The Road To Joni

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...

The penultimate episode of the Road To Joni series packs in more conversations than any episode so far. As host Carmel Holt heads east toward home and the finale of the series on Joni’s 81st birthday, the throughline of “Both Sides Now” continues on with four artists whose creative path would have been very different if not for Joni Mitchell. Sylvan Esso’s Amelia Meath was introduced to Joni’s mus...

This week’s episode comes to you in the afterglow of two sold out Joni Mitchell performances at the Hollywood Bowl in Los Angeles, where molecules were rearranged, hearts were broken wide open and 17,000 fans basked in her brilliance. Though she has a bit of FOMO over missing out on being part of the Joni Jam, this week’s first guest, Shawn Colvin, has plenty of Joni stories. After initially disco...

The two guest interviews featured in Episode 7 with Bruce Hornsby and Béla Fleck were recorded back-to-back by host/producer Carmel Holt. As it turns out, the threads that connect the two artists to each other and to Joni, make the conversations a perfect pair. Joni's then-husband, Larry Klein, played bass on and co-produced several of her albums in the '80s and '90s. He would also bring the two g...

For Episode 6, we continue a thread from last week as host Carmel Holt talks with three “boundary dweller” artists about their Roads To Joni. Each of our guests this week are visionaries who push beyond their comfort zone. They are producers, singers, songwriters and instrumentalists. Like Joni, they are multi-Grammy nominees and winners who do things on their own terms.   Grammy award winning art...

The title of this week's episode comes from a term that legendary rock photographer Norman Seeff uses to describe a truly innovative artist, one who is willing to risk sacrificing their career in order to expand beyond their creative comfort zone. He calls these people “boundary dweller artists.” Norman says that he sees Joni as the archetype of this concept. Her evolution to incorporate jazz infl...

SHEROES is on The Road To Joni, but in this episode we discover that sometimes that road is a bridge. A bridge to healing. A bridge to holding your own. A bridge to a new creative path. A bridge from one generation to another. Episode 4 of the Road To Joni begins at the SHEROES studio in upstate New York with 5x platinum recording artist and activist Natalie Merchant. A long time friend of host Ca...

Episode 3 of The Road To Joni picks up a thread from our conversation with Don Was… and leads us to esperanza spalding. In 2021 esperanza collaborated with her mentor Wayne Shorter on Iphigenia, an opera with a revisionary take on Euripides' Greek tragedy Iphigenia at Aulis. It was Ipheigenia that led esperanza to Joni’s living room, though her path on the road to Joni started years prior with a t...

We travel to Los Angeles for the first half of Episode 2, where Carmel talks to legendary producer, bassist, and Blue Note Records president, Don Was about his first gig ever at age 12 opening for Joni Mitchell. Don also shares how he learned an important life lesson from listening to Blue, and discusses the sophistication of Joni's harmonic and poetic compositions, and how this naturally intersec...

Episode One takes us back to South By Southwest 2024 in Austin, TX where an interview with Kathleen Edwards takes an unexpected and affirming turn, and Kathleen remembers how a case of mistaken identity temporarily changes the backstage rules at Toronto's Massey Hall. Then we travel to Newport Folk Festival 2024, where Joni Mitchell made her big comeback in 2022, and Carmel meets up with Taylor Go...

SHEROES is proud to present The Road To Joni - a limited audio series and travelogue devoted to SHERO Joni Mitchell. Our first all-genders series will include interviews with artists and some non-musicians about their own roads to Joni Mitchell, where that road has led them, and how they see Joni’s artistic road as an influence on music and culture as we know it today. In September host Carmel Hol...

SHEROES is proud to present The Road To Joni - a limited audio series and travelogue devoted to SHERO Joni Mitchell. Our first all-genders series will include interviews with artists and some non-musicians about their own roads to Joni Mitchell, where that road has led them, and how they see Joni’s artistic road as an influence on music and culture as we know it today. In September host Carmel Hol...