Happy Aloha Friday. 🌺
First, the shoutout: this one's for the 321 — Brevard County, Florida, the Space Coast. Brevard is home to Cape Canaveral, where the rockets launch, so in 1999 a Titusville resident petitioned to give it the countdown for an area code. Three. Two. One.
Joni Mitchell turns 83 tomorrow.
There's a scene in White Men Can't Jump where Wesley Snipes tells Woody Harrelson he can listen to Jimi, but he can't hear him. I'd been listening to Joni for years. The first time I heard Joni was Massachusetts in '97. My sister was about to graduate from Hopkins, and my dad loaded her, my brother and me into his Alfa Romeo 164 for a long weekend of college visits across Massachusetts. Mount Holyoke. Amherst. Northampton. Then east to Boston for Tufts and Boston College.
That Alfa had two twelves in the trunk, Boston Acoustics (fittingly) up front, and a deep, meaty exhaust. It was a literal sound machine! Whoever sat up front picked the music, and when I sat shotgun, I put on Blue and left it there. Somewhere between college towns, I was relegated to the back seat for playing Joni Mitchell on repeat... ad nauseam.
So I took her with me. I had a Discman, a pair of headphones, and my skateboard, a Hook-Ups deck that rode across my lap, serving as a solid foundation for the Discman, balanced carefully so as not to bounce and skip as Discmans were wont to do back in the day. While the album played, I was swept into a vortex, mindlessly tracing the smudges in the paint with my finger, following them down the deck, tapping my fingers, finding rhythms and patterns. Outside, we slid along the back roads in a rush of engine and color. Autumn was at its peak, and the pinks, reds and oranges blurred into one long, beautiful stretch, tinted in the glass and mirrored back at me.
Cradled in the comfort of those headphones and her voice, the love affair grew quickly. I longed to be where she was, and Blue gave me the excuse. I was already on a journey, and inside it I could take another one. Sitting in a park in Paris, France, in "California." In a bar in Canada, drawing a map on a coaster in "A Case of You." In the caves at Matala, on Crete, where she wrote "Carey," with beach tar on her feet, missing her clean white linen. I was one pinpoint on a map, in the back seat of a car in central Massachusetts, and those headphones sucked me in, carried me like some sonic burst from one ear to the other, and set me down anywhere she had been.
I was in awe of her. Something in that voice, the high notes she hit, the simplicity of the guitar under it. She could say something that deep and that profound and it still felt like it was about you. I struggled to say things at all, let alone that rhythmically, and here was a voice that seemed to be saying them for me. It drove me to a kind of creative madness.
I carried a journal back then, purple leather-bound, and it went everywhere I went. I spent a majority of my time filling empty pages. Every page an empty space to fill in. That weekend I erupted with ideas, thoughts, fragments of feelings and desires. I wanted to put words down on paper, say them out loud, and have them sound something like what she was doing. I wanted to write, make music, skate, make anything at all. I can still feel the pen hitting that paper, the smooth flow as words appeared. A flow of energy, her voice my siren.
It was layer weather. You'd start the morning bundled up, peel down in the midday sun, and pile it all back on as the sun trailed away, always looking for the balance between the sun and the shade and the wind picking up just slightly. Crisp air, rich with the earthy smell of fall. Everything felt like a sweater, rubbing my skin, soft and scratchy all at once. That weekend wrapped me in a layer that has never left me. I don't have to go looking for it. It sits bubbling right under my skin, a layer that you sometimes forget you are wearing and smile widely when you recognize it is still there. Songs are like tattoos, she sings, and that album is ink underneath my skin. Every time it comes on, I'm back in that seat ready for the inspiration to take hold.
That trip was an odyssey, a long weekend on the back roads of New England. My sister was searching for whatever was going to be her next thing. I was in the back seat searching for something too. I wasn't sure what it was, naively believing back then that it was just one thing. Learning later that it was and is never one thing, but the freedom to explore, choose, find, be struck by, and be seduced into all things.
That excitement of making something is what I keep falling back to. It's the drive that sparked in that back seat, and it has shown up in a lot of different ways since. I've worked the same process for years now in making AFM, and each edition forces me to find the connections between everything. So it's not lost on me that this fall, this weekend, this Friday, I'm on a search of my own, the job kind, the kind that can leave you feeling marooned without a compass. (Today, as it happens, is Marooned Without a Compass Day.) And it's Joni I get to celebrate, the one I have to thank for the first spark and the courage to create. Somewhere along the way, that same drive grew into something I built to help me on the next journey. I called it Job Odyssey. I wrote about launching it here.
This week's sign-off: Carey — Joni Mitchell. She wrote it in Matala for Cary Raditz, a lapsed advertising copywriter working as a short-order cook in a beach town on Crete, and she misspelled his name in the title. Oh, the fortune to carry her attention, even if just for a moment, even if she misspelled my name.
Take the long way somewhere this weekend. Put on the album that first made you want to make something and let it play start to finish. Revel in how it felt the first time you heard it.
Mahalo Nui. 🌺
— Matthew
