Sheila Weller, in her book Girls Like Us: Carole King, Joni Mitchell, Carly Simon -- and the Journey of a Generation (Atria Books), which weaves the biographies of these singer-songwriters into a post-feminist history, writes: “It was the first line of the chorus -- 'We are stardust, we are golden' “ -- that “conveyed the impression of hundreds of thousands of people speaking as one."
Stardust-sprinkled, golden children determined to save the world was one way of describing the youth culture's heady self-image. The generational axiom that all you need is love persisted into the 1970s during the so-called cooling of America, when soft-rock singer-songwriters like Ms. Mitchell, Ms. King and Ms. Simon and male equivalents like James Taylor, Jackson Browne and John Denver personalized the communal conversation.
As Ms. Weller astutely emphasizes, the three singers in her biography belonged to the first generation of women to come of age with the pill. The belief in love as the answer coincided with the women's liberation movement. An unvoiced question suggested by the book that has persisted through these women's lives and their music is whether romantic love and promiscuity are compatible.
As fiercely as the rock counterculture rejected its parents' tastes in music, all three women are revealed here as heavily indebted to traditional pop and its quasi-religious faith in romantic love. For Ms. Mitchell, an early epiphany was the swooningly beautiful 18th variation from Rachmaninoff's Rhapsody on a Theme of Paganini, which she discovered in the movie “The Story of Three Loves" and visited a record store to play repeatedly. Another early idol was dith Piaf, the French voice of female suffering and resilience. The song choices and lush arrangements on some of Ms. Mitchell's later records pay homage to her favorite Billie Holiday torch songs.
Ms. Simon grew up in a privileged household listening to classical music and to Richard Rodgers and the Gershwins. Her career-making hit, “That's the Way I've Always Heard It Should Be," is an art song with a semiclassical melody in the style of Gabriel Faur. But she had to wait until the early 1980s to begin recording popular standards with an orchestra.
Ms. King, who idolized Rodgers and Hammerstein, translated their aesthetic into a less flowery, Brill Building style of soul-flavored teenage pop with optimistic messages in the cheerleading spirit of Hammerstein. What is “You've Got a Friend" but a plainer, demystified echo of “You'll Never Walk Alone"?
For years these women, consciously or not, suppressed their attachment to the supposedly square music of the past, the better to be current. They concentrated on folk-rock and light pop-gospel, styles that were deemed more authentic than anything to come from Broadway or Tin Pan Alley.
But if medical science allowed them to be sexual pioneers, they were still gripped by fairy-tale mythology. Even as they pursued serial relationships in and out of marriage, they embraced the credo expressed in Rodgers and Hammerstein's quintessential postwar romantic sermon, “Some Enchanted Evening," which imagined that true love could ignite in the eye contact of strangers across a crowded room.
“Girls Like Us" chronicles the singer-songwriters' lives from birth in the early and mid-1940s (born before 1946, they are technically not baby boomers, though their names are synonymous with boomer musical tastes) to the present. The pathway for personal true stories, performed by those who lived them, was paved by the established literary vogue for confessional poetry.
