni Mitchell, Big Yellow Taxi

I'm a pretty good cook Sitting on my groceries Come up to my kitchen I'll show you my best recipe I try and I try but I can't save a cent I'm up after midnight, cooking Trying to make my rent I'm rough but I'm pleasin' I was raised on robbery

There is no time to process during process. As Joni Mitchell sang, you’re just 'living on nerves and feelings' before sensing you have done something. And you hope people will hear it. And hear you. And hear themselves. In the songs; I was the empty swimming pool. I was the coward who wanted an iron spine. I was the kid hiding under the bed from a predator. I was the televangelist selling lies but spreading hope. I was the ashtray with the stubbed out cigarette waiting to be cleared by the beleaguered late night bar staff. So were you. You were everything. I was just the same. But brand new. I wanted to be if not free, something just a little closer to it.

In the words of the Joni Mitchell song, we’ve got to get ourselves back to the garden.

Asylum Records became a power base for David Geffen, with one of the best artist rosters in the business. It became the home label for what was to be known as the California sound. Elliot continued running the management company, most of whose artists recorded on Asylum, whose corporate philosophy was “benevolent protectionism.” The record company was different from other labels and was proud of its noninterference with the private and artistic lives of its artists, who in turn looked to David Geffen and company to insulate and protect them from the shocks and insults of commercially oriented sales and marketing types, aggressive promotion men, and demanding producers. The opening lineup at Asylum included Jackson Browne, the Eagles, and Joni Mitchell, with Linda Ronstadt joining shortly after. In 1974, the legendary Bob Dylan would leave Columbia and release two Top 10 albums with the company before returning to his original label. That didn’t matter to David. Crosby, Stills, Nash, and Young were Atlantic artists and they were doing quite nicely, thank you very much. Besides,

Telling a boy in your class that you liked Joni Mitchell was really another way of saying, “If the worst comes to the worst and you knock me up, it’ll be okay.

If I passed a thief, I’d know he was a thief. In level-four Buddhism, your sixth sense comes in. The sixth sense is why the animals ran through the hills in the tsunami. All of your senses are incredibly sharpened. If you’re an animal and you see that birds are not moving in their normal pattern and sound different, you can probably hear the wave coming in the wrong direction. It’s a coordination of all your senses. I think that’s what was happening that time. I wasn’t reading anything at the time, but that was not a mental breakdown but the arrival of the sixth

His cry rushed down the corridor towards her as if a dam had just been overcome by torrential floodwater. The sound echoed, bouncing along the unfurnished walls, before spilling over the lip of the laboratory doorway and intermingling with the tragic tones of Joni Mitchell that accompanied her working day. “Freya! Shut. The. Door.

I've looked at life from both sides now From up and down, and still somehow It's life's illusions I recall I really don't know life at all

A mother who underestimates a little girl can eventually be written off as unsupportive, but a mother who sees her daughter’s best self even before she does is harder to disengage from.

Oh, I wish I had a river I could skate away onCanción de JONI MITCHELL

Non-teenagers might find his appeal difficult to understand, as he isn’t especially handsome, or big, or even funny; his features are striking only in their regularity, the overall effect being one of solidity, steadiness, the quiet self-assurance one might associate with, for instance, a long-established and successful bank. But that, in fact, is the whole point. One look at Titch, in his regulation Dubarrys, Ireland jersey and freshly topped-up salon tan, and you can see his whole future stretched out before him: you can tell that he will, when he leaves this place, go on to get a good job (banking/insurance/consultancy), marry a nice girl (probably from the Dublin 18 area), settle down in a decent neighbourhood (see above) and about fifteen years from now produce a Titch Version 2.0 who will think his old man is a bit of a knob sometimes but basically all right. The danger of him ever drastically changing – like some day joining a cult, or having a nervous breakdown, or developing out of nowhere a sudden burning need to express himself and taking up some ruinously expensive and embarrassing-to-all-that-know-him discipline, like modern dance, or interpreting the songs of Joni Mitchell in a voice that, after all these years, is revealed to be disquietingly feminine – is negligible. Titch, in short, is so remarkably unremarkable that he has become a kind of embodiment of his socioeconomic class; a friendship/sexual liaison with Titch has therefore come to be seen as a kind of self-endorsement, a badge of Normality, which at this point in life is a highly prized commodity.

she needed rest, but it was more than that—she needed to get someplace where she could breathe a little better, where her daughter could run barefoot without stepping in dog shit and broken glass and where she wasn’t waiting all the time for a catastrophe she couldn’t even name. Later when she heard Joni Mitchell sing about Woodstock, the lyrics, written that same summer, could have been channeled straight from Loraine’s own mind: “I’m going to camp out on the land/I’m going to try an’ get my soul free . . . We’ve got to get ourselves/Back to the garden.” For Loraine, her next move felt obvious. One day, she left.

I'm porous with travel fever But you know I'm so glad to be on my own Still somehow the slightest touch of a stranger Can set up trembling in my bones. I know no one's going to show me everything We all come and go unknown Each so deep and superficial Between the forceps and the stone.

I think the fact that I did not have the masters, that I don’t have any musical heroes…my music is pretty original. Nearly anyone you talk to in my generation had a hero that they studied and analyzed and strove to be like. They did air guitar in front of the mirror. So it was less “muse” than “ick.” Music comes from the muse, not from other musicians.

shut me up and talk to me

shut me up and talk to me!

Many residents had written letters, sickened by the aftermath of the spraying. Health officials were unbowed. But Olga Huckins refused to be ignored. She sent a copy of her Boston Herald letter to her friend, Rachel Carson. Four years later, Carson published a book about it. Called Silent Spring, it became an international best seller, alerting the world to the dangers of pesticides, landing Carson on national television programs and in front of congressional hearings, winning praise from people as diverse as President John F. Kennedy, Supreme Court Justice William O. Douglas, and singer-songwriter Joni Mitchell, and making Carson one of the most famous and most influential women in the United States. Unfortunately,

If anyone bothered to ask her, back then, what she did want, she would have said: to listen to music, Zeppelin and the Dead most importantly, but also Procol Harum, and Joan Baez, and Joni Mitchell; to see George McGovern elected someday (now that Bobby Kennedy was dead and gone); to go into a line of work that would make a difference in the world; to meet a good man who took her seriously; to travel the country and the world. But nobody asked her, and so she kept these wishes quiet, writing them only in journals, summoning them to the forefront of her mind whenever a birthday or a well or a star presented her with a formal opportunity to make them known to the universe.

Instead, I’m a critic. A kind of mapmaker, as I see it, setting down lines meant to guide others along the trajectories of artists who are always one step ahead of me.

Yancy stayed up listening to his iPod while the television was tuned to Animal Planet. The effect was enthralling: wildebeest migrations accompanied by Joni Mitchell and the Strokes.