Now, look, I know just how polarising James Blunt has always been but honestly, I will never understand why. When I first heard his debut single You're Beautiful, I was 17 and it spoke to me on every level; I'd experienced unrequited love like that more times than I care remember. Then when I bought the album Back to Bedlam, I must've driven my parents absolutely mental with it from having it on repeat for about a year. His lyrics are sparse but totally articulate and lucid, filled with unique similes and haunting imagery and he jumps between guitar and piano with confident assurance, but best of all, his voice sounds somehow neither male nor female, which I think gives it a universal resonance. After BTB, he lost his way somewhat with his next two albums All the Lost Souls and Some Kind of Trouble, but with his latest two, Moon Landing and The Afterlove, he has really return to form.
Thanks to my parents I'd heard Cat Stevens' music periodically as a kid, but I must confess it wasn't until Father and Son was used unforgettably in the 2009 movie The Boat That Rocked that, at 20, I truly became a fan myself. I bought a stack of his back catalogue pretty soon after that, and in 2010 I then saw him in concert, which was a fucking magical show. He had his big break aged just 18, but then really came into his own throughout the 1970s as a twenty-something with a more conscientious outlook and agenda, and his songs from that period contain messages and themes that are perhaps more relevant now than ever. He also did all his own artwork. After he famously converted to Islam and abandoned the spotlight in 1978 , he returned to music after nearly 30 years with the albums An Other Cup and Roadsinger which showed he'd lost none of his talent, and while he made controversial comments about author Salman Rushdie in 1989 after Rushdie's book The Satanic Verses landed him a fatwa from the Ayatollah Khomeini, in 2001 Yusuf Islam as he's known now made a long and emotional statement condemning the 9/11 attacks.
Like most Millennials, I first heard of Joni Mitchell through Counting Crows' hit 2003 cover of Big Yellow Taxi. Then I'd known of her seminal 1971 album Blue for some years before I finally heard it at work last year and was instantly captivated. Soon after I bought it and then two of its predecessors, Clouds and Ladies of the Canyon. Another painter like the Cat, Mitchell approaches songwriting like it's a self-portrait or still life: she doesn't use big or fancy words, but uses more words to give the settings of her songs real atmosphere, and a very conversational and introspective quality. When she's in an up-tempo mood Joni is fun and lilting, when she's in balladeer mood you see the vulnerable little girl underneath, and the rest of the time she just makes you feel like you're having a campfire singalong. A rare kind of triple threat.
The Boss. I've put him last not because I like him the least, but because he's the least associated with folk out of these four (and as you might've gleaned from my intro I do love him primarily as a hard rocker). Bruce had dabbled occasionally in folk during the 1970s and '80s with tracks like Atlantic City, I'm on Fire and My Hometown, but then entering the '90s he focused pretty exclusively on it. In 1996 after releasing his fully acoustic album The Ghost of Tom Joad he even said: "The bottom line is that, through the nineties, the voice I've found, the voice that's felt the most present and vital for me, had basically been the folk voice. It really hasn't been my rock voice." Smart choice. It was his folk voice that helped him win an Oscar for Streets of Philadelphia, his theme to the 1993 movie Philadelphia, a nomination for another one for Dead Man Walkin' from the 1995 movie of the same name and with which he sang one of his sweetest masterpieces, Secret Garden.
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