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(More customer reviews)I had the great fortune to read the uncorrected proof of Michelle Mercer's forthcoming book. _Will You Take Me as I Am: Joni Mitchell's Blue Period_ and I can tell you that you are in for a real treat when it comes out in April.
I read a lot of books about music and this one is really distinguished by the high quality of the writing. Mercer breaks with strict chronology that makes run-of-the-mill music criticism so uninteresting. Her discussion about "confessional" songwriting is fully informed by the literary history of confession from Augustine to Robert Lowell. There is a wonderful Joni monologue on Augustine--one of many fascinating excerpts from Mercer's original interviews.
For me, she really captures the core appeal of the records that she focuses on--_Blue_ through _Hejira_--, blending memoir and biography with criticism in useful ways. The book really took me back to my own personal connections with the music. While I like gossip as much as anyone else, this book has none of the prurient interest of Sheila Weller's book; rather, it captures the intricate essence of the music. It has a meditative quality that reminded me precisely about how I felt when I was coming of age with Joni's music. I didn't care about who her boyfriend was; I wanted to know, "How does she understand so well the way I feel?" This book goes a long way toward exploring that question, summed up in the quotation from Wallace Stevens's "The Man with the Blue Guitar" that serves as the book's epigraph:
And they said to him, "But play you must,
A tune beyond us, yet ourselves,
A tune upon the blue guitar,
Of things exactly as they are.
The book so exceeded my expectations that I couldn't put it down till I finished it.
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