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

Music has had a great impact on the human experience and this is especially true during the 1960's and early 1970's when musical artists began to sing about everything from civil rights to ending the military conflict in Vietnam to living together in harmony. Once basically an entertainment medium, music quickly became a means to influence, with several individual performers and bands coming forward to voice their concerns about social justice, war, and other like topics. In this book, Girls Like Us: Carole King, Joni Mitchell, Carly Simon, and the Journey of a Generation, author Sheila Weller walks the reader through the lives of three important women of music who were pioneers during this era of social upheaval and whose influences are still felt today.

Book Commentary:

Girls Like Us is piece of pop music history about three women who greatly influenced music and whose influence can still be felt all around us. Carole King, Joni Mitchell, and Carly Simon are three giants of pop music- three women who experienced the struggles and faced the obstacles common to women in their generation. They each had their own unique style and each made her own unique contributions to music.

Girls Like Us contains all sorts of interesting trivia facts about Carole King, Joni Mitchell, and Carly Simon and I discovered many facts about these three women that I did not know about previously. 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. She and her first husband, Gerry Goffin, are responsible for writing many songs that were not only popular in their day, they have stood the test of time and are well- known and loved by younger generations as well. Songs like "The Locomotion", "Up on the Roof", "Go Away Little Girl", and "Pleasant Valley Sunday" are just a few of the many pop tunes composed by this young couple. 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" (I assumed one of the four members of the band wrote it) and I did not know that Carly Simon's father was one of the founders of publishing giant Simon and Schuster. These and other trivial facts are just waiting to be discovered in the pages of Girls Like Us.

But Girls Like Us is much more than a book about music. This book also covers the personal lives of these women as closely as it does their music and the reason is obvious: The men in the lives of these women influenced their music tremendously and the book would be incomplete without them. In many instances, the men in their lives were other musicians, like James Taylor, Jackson Browne, Graham Nash, and others. In other instances, the men are relative unknowns like Rick Evers, Larry Klein, and Jim Hart. These men, their effects on the relationships, and the songs they helped to influence are all important components of Girls Like Us and they receive plenty of coverage.

Girls Like Us 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. It would be very easy to write a separate book on each of these three rock and roll divas, but Weller decided to include them in a single volume because they are all musical spokespeople for their generation and they all share certain traits in common. These leading ladies of rock not only shared the same men, they also shared a common interest in music as an art form and as the voice of a frustrated generation.

Bottom Line Viewpoint:

Overall, Girls Like Us is a very good book about three women who have left an important imprint on popular music that will likely never disappear with time. Carole King, Carly Simon, and Joni Mitchell have experienced everything, including unpredictable relationships, professional obstacles to success, and strained relationships with their fans and the media. But these women persevered and they serve as role models to future generations. Their stories are eloquently written in Girls Like Us, and it's a book that I recommend without reservation. It stands as a lasting tribute to these three leading ladies of popular music and the incredible legacy they have left behind.