Beck, St. Vincent, Brandi Carlile Playing Joni Mitchell’s MusiCares Person Of The Year Gala
Every year, just before the Grammy Awards, there’s a big gala show to honor a music-business legend. The MusiCares Person Of The Year shindig typically features the artist in question, and it also has lots of heavyweights coming in to pay tribute to that artist. There was no MusiCares gala last year, but in recent years, the show has spotlit Aerosmith, Dolly Parton, and Fleetwood Mac. Back in August, the Recording Academy announced that Joni Mitchell would be this year’s MusiCares Person Of The Year. Today, they’ve announced the artists who will honor Mitchell at this year’s show.
This year’s MusiCares event is happening 4/1, and it’ll feature performances from people like Beck, St. Vincent, Brandi Carlile, Chaka Khan, Herbie Hancock, Stephen Stills, Graham Nash, Jon Batiste, Leon Bridges, and, uh, Pentatonix, among others. Brandi Carlile and Jon Batiste will serve as the evening’s artistic directors. Turnstile/Fiona Apple/Dr. Dre producer Mike Elizondo is the music director. Many of those performers were announced back in December, along with James Taylor and Maggie Rogers, who pulled out because of scheduling conflicts. The newly announced artists include Beck, St. Vincent, and Chaka Khan.
Brandi Carlile regularly covers Mitchell’s songs, and she sometimes devotes entire performances to the practice. Last year, Carlile was one of the artists who covered Mitchell at her Kennedy Center Honors tribute. Another of those artists was Herbie Hancock, who won the 2008 Album Of The Year Grammy for his Joni Mitchell tribute album River: The Joni Letters. This was one of the more inexplicable Grammy decisions in the recent past, but it’s nice that Hancock is still down to honor Mitchell whenever he gets the chance.
A couple of months ago, Joni Mitchell was in the news for yanking her music from Spotify in solidarity with her old comrade Neil Young. Young’s old bandmates Stephen Stills and Graham Nash, two of the performers booked for the MusiCares show, joined her in their protest. It seems likely that people will have a whole lot to say about Spotify at this year’s show.