Dear Neil and Joni

Dear Neil and Joni,

You will always be in my heart. Your music has been a mellifluous and comfortable constant in my life since I was knee high to a grasshopper.

Cranky, late-arriving, Neil...your voice, along with David's and Stephen's and Graham's provided the smoky, harmonious, free-spirited backdrop for many of my most treasured high school moments. Emotionally naked and globally conscious Joni...your albums were what buoyed and strengthened me as a woman, despite feeling like a hopeless science experiment driving to the doctor's office during a few years of medical procedures. 

I want you to know how important you are to me. I toss off my shoes and release my long hair and I paint imaginary rainbows with my wineglass while your unusual voices fill me from stem to stern. A vessel for your counterculture anthems and for your throaty precociousness for the four and a half decades, you'd be relieved to learn that I have grown into a critical thinker. Not surprisingly, music has helped me to do so. From you, I learned that artistic greatness cannot be pigeonholed or bought off, and I learned that falling, hook, line and sinker, for the propaganda of the day, whatever day you find yourself standing in, was a pitfall to be avoided. These ideas are as natural as breathing, to me. 

I also gleaned, from Sugar Mountain and The Circle Game, that we can't be kids forever, but that growing older isn't necessarily anything to rush if we can, perhaps, linger just a bit longer with the barkers and the carousels.

Pulling yourself off of Spotify doesn't affect my ability to listen to you, whatsoever, for I am old school and I own all of my music, including yours. But, I'd like you to know that I wholeheartedly disagree with your stance because you taught me censorship is worth fighting against and listening to a few of your songs today, including Neil and Stephen's (Buffalo Springfield's) For What It's Worth inspired by the Sunset Strip Curfew Riots and and Joni's cover of Both Sides Now, I am empowered in my beliefs.

 

Paranoia strikes deep 

Into your life it will creep 

It starts when you're always afraid

Step out of line, the men come and take you away

 

It's time we stop.
Hey, what's that sound?
Everybody look, what's going down?

 

 

 

Oh, but now old friends they're acting strange

 
And they shake their heads and they tell me that I've changed

 
Well something's lost, but something's gained

 
In living every day

 

I've looked at life from both sides now
From win and lose and still somehow
It's life's illusions I recall
I really don't know life at all

 

 

 #mushroomtumbler