You turn me on to new music, you're a radio

The latest You, Me and An Album episode marked a milestone. By picking For the Roses for her album to discuss, Jesca Hoop became the third guest to choose a Joni Mitchell album. Unless you want to count Thom Yorke (two Radiohead albums plus the Atoms for Peace album), Mitchell is the first artist to be featured on three different episodes.

There could have been several more episodes about Mitchell. Other guests have included her albums on their short lists, and while Ann Powers selected The Roches' self-titled debut album for her episode, we devoted some of our discussion to her Mitchell biography, Traveling: On the Path of Joni Mitchell.

Now that I'm three albums into my exploration of Mitchell's discography, I understand why her music is so beloved and respected. For most of my life, that's been something of a mystery to me—not because I didn't like the handful of Mitchell's songs that I'd heard—but because I didn't hear many of her songs on the radio. Prior to starting You, Me and An Album, radio had always been my main source of music discovery. When I bought an album, it was almost always because I had heard at least one track on the radio first. Even when friends turned me on to albums they loved, I had usually heard some portion of it on the radio before I experienced the whole thing.

I am starting to think that having been so radio-dependent makes me a little weird. If there has been a single guest on YMAAA who has discovered an album by way of radio, I can't recall it. The three guests who have chosen one of Mitchell's albums don't constitute much a sample, but each one discovered the album with the aid of another person in real life and not on the radio. Jesca first listened to For the Roses after finding it in someone's record collection. Kendall Jane Meade found Court and Spark as part of a self-guided singer-songwriter immersion. She noted that Blue was a gateway to other Mitchell albums, and it's an album that an ex-boyfriend had bought for her. Tim Easton heard Blue for the first time in high school when a classmate played it for him during an acid trip.

My dependence on radio contributed to my late arrival to the Mitchell party, but I'm glad that I'm finally going beyond her radio hits. I had Court and Spark in rotation for a while after recording my episode with Kendall, and I'll likely be going back to that album and For the Roses for years to come. (For reasons I haven't pinpointed yet, I didn't connect with Blue quite as much.)

Another great discovery I've made via the podcast lately is No Knife's Fire in the City of Automatons. I have Ryan Sollee of the Portland-based indie folk-rock band The Builders and The Butchers to thank for this. No Knife's music sounds similar to much of what I heard on "modern rock" radio in the '90s, yet I had never heard any of their songs or even heard of the band before. On Ryan's episode, I said that they reminded me of a combination of Unwound, Green Day and Toad the Wet Sprocket, and as strange as that characterization is, I'm sticking with it.

One of my favorite parts of my conversation with Ryan was his recollection of geeking out over No Knife with Thrice bassist Eddie Breckenridge. Not long after publishing Ryan's episode, the YouTube algorithm fed me an episode of Amoeba Music's "What's In My Bag" series with Thrice. It turns out that Breckenridge and his bandmates are into a lot of interesting music—not just No Knife! (I was a little disappointed that No Knife did not get featured among the band's picks.) If you enjoy that Amoeba series, I highly recommend watching this episode, as Thrice put as eclectic a selection of albums in their bags as I've seen in these videos.

I began this post with a milestone, and now I'll end it with another. While I was writing this newsletter, Ann's Roches episode got its 1,000th download, making it the first YMAAA episode to reach that level. Thanks to everyone who gave that episode—or any episode—a listen!