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Welcome to the site of writer and radio producer Michelle Mercer. Look around to learn more about Michelle's book and audio projects. |
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"Michelle Mercer has gone beyond the lurid, tell-all biography to investigate the elements and events that combine to create an innovative artist. Like Joni's work has always done, her book transcends the norm, and delves into the universal."
- Larry Klein, bassist, songwriter, and producer of the Grammy Award-winning album, River: The Joni Letters
"Michelle Mercer has a quick instinct for the dynamics of musical creativity, how experience feeds the lyric imagination, and how private insights go public. Her smart and deeply felt portrait gives us Mitchell’s life, its defining intensities—everything that went into the making of Blue—but avoids going in for the explanatory kill. The sweet vibration of the work remains."
- Sven Birkerts, author of My Sky Blue Trades: Growing Up Counter in a Contrary Time
"Knowledgeable, scrupulously researched, insightfully written, sympathetic to its subject yet without a scintilla of fanzine gush, this book is the very model of what pop cultural criticism could and should be."
- Phillip Lopate, author of Notes on Sontag
"Michelle Mercer's writing on music and musicians always manages to fuse intense subjectivity with cool wit and sharp analysis. Will You Take Me As I Am offers a unique perspective on a complex and elusive contemporary master. Anyone interested in Joni Mitchell's work, or the larger topic of songwriting and performance in our time, will find this book a fascinating read."
- Tom Piazza, author of City of Refuge
- Larry Klein, bassist, songwriter, and producer of the Grammy Award-winning album, River: The Joni Letters
"Michelle Mercer has a quick instinct for the dynamics of musical creativity, how experience feeds the lyric imagination, and how private insights go public. Her smart and deeply felt portrait gives us Mitchell’s life, its defining intensities—everything that went into the making of Blue—but avoids going in for the explanatory kill. The sweet vibration of the work remains."
- Sven Birkerts, author of My Sky Blue Trades: Growing Up Counter in a Contrary Time
"Knowledgeable, scrupulously researched, insightfully written, sympathetic to its subject yet without a scintilla of fanzine gush, this book is the very model of what pop cultural criticism could and should be."
- Phillip Lopate, author of Notes on Sontag
"Michelle Mercer's writing on music and musicians always manages to fuse intense subjectivity with cool wit and sharp analysis. Will You Take Me As I Am offers a unique perspective on a complex and elusive contemporary master. Anyone interested in Joni Mitchell's work, or the larger topic of songwriting and performance in our time, will find this book a fascinating read."
- Tom Piazza, author of City of Refuge
Photo of Michelle by John Hazlehurst, Colorado Springs Business Journal