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...

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 the...

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 ye...

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 o...

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...

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 di...

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 wh...

I first got to know Tyrell Lisson when he invited me on his own podcast, the excellently informed The Band: A History . It should go without saying that if you’re a fan of Canadian musicians — which you likely are since you’re subscribed to a program about Joni Mitchell — Tyrell’s show is definitely one you’ll want to check out. Besides being an expert on the Band, whom Joni worked with a couple o...

Just a few months after winning her first Grammy, Joni Mitchell released 1970’s Ladies of the Canyon , which illustrated both her enchantment with her new, glamorous life in Laurel Canyon, Los Angeles, and her mild disillusionment with her growing fame. Oh, and she’s got a new boyfriend in the mix, a one Graham Nash… Thanks for listening x * Allison Get full access to Big Yellow Podcast at allison...

If there’s one thing I love, it’s becoming friends with a Canadian. I first got connected with singer-songwriter Emm Gryner when she sent me a copy of her book, The Healing Power of Singing: Raise Your Voice, Change Your Life. Over the next couple years, I got to know Emm a bit more — you might recognize her name from David Bowie’s band, which she was a part of in the 2000s, but she’s also got an...

Music was not Joni’s first love. Here’s what else she took up in her early days and mostly never let go of. Thanks for listening x Allison Get full access to Big Yellow Podcast at allisonrapp.substack.com/subscribe

A conversation with writer and author Annie Zaleski ( Salon , The Guardian , NPR ) Get full access to Big Yellow Podcast at allisonrapp.substack.com/subscribe

On May 1, 1969, Joni Mitchell released her nearly entirely self-produced sophomore album, ‘Clouds.’ Here are the basics about it… Thanks for listening x * Allison Get full access to Big Yellow Podcast at allisonrapp.substack.com/subscribe

Like others who have been on this show so far, Paul Myers is someone I’ve never met in person, but somehow I felt a kinship with him when we spoke, perhaps because of his roots in Toronto, which I grew up right across the border from in Buffalo. Throughout his career, Paul has done a little bit of everything: record making, writing, radio hosting, podcasting, etc. Which to me meant I needed to bri...

If you’re part of the online Bob Dylan community — yes, that’s very much a thing and it’s made up of many wonderful people — then you likely know Laura Tenschert’s name. She’s the host of the Definitely Dylan podcast series, which she started as a radio program several years ago. Laura is also, as it turns out, a fellow Joni fan, whose music she fell in love with before Dylan’s. The history betwee...

Joni Mitchell released her debut album, Song to a Seagull , in March of 1968. Here are the basics about it… Thanks for listening x * Allison Get full access to Big Yellow Podcast at allisonrapp.substack.com/subscribe

When I first started dabbling in music journalism, more or less all of the writers I was familiar with were men. It took several years of exploration, work, and research to learn of more women in my field, and one of those people was Ann Powers, whom I’ve admired and looked up to since. Like some of my other guests, Ann and I have never met, but it seemed like fate that she happened to be releasin...

Back in 2019, my boyfriend at the time gifted me a copy of David Yaffe’s ‘Reckless Daughter: A Portrait of Joni Mitchell,’ the first book I’d ever read about her. When I finished that book, a fascinating and much more up close look at Joni than I had previously encountered, I wrote to David to express my thoughts. We’ve been friends since, have eaten meals in the West Village with fellow writers,...

In which Joni travels from Calgary to Toronto, writing one of her first original songs along the way, and finds herself pregnant and alone at 21 years old. In which Joni also gets married, puts her daughter up for adoption and moves to Detroit, gets divorced and moves again to New York City, where her music starts to catch the attention of fellow folksingers. And in which Joni meets a one David Cr...

A conversation with award-winning songwriter and recording artist Margo Price. Get full access to Big Yellow Podcast at allisonrapp.substack.com/subscribe

Hello! Welcome to the first, non-guest episode of Big Yellow Podcast. As previously mentioned, my general plan is to post some ancillary episodes in between guest interviews, to give listeners a bit of context and background information. These episodes aren’t meant to cover every last point of Joni’s life and career — there are excellent books, articles, videos, etc out there for that purpose — bu...

I’d never met David Wild when I asked him to be the first guest for Big Yellow Podcast — and I still haven’t “met” him, since we spoke over Zoom. But David was gracious enough to be my inaugural interview, and for that alone I’m supremely grateful to him. You may recognize David’s name from a number of Rolling Stone bylines, where he worked for quite some time, including a handful of interviews wi...