Word: cipolla
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...Joanne Cipolla plays her guitar wrong. With the strings in an unidentified open tuning (Cipolla can't tell you what chord it is), she reaches up around the neck with her left hand and plays over the top, fingering bar chords in a style that audiences invariably compare with Joni Mitchell...
...Cipolla doesn't really like the comparison, but "People always have to compare you to someone, I guess," she says. Like Mitchell, she writes all her own material, songs that express very personal emotions about a world that sometimes moves too fast to take...
Once upon a time, when she was a student at Brown, Cipolla thought she was headed for med school. Her father is a surgeon, and the other seven children in her family are all doing things scientific. It took her some time, she says, to "stop criticizing and analyzing, to just react, spontaneously," a change she feels had to come if she was to get serious about...
...wasn't until last fall, when she was enrolled at the Ed School and taking biology courses, that Cipolla decided to get serious. She dropped out of grad school, began baking for Baby Cakes, and started playing gigs in Cambridge and around New England...
Getting really serious about a professional musical career may be difficult for Cipolla, who has always taken life with a large dose of spontaneity. She started playing guitar on a whim; several years ago, after hearing some bad news, she found her sister's guitar on a bed, and just started playing it--which is why her technique is so unusual...