Girls Like Us: Carole King, Joni Mitchell, Carly Simon--And the Journey of a Generation

Girls Like Us: Carole King, Joni Mitchell, Carly Simon--And the Journey of a Generation | Sheila Weller | Three Ladies, One Voice

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Girls Like Us: Car...

	Girls Like Us: Carole King, Joni Mitchell, Carly Simon--And the Journey of a Generation Sheila Weller Atria, 2008 - 592 pages average customer review:based on 108 reviews view larger image
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highly recommended

What Great Girls

My mom knew about these singers and loved them so I bought it for her for Mothers Day. Needless to say, she couldn't get enough of it and started reminding me of all the times she played this songs for me. She said I'm not sure that you'll get it, but why don't you try, and I did. The sentences are long and there are avenues that wander into places that maybe only someone older would understand (but great learning experience) but I was hooked. I feel that these women came off as heroines in a novel, or characters in a movie. They had their crosses to bear, there big ups and low downs, but they always sang their way out of it and that in itself was inspiring. My friend and I are making a list of the whose whos, the people the songs are about. As my mother would say, Who knew? Now because of this beautiful book, we do know.

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Three Ladies, One Voice

Girls Like Us is piece of pop music history about three women who greatly influenced music and whose influence can still be felt today. Carole King, Joni Mitchell, and Carly Simon are three giants of pop music and each of these leading ladies had her own unique singing style and her own unique songs. Carole King was a prominent song writer long before she made it on her own. Her songs usually centered around love, loss, and coming of age. Carly's songs were more mainstream with a more updated 1970's style. Joni's songs were folk rock oriented and deeper, with lyrics that were often more complex. No matter which of these three ladies' music you prefer, it is easy to see how they all contributed to popular music and popular culture in their own unique way.

Girls Like Us contains all sorts of interesting trivia facts about Carole King, Joni Mitchell, and Carly Simon and I found my knowledge tested at several levels. While I knew, for example, that Carole King scored huge commercial success with the album Tapestry and its number one single, It's Too Late, I did not realize she had already achieved such a great deal of success as a songwriter for other musical acts. Along with her husband at the time, Gerry Goffin, this prolific songwriting team composed such memorable tunes as The Loco- motion, Up on the Roof, Go Away Little Girl, and One Fine Day among many others. I always thought I knew quite a bit about music trivia, but I did not know that Carole's influence and prolific songwriting was this diverse. I also did not know that Joni Mitchell wrote the Crosby, Stills, Nash, and Young classic "Woodstock". These and other trivial facts are just waiting to be discovered in the page of Girls Like Us.

Besides the music, there was one other very important part of these women's lives: Their many lovers. Many men have crossed paths with Carole, Carly, and Joni over the years and Girls Like Us offers many anecdotes of these men and their influence on the music of these female musicians. In some instances, the men in their lives were other musicians, like James Taylor and Jackson Browne. In other instances, the men are relative unknowns like Rick Evers and Larry Klein. But even the lesser- known individuals had a profound impact on the life and music of these women and the songs they helped to influence are all important components of Girls Like Us and they receive plenty of coverage.

This book includes quite a bit of research and I like the way it includes footnotes at the bottom of many of the book's pages so that readers can read the footnotes without having to turn to one of the appendices. The book includes a succinct level of detail, considering it is written about three different women. But if I had to voice one complaint, it would be the author's tendency to get too wordy and too creative. Some like this style of writing, but it can be overdone. Often, the book could have offered a sensible sentence in only fifteen or so words but instead stretches the sentence into double its original length by adding more adjectives or other words to make the sentence sound more interesting. Some people like this approach but I feel it makes a book longer than it should be without offering anything new and noteworthy.

This book offers a musical history lesson and it manages to inter- weave the lives of these three ladies into one volume. Each of these women was significant in her own way, and each has left a lasting impression on popular music that will likely withstand the test of time. A separate book could easily have been written on each of these rock and roll icons. But they are all musical spokespeople for their generation and they all share certain traits in common. Not only did these women sometimes share the same men, they also shared a common interest in music as an art form and as the voice of a frustrated generation. It all makes for some very good reading when you're feeling a little nostalgic and want to hark back to the musical days of the 1960's and 1970's.

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Patchwork that is big on sizzle and short on substance

In a way, this is a very odd idea for a book. Aside from the fact that all of these people are women and singer/songwriters, there is little that unites them. As a result, there is a patchwork quality to this book. The author goes from one singer to another and back again. You feel as a reader like you're the passenger in a car where the driver doesn't really know how to use a stick shift. There is a lot of lurching.

Most of the focus on the book is not on these women as artists, but which famous people they slept with. Since Ms. Simon apparently has slept with a tremendous number of famous men, Girls Like Us is best when focusing on her. At the other end of the spectrum, the author can't seem to get much of a handle on Carole King. Joni Mitchell falls somewhere in between.

If you want to know more than just about their sex lives and love affairs and get to the real heart of the matter - the music of these women - this book comes up short. There is very little insight here as to the art of their songwriting. What motivates these people to do what they do? What were they thinking when they wrote their classic songs? These are the kinds of questions that the author does not possess the depth to answer.

The tone of the book is very girlie and chatty. It's like eavesdropping on a coffee shop conversation with some fifty-something year old women dishing the dirt about relationships and sex lives. If you're a woman, maybe this tone is fine. For me, it was a distraction.

In essence, this book is a beach read for female boomers. It's full of well-researched celebrity gossip. To her credit, the author does treat the subjects with respect. She also knows how to write a sentence. But if you want to truly get inside the head of any of these songwriters, you'll have to look elsewhere.

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overwritten

Despite the fascinating subject matter, the author has has succumbed to self indulgence. It is a combination of her personal cliched analysis of women's sexual liberation and a wikipedia type entry of a litany of names. In doing this the narrative, the basic story telling suffers.

reviews: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, page 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17

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