ephemera

ok yep joni mitchell's magical mystery tour album 'blue' came out 50 years ago and you love joni and i love joni (i would have died for joni) but there is nothing more boring than a bunch of old schmoopers going on and on about it. jeezus! especially the ones that she happened to be rooting at the time. yes i am looking at you graham nash and david crosby and james taylor.

the point is she gave each one of them the boot very quickly when she realised how shallow they were, but the new york times found this neuroscientist daniel levitin who did say something interesting : joni got into the emotional centers in people’s brains and burrowed into their sense of self :

There are two regions of the prefrontal cortex — pars opercularis and pars triangularis — that have to do with resolving linguistic and musical ambiguity. It hears something ambiguous and it’s trying to solve it. You get neurons firing, and that’s engaging you. You don’t want to leave the experience. You want to stay there to figure it out. And then adjacent to all of that is an area that processes your sense of self: “Who am I in the world, and do people like me, and who is this person I’m encountering? And do they like me?” And I think the bond is how so many people see themselves in Joni’s lyrics. That sense of self becomes bonded to her.