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Today we meet an artist who doesn’t blow the doors off with volume or choreography, but with something quieter—and in many ways, just as radical.

A woman alone with a guitar in an open tuning.
A voice that can sound like a bell, a blade, or a diary you were never meant to read.
A songwriter who refuses to keep her feelings, or her harmonies, inside the lines.
But inwardly a mother with empty arms carrying shame that didn't belong to her and grief she poured into songs that people around her could feel even if they didn't know why both sides now Chelsea morning
Joni Mitchell.

In this episode, I want to explore:

Her background: prairie girl, painter, survivor.

Her influences: folk clubs, jazz giants, poets, painters, and her own wounds.

Her effect on music: especially the singer-songwriter era and beyond.

Her life’s arc: including the hidden child, the fame she never really trusted, the experiments that confused critics, the silence, the aneurysm, and the astonishing later-life return.

Because if Hendrix reimagined what a guitar could do, Joni Mitchell reimagined what a song could say.

Small-town skies, big inner world

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Our story begins not with sequins but with a housing project.

Mary Wilson and Florence Ballard both grew up in Detroit’s Brewster-Douglass projects, one of the first federally funded housing developments for Black families. Diana Ross, who grew up nearby, joined that same orbit.

Detroit in the 1950s and early 60s was a complex place:
Automobile money and factory work.
Northern promise and stubborn segregation.
Church choirs, street-corner harmonies, jazz clubs, rhythm & blues, gospel pouring out of radios.

Music wasn’t a luxury; it was a language.
The three girls—at first part of a broader group of friends—found each other through that language. They called themselves The Primettes, designed as the “girl group” counterpart to a rising male group called The Primes (who would evolve into The Temptations).

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Today, we turn to a musician whose care there were moves separations long stretches were Jimmy simply simply had to figure things out on his own no one was buying but whose shadow is so long that every electric guitarist since has had to walk through it.

Jimi Hendrix.

He didn’t just play louder. He didn’t just play faster. He changed what the electric guitar meant. He changed the expectations for sound, for performance, for what a song could hold.

In this episode, I want to step past the posters and the legends—the burning guitar, the psychedelic clothes, the famous take on “The Star-Spangled Banner”—and really look at four things:

His background: the fragile, human story underneath the icon.
His influences: because Hendrix was not a meteor out of nowhere.
His effect on music: how he reshaped the instrument and the stage.
His life and his death: and the pressures and possibilities that surrounded him at the end.

At the end of this journey, we’ll eventually look forward—to some very different voices who were changing the sound of the 1960s in their own way: Diana Ross and The Supremes.

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Today we turn to a voice that has become a kind of measuring stick. A singer you can’t ignore, can’t casually imitate, and certainly can’t replace.

Aretha Louise Franklin.

You can line up all the adjectives: legendary, iconic, incomparable. But with Aretha, those words almost sound lazy. The real story is more interesting. It’s the story of how a shy, brilliant preacher’s daughter walked out of a Detroit church and, without surrendering where she came from, changed what mainstream American music could sound like — and what it could mean.

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If you grew up in a certain era, his name isn’t just a performer on a poster. It’s a weather system. A shift in air pressure. A bulletin from the fault line where art, politics, faith, doubt, youth, age, and trouble all collided.

And at the end of this episode, I’m going to tell you about one night—one Bob Dylan concert—that coincided with the most frightening turn my own life had taken up to that point, and how, in a way, it nudged me toward paying attention to people many others don’t see.

But let’s start with the man himself.

Bob Dylan was born Robert Allen Zimmerman on May 24, 1941, in Duluth, Minnesota, and grew up in the mining town of Hibbing on the Mesabi Iron Range. Hibbing was not Greenwich Village, not California, not London. It was wind, work, winters, and radio.

Inside that small-town house, though, the signals of the wider world were pouring in: country music, blues, early rock ’n’ roll, gospel, and crooners—all collapsing into one restless imagination. He listened hard. He absorbed. And he did what born artists do: he tried things on.

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Today’s pairing may look odd until you start really listening:

The Beach Boys and The Grateful Dead.

Two California bands. Two American institutions. Two completely different ideas of what a band is for.

One built pop cathedrals in the studio and spent decades trying to bring that sound to the stage.

The other built a moving city on the road and treated the studio almost like a postcard from their real life’s work.

Let’s spend some time with both—and with the very different concert worlds they created.

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Today I want to put two names in the same frame—Joan Baez and Taylor Swift—not because they sound alike or have the same values but because they tell us how the culture around music, fandom, and accessibility to their shows have changed in less than one lifetime.

Same art form. Very different worlds.

This episode is about those two worlds.

No boxing match.
No “who’s better.”

Just what it means that one night with Baez cost you five dollars, and one night with Swift might cost someone else a small fortune.

In one: Joan Baez at Catholic University—five dollars a ticket. A guitar, a voice that sounds like it dropped in from a kinder universe, and the feeling that history, morality, and music are all sitting beside you.

In the other: Taylor Swift in a sold-out stadium—tens of thousands of phones glowing, a three-hour epic of costume changes and choreography, and ticket prices that can look like a month’s rent.

Before I go any further, a brief portrait of Joan Baez - she was born January 9, 1941, in Staten Island, New York and raised in a Quaker family with a strong social conscience. She emerged at the end of the 1950s folk revival, her pure, ringing vibrato and unadorned guitar style making traditional ballads and spirituals feel both ancient and immediate. Her breakthrough came with performances at the Newport Folk Festival (1959–60) and early albums that brought folk music—and later protest music—to a mass young audience.

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In a recent episode, we spent time with a man who changed popular culture and then became a warning about what fame, isolation, and addiction can do to a single human body—Elvis Presley. Brilliant, iconic, but ultimately tragic.

Today… similar voltage. Very different story.

This is about a band that came out of the same storm system of sex, drugs, and rock and roll… but somehow did not end as a cautionary tale on a bathroom floor. Instead, they turned danger into discipline, scandal into strategy, and raw rebellion into one of the longest-running creative partnerships in modern music.

In this series, we’ve already met Frank Sinatra, who turned phrasing and breath into a method—and Chuck Berry, who wired the circuitry of rock and roll into the American imagination. Elvis showed us how a single, fragile human can be crushed under the weight of that circuitry.

Today’s story is different. This is what happens when that same dangerous current is handed to a band that refuses to burn out.

The Rolling Stones.
This is not just a tale of sex, drugs, and rock and roll. This is the story of staying power.

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