MUSICAL BOX: Chinese Café/Unchained Melody
celebrating International Women's Day with a song about friends
IT’S INTERNATIONAL Women’s Day, and who better to grace this week’s MUSICAL BOX than one of the greatest artists of the twentieth century, who also happens to be female? For me there is only one possible choice. It’s Joni Mitchell.
Easy as it was to choose the artist for this issue, it was not so easy to pick a song. I was looking for something that might be suitable for this day of celebration but I didn’t get very far. This is because, meandering through Joni Mitchell’s back catalogue of magical songs, I inevitably get distracted by something that I find so inspiring that I just want to share it with you, regardless of topic. Luckily my husband poked his nose in and made an excellent suggestion: a track from Wild Things Run Fast, the 1982 album which featured Lionel Richie and the bassist Larry Klein, whom Mitchell later married. It’s a song for which we retain a lasting affection, and the perfect selection for today. I have chosen some quotes from it but frankly, if I were to include every line from Chinese Café that is powerful, truthful or dazzlingly poetic I would need to type out the whole damn song.
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