SHEROES is proud to present The Road To Joni - a limited audio series and travelogue devoted to SHERO Joni Mitchell. Our first all-genders series will include interviews with artists and some non-musicians about their own roads to Joni Mitchell, where that road has led them, and how they see Joni’s artistic road as an influence on music and culture as we know it today.
In September host Carmel Holt will be embarking on a cross country road trip, stopping along the way in public radio markets where SHEROES Radio airs, with a destination of the Joni Jam at the Hollywood Bowl, Los Angeles, CA on October 19 & 20, 2024.
Ten weekly one-hour episodes will include: interviews, Road To Joni playlists, and a handful of live recorded events produced in partnership with radio affiliates. The first episode drops on September 6th, and the finale on Joni’s 81st birthday, November 7th.
This innovative new series will be hosted and produced by Carmel Holt, former on-air host, interviewer and Asst. Music Director at WFUV in New York City, creator / host / producer of the nationally syndicated radio show SHEROES Radio, the SHEROES Podcast, and the Webby-nominated Sonos Radio podcast SHEROES Mixtape Memoir.
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We’ve reached the end of The Road - the one that leads our host Carmel back home and to the finale of our special 10 episode series. It is also Joni Mitchell’s 81st birthday. From Newport Folk Festival 2022 to the Hollywood Bowl on October 19, 2024, we’ve watched the remarkable comeback of our SHERO, and in the past ten weeks, we’ve heard from a group of artists who shared their roads to Joni with so much love and reverence that it was rare to end a conversation without tears. We set out on this...
The penultimate episode of the Road To Joni series packs in more conversations than any episode so far. As host Carmel Holt heads east toward home and the finale of the series on Joni’s 81st birthday, the throughline of “Both Sides Now” continues on with four artists whose creative path would have been very different if not for Joni Mitchell. Sylvan Esso’s Amelia Meath was introduced to Joni’s music at the age of 12 by her dad. They listened in the car on cassette until she knew the songs by hea...
This week’s episode comes to you in the afterglow of two sold out Joni Mitchell performances at the Hollywood Bowl in Los Angeles, where molecules were rearranged, hearts were broken wide open and 17,000 fans basked in her brilliance. Though she has a bit of FOMO over missing out on being part of the Joni Jam, this week’s first guest, Shawn Colvin, has plenty of Joni stories. After initially discovering Clouds as a teenager at church camp, Shawn found herself many years later recording her 2nd a...
The two guest interviews featured in Episode 7 with Bruce Hornsby and Béla Fleck were recorded back-to-back by host/producer Carmel Holt. As it turns out, the threads that connect the two artists to each other and to Joni, make the conversations a perfect pair. Joni's then-husband, Larry Klein, played bass on and co-produced several of her albums in the '80s and '90s. He would also bring the two guests in this episode closer to each other and to their shared SHERO, Joni. Pianist and genre-blendi...
For Episode 6, we continue a thread from last week as host Carmel Holt talks with three “boundary dweller” artists about their Roads To Joni. Each of our guests this week are visionaries who push beyond their comfort zone. They are producers, singers, songwriters and instrumentalists. Like Joni, they are multi-Grammy nominees and winners who do things on their own terms. Grammy award winning artist Arooj Aftab spent her teenage years in Lahore, Pakistan listening to American folk music. She foun...
The title of this week's episode comes from a term that legendary rock photographer Norman Seeff uses to describe a truly innovative artist, one who is willing to risk sacrificing their career in order to expand beyond their creative comfort zone. He calls these people “boundary dweller artists.” Norman says that he sees Joni as the archetype of this concept. Her evolution to incorporate jazz influences in the 70s, threw some of her fans for a loop, but as we’ve heard in previous episodes, Joni ...
SHEROES is on The Road To Joni, but in this episode we discover that sometimes that road is a bridge. A bridge to healing. A bridge to holding your own. A bridge to a new creative path. A bridge from one generation to another. Episode 4 of the Road To Joni begins at the SHEROES studio in upstate New York with 5x platinum recording artist and activist Natalie Merchant. A long time friend of host Carmel Holt, they discovered that they were both Joni Mitchell fans at a 1999 at breast cancer benefit...
Episode 3 of The Road To Joni picks up a thread from our conversation with Don Was… and leads us to esperanza spalding. In 2021 esperanza collaborated with her mentor Wayne Shorter on Iphigenia, an opera with a revisionary take on Euripides' Greek tragedy Iphigenia at Aulis. It was Ipheigenia that led esperanza to Joni’s living room, though her path on the road to Joni started years prior with a track from the 1976 album Hejira. esperanza tells host Carmel Holt how, at a recent Janet Jackson con...
We travel to Los Angeles for the first half of Episode 2, where Carmel talks to legendary producer, bassist, and Blue Note Records president, Don Was about his first gig ever at age 12 opening for Joni Mitchell. Don also shares how he learned an important life lesson from listening to Blue, and discusses the sophistication of Joni's harmonic and poetic compositions, and how this naturally intersected with some of the greats of jazz, including their mutual friend, the late Wayne Shorter. Next, in...
Episode One takes us back to South By Southwest 2024 in Austin, TX where an interview with Kathleen Edwards takes an unexpected and affirming turn, and Kathleen remembers how a case of mistaken identity temporarily changes the backstage rules at Toronto's Massey Hall. Then we travel to Newport Folk Festival 2024, where Joni Mitchell made her big comeback in 2022, and Carmel meets up with Taylor Goldsmith of Dawes who shares how talking to Brandi at Newport a few years ago led him to getting the ...
SHEROES is proud to present The Road To Joni - a limited audio series and travelogue devoted to SHERO Joni Mitchell. Our first all-genders series will include interviews with artists and some non-musicians about their own roads to Joni Mitchell, where that road has led them, and how they see Joni’s artistic road as an influence on music and culture as we know it today. In September host Carmel Holt will be embarking on a cross country road trip, stopping along the way in public radio markets whe...
SHEROES is proud to present The Road To Joni - a limited audio series and travelogue devoted to SHERO Joni Mitchell. Our first all-genders series will include interviews with artists and some non-musicians about their own roads to Joni Mitchell, where that road has led them, and how they see Joni’s artistic road as an influence on music and culture as we know it today. In September host Carmel Holt will be embarking on a cross country road trip, stopping along the way in public radio markets whe...
