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Adobe DRM
Product Details
Free Press, April 2009
eBook, 256 pages
ISBN-10: 1416566554
ISBN-13: 9781416566557
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Chapter 1
Description
A work of stunning virtuosity that is beloved by generations of listeners, Joni Mitchell’s Blue still sells 40,000 copies a year, more than three decades after its release. Will You Take Me As I Am is a unique journey through the genius behind the album and the age it came to represent. Michelle Mercer, a respected music journalist and a regular contributor to National Public Radio’s All Things Considered, is the first author of a book about Joni Mitchell to gain access to the famously media-shy musician. Incorporating dozens of hours of interviews into an illuminating narrative heightened by rigorous reporting and compelling analysis of Mitchell’s craft, Mercer insightfully details the richness of the artist’s accomplishment: Mitchell’s innovative way of marrying lyrics to melody; how she plays with inventive, highly expressive chords to achieve her unusual blend of wonder and melancholy; and how she pioneered autobiographical songwriting and along with Bob Dylan brought a new literacy to the popular song. From the weeks living among the hippies in caves in the Greek islands and the other travels that gave birth to Blue, to the album’s influence on the explosive creativity of the 1970s, Will You Take Me As I Am offers a fascinating look into the personal life of a great artist and the culture she helped to shape
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"Mercer, an accomplished music journalist, wisely places her focus on Blue's almost perfect marriage of lyric, melody, mood, and explored experience at the center of the book, surrounded by a careful yet conversational look at how Mitchell got to that point in her life and where she went in the years that followed. Mercer was fortunate to spend extensive time talking directly with the media-shy Mitchell. The author's own thoughts and experiences play a subtle yet pivotal role as the enduring power of Blue is reflected in her personal narrative as one who was, and remains, inspired by this landmark recording."
-- Library Journal
"What distinguishes this work from standard celebrity profiles is that it reads like a collection of cultural essays.... Mercer uses her subject's own words (she conducted a trove of interviews with Mitchell) to illustrate her thesis that Mitchell helped make the personal songwriters of the late '60s and early '70s the literary successors to the Beats.... She addresses nuances of Mitchell's art that have not been adequately recognized but does not lionize her. Rather, Mitchell is revealed as a complicated woman for whom being widely liked is both anathema and a great need."
-- Los Angeles Times
"Knowledgeable, scrupulously researched, insightfully written, sympathetic to its subject yet without a scintilla of fanzine gush, this book is the very model of what pop cultural criticism could and should be."
-- Phillip Lopate, author of Notes on Sontag
"Michelle Mercer has gone beyond the lurid, tell-all biography to investigate the elements and events that combine to create an innovative artist. Like Joni's work has always done, her book transcends the norm, and delves into the universal."
-- Larry Klein, bassist, songwriter, and producer of the Grammy Award-winning album, The Joni Letters
"Michelle Mercer has a quick instinct for the dynamics of musical creativity, how experience feeds the lyric imagination, and how private insights go public. Her smart and deeply felt portrait gives us Mitchell’s life, its defining intensities--everything that went into the making of Blue--but avoids going in for the explanatory kill. The sweet vibration of the work remains."
-- Sven Birkerts, author of My Sky Blue Trades: Growing Up Counter in a Contrary Time
Chicago Sun-Times, April 26, 2009
...Musical giant Joni Mitchell merits so much more than the Michelle Mercer book Will You Take Me As I Am: Joni Mitchell's Blue Period offers to her legions of admirers. The effort is a passionate meditation on the albums Mercer ...
