Today Polaris Prize and Juno Award nominated Canadian singer, songwriter, and producer Basia Bulat returns with her seventh studio album, Basia's Palace, and returns to SHEROES to sit down with Carmel Holt to discuss the new album, the importance of staying in touch with her inner child, and how becoming a mother herself brought Basia to some unexpected new sonic landscapes.

We love St. Vincent! To celebrate her recent three Grammy wins in one night for her first fully self-produced album All Born Screaming, it's an encore episode of SHEROES with Annie Clark recorded live in conversation at The Current in St. Paul, Minnesota in September 2024.

Spanish-American singer, songwriter, and multi-instrumentalist Victoria Canal joins Carmel Holt to discuss her full length debut album, Slowly It Dawns, and they have a fascinating conversation about gender, identity, and being perceived, beauty as currency, and the many factors that may be playing into gender imbalances in the recording industry.

Just in time for the Grammy's, nine-time Grammy Award nominated mastering engineer Emily Lazar joins Carmel Holt to talk about her journey to becoming the ceiling breaking audio engineer she is today, what led to founding her nonprofit We Are Moving The Needle, who have recently launched their new microgrants supporting creators who have been affected by the L.A. wildfires, and what she believes is the solution to getting more cis and trans women and nonbinary folks hired as engineers and producers.

One of the year's most anticipated albums is out today - Humanhood, the seventh studio album by The Weather Station - and Carmel Holt helps celebrate its arrival by welcoming the brilliant singer, songwriter, producer and musician at its center, Tamara Lindemann for a fascinating conversation about the making of the new album, how learning about differing skull shapes between men and women changed her life, and revelations that have come from teaching songwriting to others.

We've dressed up and lit 84 birthday candles for Joan Baez this week with a newly refreshed version of our interview at Newport Folk Festival six months ago. Newport was where an 18 year old Joan Baez got her start in 1959, and where she returned last summer for the first time since 2009 to share some of her poems from her new poetry book, When You See My Mother Ask Her To Dance. She reads from her book during our conversation, and treats us to a powerful impromptu a-capella song.

Singer-songwriter-multi-instrumentalist and producer Amy Helm recently returned with her fourth solo studio album called Silver City, and joins Carmel Holt to discuss the album's central themes of generational women's voices, and her own journey as a single mother, touring musician, middle age, love and divorce. Amy reflects on her path of revealing more of her own inner world in her songs, and discovering how much she has to share that can inspire and uplift others.

Singer-songwriter Kathleen Edwards returned with her first album in eight years in 2020 called Total Freedom, only to have her comeback thwarted by the pandemic. Earlier this year in Austin, Texas, Kathleen sat down with Carmel Holt to talk about that experience, as well as her then-upcoming series of cover songs she was recording. With a whole lot planned for 2025, including her sixth studio album, produced by Jason Isbell, we get a sneak peek at the newest addition to that series coming on December 11th, and hear why, when she quit music, she wanted to talk to Joni Mitchell.

We just wrapped our limited SHEROES series called The Road to Joni. The road was both a metaphor for artists’ paths that led to Joni Mitchell and where those roads led them - and it was a literal road to Joni, as simultaneously, host Carmel Holt travelled across the country from New York to Los Angeles to see Joni at the Hollywood Bowl and back again, while on a tour of public radio affiliate stations who carry SHEROES each week. At the very start of the journey back in September, I visited The Current in St. Paul, Minnesota, and hosted a one hour interview with St. Vincent, recorded in front of a live studio audience of public radio members. A portion of that interview focused on Annie Clark’s road to Joni and aired as part of episode six of The Road to Joni series. The rest of the hour centered on St. Vincent’s now four-time Grammy nominated, seventh studio album, All Born Screaming, and the interview has been in the SHEROES vault until now. With The Road to Joni freshly in the rear view window, we take one last look back to the beginning of our SHEROES Radio tour, and bring you St. Vincent as this week’s SHERO in the Spotlight.

We’ve reached the end of The Road - the one that leads our host Carmel back home and to the finale of our special 10 episode series. It is also Joni Mitchell’s 81st birthday. From Newport Folk Festival 2022 to the Hollywood Bowl on October 19, 2024, we’ve watched the remarkable comeback of our SHERO, and in the past ten weeks, we’ve heard from a group of artists who shared their roads to Joni with so much love and reverence that it was rare to end a conversation without tears.

We set out on this journey not only to celebrate Joni Mitchell, but also to explore the immense power of music and community to heal, unite, inspire and crack us wide open… which this experience certainly did.

For this final episode, Carmel talks to 7x Emmy award winning journalist and senior culture and senior national correspondent for CBS News, Anthony Mason. He tells us about his decision to get to Newport when he heard that Joni was going to be there in 2022; and camping out in an Airbnb during the festival, hoping that he’d get “the call.” When that call came and he was summoned to rehearsals at an old church at Fort Adams State Park, the site of the Newport Folk Festival, he knew that his patience had paid off. Anthony got 15 minutes with Joni and with that, he secured the first televised interview with her since her aneurysm in 2015. Anthony says that the experience of seeing Joni perform at Newport 2022 was “everything we’ve waited for and so much more.”

FInally, we hear from a listener that Carmel met on night two of the Hollywood Bowl Joni Jam shows. Our new friend, Cory Reeder, is an award-winning director, producer and screenwriter. The heartfelt story of his road to Joni leaves us, once again, in tears. He says that “Joni Mitchell is courage” and that “she is the hero that we need.” Cory says that he is forever grateful for living in this time of Joni. We can’t think of a better sentiment to end on.

It has been an honor and a privilege to have you on this journey with us.