My Weekend Crush

Oh, Joni. Joni, Joni, Joni. Joni fucking Mitchell, everyone. While most of Joni’s best-known songs came out before I was born, I was lucky to have folk-music loving parents who raised me on acoustic guitar and NPR. So I know the power of her work, and the importance of her voice. Last weekend, at age 78, Joni made a triumphant return to the Newport Folk Festival. It was her first appearance at the influential music festival since her debut there as a then up-and-coming singer in 1969. The show also marked her first full concert since 2000 and her first time playing guitar on stage since her aneurysm in 2015. In short, it was special. It was really, really special.

Making it even more special, we have our own Brandi Carlile to thank for pulling it all together. Honestly, watching Brandi’s career from its very early, early days to its stratospheric success today feels a bit like getting in on the ground floor of another Joni Mitchell. And aren’t we the lucky ones who get to see these two great together. Of course, like everyone else I was reduced to an absolute puddle with Joni’s “Both Sides Now.” The timber of her voice, well, I’ve been playing her new “Both Sides Now” all week. And it only gets better. Each note, each beat, is so earned. I posted the official Newport festival video of the song above. But if you want to feel the raw power of being in the presence of a true legend, watch Wynonna Judd get similarly reduced to a weeping mess behind Joni as she sings below. I’m not crying, you’re crying. But it’s a good cry. The kind of cry that time and life and the universe understands comes to cleanse us and remind us all of the indescribably beautiful things we can do, when we’re just given the chance.

Seeing someone great like Joni return to the stage, smiling and laughing and clearly enjoying herself, is good for the soul. After the last two-plus years we’ve had as a world and a country, we needed to feel good about humanity again — if only for a few precious songs. To see Joni perform the music that made her famous as a young woman, yet not try to replicate that but instead reinterpret them to account for her decades of lived life is just beyond lovely. Some people will say commerce or enterprise or our endless technological advances are humankind’s greatest gift. But I think, in the end, it will always be art. I really don’t know life at all, either. But I know art is the best way to understand it, always. Thank you for the reminder, Joni. Happy weekend, all.