Big Yellow Podcast

In which I briefly walk through Joni’s experience becoming a mother at a young age, giving her daughter up for adoption and eventually reuniting with her decades later.

Thanks for listening x

* Allison

Get full access to Big Yellow Podcast at allisonrapp.substack.com/subscribe

Becca Stevens has been a musician pretty much her entire life. She grew up in a musical family — her mom was a singer and her dad a composer — and not only did she play in bands growing up, but she went on to study music at the professional level.

Joni has been, in Becca’s words, a songwriting mom, someone she’s looked up to from various angles and at various points in her life. Things really came full circle when she started working with one of Joni’s longest and biggest champions, David Crosby.

Becca’s most recent album, Maple to Paper, came out a few months ago. It brought me to tears last night. Vulnerable, determined, charismatic, tender…this is an album made by someone who is feeling in every sense of the word.

In this episode, Becca and I chat about, well, all of the above.

Thanks for listening x

* Allison

Get full access to Big Yellow Podcast at allisonrapp.substack.com/subscribe

If you know me, you know that a significant chunk of my musical DNA involves the Tragically Hip, one of the single most successful acts to come out of Canada.

Being from Buffalo, their music was on constant rotation — not just in my dad’s car and our stereo but at bars and sporting games around town. I have one of their album covers tattooed on my left thigh. I’ve stopped by some of the venues they played in their early days in Toronto. And I was fortunate enough to see them on their very last tour in 2016, about a year before lead singer and lyricist Gord Downie died of brain cancer. Our family dog, Gordon, is named for him.

The Hip never really broke all that big in the U.S., which was both happenstance and purposeful. They were, in essence, Canada’s band, though anyone who lives or grew up close to the border is more likely to know their songs. Long story short: you simply can’t have a conversation about Canadian musicians without talking about the Tragically Hip.

After Downie died, whoever was running his social media account started a casual mini series in which they’d pull an album out of Downie’s personal record collection. Albums by Bob Dylan, Tom Petty, Joy Division, Bruce Springsteen, Johnny Cash popped up from time to time. And recently I saw one that didn’t surprise me in the slightest: Joni Mitchell’s ‘For the Roses.’

But I’m getting ahead of myself. The exceptionally humble Gord Sinclair, bassist for the Tragically Hip since day one, was kind enough to speak with me about Joni and her influence on the band over the years. This is an interview I’ve been dreaming about for years, a real full circle moment for a music fan from Buffalo like me.

Thanks for listening x

* Allison

Get full access to Big Yellow Podcast at allisonrapp.substack.com/subscribe

Well, if you know you know. In which I discuss the 1971 album that changed a lot of women’s lives, a lot of songwriter’s lives and probably drove a bunch of people to the bottle.

Thanks for listening x

* Allison

Get full access to Big Yellow Podcast at allisonrapp.substack.com/subscribe

For those of you who haven’t spent hours upon hours of your life on the official Joni Mitchell website like I have, you may not know that there is an entire section dedicated to various Joni song tabs transcribed for guitar, piano, bass and more — even dulcimer.

Those transcriptions are there thanks to the (volunteer!) work of people like Sue Tierney, who have been figuring out Joni’s songs for years and helping them to end up on the internet for all to learn from.

I recently caught up with Sue, a lifelong Joni fan naturally, to talk about how and why she got involved in this work.

Thanks for listening x

* Allison

Get full access to Big Yellow Podcast at allisonrapp.substack.com/subscribe

In which I trace Joni’s style evolution from Mod It Girl to Hippie Queen to Sophisticated Lounge Singer.

Thanks for listening x

* Allison

Get full access to Big Yellow Podcast at allisonrapp.substack.com/subscribe

The first time I met writer and author Seth Rogovoy was in the spring of 2022 in Tulsa, Oklahoma, where we were both attending the grand opening weekend of the Bob Dylan Center. As luck would have it, we both separately had decided it was perfectly okay to walk to Leon Russell’s Church Studios on the outskirts of town for an event. No big deal for North-easterners like ourselves, but as it turns out, Tulsa is not the kind place in which you can walk to everything…long story short: we made the trek back together and saw some parts of Tulsa I’m not sure many others have.

Flash forward to 2024 and Seth has released a brand new book about a different musical icon, Within You, Without You: Listening to George Harrison. And guess what? There’s a Joni connection in the form of Tom Scott’s LA Express, the story of which Seth explains both in his book and in this episode of Big Yellow Podcast.

So here’s Seth and I, not wandering the streets of Tulsa but instead perusing the paths of George and Joni, who have more in common than you may think.

Thanks for listening x

* Allison

Get full access to Big Yellow Podcast at allisonrapp.substack.com/subscribe

To begin, my apologies for the lesser-quality audio in this episode — I was forced to use my backup recording on account of only traveling with one laptop, the one that did not have the better audio on it…

But if you can hopefully look past that, you’ll find a lovely conversation I had with David Hajdu, the acclaimed author, writer, and self-proclaimed Joni fanatic. Here we talk about Joni’s place in the West Village, his own run-in with her at a jazz club in NYC and more.

If you haven’t read David’s excellent book, Positively 4th Street: The Lives and Times of Joan Baez, Bob Dylan, Mimi Baez Fariña, and Richard Fariña, I’d highly recommend. Here’s a link to it.

Thanks for listening x

* Allison

Get full access to Big Yellow Podcast at allisonrapp.substack.com/subscribe

My guest today is someone I’ve spent time in court with several months ago.

I was with David Browne and fortunately neither one of us was in legal trouble. We were both there in a stuffy NYC criminal courtroom covering the then-ongoing trial involving Don Henley and some allegedly stolen Eagles lyrics, he for Rolling Stone and I for Ultimate Classic Rock. That case ended up being dropped…

But I digress! I actually met David in person for the first time before that at the Bitter End, one of the West Village’s few remaining music venues left over from its folk scene days. (Here is a picture of Joni playing at it in 1968.) We spoke a little bit at the time about a new book he was writing, and now here we are, discussing said book: Talkin’ Greenwich Village: The Heady Rise and Fall of America’s Bohemian Music Capital (out September 17).

David did warn me that Joni herself doesn’t play a large role in the book, but I would argue that she was still an integral figure in the Greenwich Village folk scene, even if she was only a part of it for a short time.

If you’re into music history pretty much of any kind, this will be a book you’ll want to get your hands on — excellently researched and chock full of detail.

Here’s David and I…

Thanks for listening x

* Allison

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I am by no means a professional guitarist — I’ve dabbled since I was a kid, but my skills don’t really stretch much beyond basic chords.

However, to speak about Joni Mitchell’s music and not acknowledge her approach to guitar playing, and more specifically her famous way of utilizing unique tunings, would be an oversight.

In today’s brief episode, I explore this topic as a novice guitarist, one who has struggled to play many of Joni’s songs thanks to their eccentric tunings.

Thanks for listening x

* Allison

Get full access to Big Yellow Podcast at allisonrapp.substack.com/subscribe