Carole King, Joni Mitchell, and Carly Simon, along with Judy Collins and a score of women who made their musical mark primarily during the singer/songwriter era (the late 60s/early 70s) were and are the soundtrack of my life. I read somewhere that the music we hear and embrace in our late teens into our late twenties becomes "our music", and I agree.
These three women are the core for so many women of my Baby Boomer generation (though they are just a little older than most of us). When the trio of some of their most important albums, like "Tapestry" (King), "Court and Spark" (Mitchell), and "No Secrets" appeared in and around 1971, they seemed to instantly begin playing in bedrooms, dorm rooms, and studio apartments everywhere.
The award-winning journalist Sheila Weller researched and wrote this triple biography of Carole King (born 1942), Joni Mitchell, and Carly Simon (both born in 1943). It hopscotches back and forth between the lives of the three women, all of whom almost simultaneously became household names around their thirtieth birthdays, even though King had already had more than a decade of great success as a Brill Building pop music composer with songs like "Up on the Roof", "The Loco-Motion", "One Fine Day", and more. Their lives sometimes intersected in the music business, through complex personal connections, and crisscrossed friendships and romantic relationships.
Weller's book takes us deep into the culture of the period, and the music scenes in Los Angeles and New York, through extensive interviews, and adds a wealth of anecdotes and insights about the three women from many of the people who had close relationships and attachments to them. It is a kind of comfort read too, if that was your era, when so much seemed to be changing and possible for women. We can each consider what it means to "feel like a natural woman" and go from there.
No one could have predicted how that would play out for women in the five decades since the early 70s, with so many broadening opportunities and fewer restrictions (on the whole) for us. We accomplished so much, yet now after forty-plus years of advancement, we have been faced with some troubling attacks on our personal freedoms during the last five or six. I read the book when it first came out in 2013 when it was first published, with a second read just recently – a decade later. So much has happened over those ten years.
On the plus side, despite the current social and political wars, if we look solely at women in music, we have so many huge names: Beyoncé, Lady Gaga, Taylor Swift immediately come to mind. Each is a great example for their female peers in their 20s and 30s. Their success gives me hope.
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