Clouds was Joni Mitchell’s second album and won her a Grammy for best folk performance in 1970. I didn’t know the album’s biography before I came to write this piece because when you come to an artist with a large…
Category: Reviews
Live: Po’Girl @ Holywell Music Hall, Oxford
Po’Girl stem from Canada and comprise Allison Russell, Awna Teixeira, and Benny Sidelinger. Allison and Awna both have incredible voices and produce incredible harmonies, yet as multiple instrumentalists they bring to their showcases a wide array of instruments that include…
Live: The Antlers @ The Scala, London
Kings Cross is an area lacking identity over and above being a major travel hub. The immediate vicinity is a tableau of inner city post-industrial decline and recent attempts at regeneration which have, in the main, failed. The venue for…
Album: William Fitzsimmons – Derivatives
William Fitzsimmons, the son of two blind musicians from Pittsburgh, announced his arrival last year with his official debut The Sparrow And The Crow. Filled with the sort of gentle folk-rock that quickly racked him up a series of US…
Classic Album: Ain’t No Neil – Joni Mitchell’s For The Roses
In 1972, two Canadian musicians released amazing folk albums, both coincidentally featuring songs about heroin addicts. Despite the links between Neil Young and Joni Mitchell, listening to Harvest and For The Roses I feel like they were never really trying…
Album: Family Band – Miller Path
The Family Band are formed of husband/wife duo Johnny Ollsin and Kim Krans, and their friend Scott Hirsch, but it’s been said they have a “fourth member”, their log home plan cabin in the Catskills Mountains of upstate New York…
FFS New Bands Panel: The Stan Laurels
The Stan Laurels is the solo project of John Lathrop, a musician from Austin, Texas. He describes his solo album, Death of the Sun, as “a psych-pop/rock/prog concept album with the theme ‘boy meets girl, boy gets abducted by aliens’.”…
Classic album: Joni Mitchell — Blue
What is there to say about Joni Mitchell’s Blue album that hasn’t been said already? Blue was the work of Joni Mitchell at her peak. It was an open diary pouring out her bleeding heart, her sorrow and her sadness.…
Live: Babe Shadow @ Hammersmith Apollo, London
As I stood amongst the growing crowd in the opulent and massively-sized Hammersmith Apollo watching Babe Shadow take to the stage, I couldn’t help but feel a sense of awe about the place. Would The Babe Shadow, a small band…
Classic album: Joni Mitchell – Both Sides Now
Joni Mitchell’s concept album of 2000 traces the arc of a relationship from the first flushes of romance (‘You’re My Thrill’), through uncertainty and despair (‘You’ve Changed’), to a tragic end filled with the pathos of her realisation that it…