IN THIS ISSUE: Violet Grohl, a birthday poem & a couple of artichokes come home
Dear friends,
Welcome to the second edition of the Alchemy newsletter. While writing this, I celebrated a pretty big birthday (some thoughts on that below).
I also reunited with a painting by my late stepfather that I hadn’t seen in 60 years. I’m happy to report it made for quite a homecoming!
But first up, on the latest episode of Alchemy, we meet an exceptional young singer-songwriter: 20-year-old Violet Grohl.
And don't forget, we’d love to hear from you & better understand what you’d like to hear from us. So just reply to this email and let us know!
- Anthony
This week on Alchemy: Violet Grohl
The first time I saw Violet Grohl perform, she was singing Joni Mitchell’s “Help Me” right in front of Joni herself. The occasion was the MusiCares tribute to Joni in Las Vegas in 2022. Violet was just shy of 16, but her performance was poised and gorgeous.
She was in some pretty impressive company that night too: John Legend, Brandi Carlile and Jon Batiste also took the stage.
"When I got asked to do that, I sat in my room and I just cried. It was like, the most exciting, overwhelming thing ever. I mean, I taught myself to play guitar by listening to Joni Mitchell records."
-Violet Grohl on Alchemy
The MusiCares gala over Grammy weekend brings together some of the biggest names in the industry. Joni was sitting right up front that night in Vegas. “It was so intimidating,” Violet recalls, “but in a good way. Looking down and seeing her with a spotlight on her, it was just so magical.”
Violet is 20 now and has just released her impressive debut album, "Be Sweet to Me." She’s been rehearsing for this moment for a while already.
She was 12 when her dad, Dave Grohl, first coaxed her on stage to sing backing vocals during a Foo Fighters gig. And singing for Joni wasn’t her only high profile performance as a teenager.
In London later that year, I saw her perform a remarkable cover of the Zutons' “Valerie” with Mark Ronson at the tribute concert for the late Foo Fighters drummer Taylor Hawkins.
And last year, she joined her dad for the surprise Nirvana reunion at the L.A. FireAid benefit concert to sing “All Apologies.”
Her father opened the door to music, of course. But on Alchemy, Violet says her biggest influences also include David Lynch, The Beatles and her late grandmother, Virginia Grohl, who died in 2022 at 84.
“My grandma was such a force of of nature,” she says, after a tearful moment. “She was such an inspiration to me and my dad as well.”
I met Virginia Grohl when I profiled Dave for CBS Sunday Morning back in 2018, and I was struck by the trust she had in her son. We were sitting in the living room of her home in Virginia, talking about Dave’s decision to drop out of the high school where she was an English teacher. I asked if she was okay with Dave quitting school at 17. “I was,” she said. “He just didn’t like it. And he was a really great writer and such a great spirit. He said, ‘I’m going to Europe to tour with Scream.’ ‘Go, great. Can I go, too?’”
“It’s a crazy thing to let your son just go out and be in the world by himself like that,” Violet says. “But she knew he could do it.”
One of my favorite moments from this episode of Alchemy is when Violet shares a beautiful tattoo of her grandmother on her left arm. She begged her father for permission to get it. It was her first tattoo.
“She was a magical human,” Violet says. “And she is close by me always.”
Click here to see Episode 5 of Alchemy with Violet Grohl.
A couple of artichokes come home
I gasped when the image popped on my computer screen, like I was seeing a ghost. An email notification had arrived in my inbox alerting me that one of my late stepfather’s paintings was coming up for auction. When I clicked the link, there it was: a painting I hadn’t set eyes on in 60 years.
“Round Blue Green Contact” was Lot #320 in an upcoming sale at Stair Galleries, an auction house in Hudson, New York. Henry had painted it in 1966 - I’d last seen it as a as a ten year old when it was still a wet canvas! The listing said it was being sold by a collector in the Bahamas.
Henry’s artichokes rarely come up for auction. I’ve kept a close watch for a while now. I just missed one about eight years ago. So I wasn’t gonna allow this one to escape.
“Everybody asks me, 'Why artichokes?'” Henry said in an interview in 1972. “I suppose my fascination with artichokes has gone beyond anyone’s comprehension, but I find painting one thing over and over very challenging.”
For about a decade, from the late 60s well into the 70s, artichokes were my stepfather’s primary subject. Those were my formative years, when I was still living with my folks and artichokes lined the stairwell in our apartment. Henry even painted a thumbnail-sized one with a banner unfurling in front of the stem which had our phone number on it. He put it in the center of the dial on our rotary phone. My friends were always a little confused by the family’s artichoke obsession. But they all loved the tiny one on the phone and still remember it.
Henry painted most of the larger artichoke canvases in his garage studio in Southampton where he worked during the summers. It was on a sprawling property called Red Top Farm owned by friends. The two-car garage he worked in had an apartment over it that we rented. My parents and my brother lived on the second floor; I slept in the small bedroom tucked under the stairs, right next to the garage and Henry’s studio.
He would paint with both doors open to let the light in. His finished artichoke canvases would be spread out on the floor, so they caught the sun to dry. Winston, our pug, was usually lying somewhere in between them. The artichokes gradually started to get bigger and bolder: mostly green, of course, but also red, blue, even burgundy on an orange background! One day Henry asked my friend Bill Bancroft and I to shake hands while he took a polaroid. A few weeks later a painting of pair of artichokes shaking hands appeared.
In later years, when I went off to live in Tulsa, and Philly, Henry offered to loan me paintings to fill my bare walls. “Take your pick,” he said. “You’re welcome to anything. Except the artichokes.” Those were off limits cause he knew they’d sell. After he died in 2018, I found a few slightly damaged ones in his attic. I took home a big blue artichoke (with a barely perceptible inch long tear in it) to hang over my sofa. But I’d long been hoping to find a vintage 60s canvas of his. And suddenly there it was.
A couple of weeks ago, after becoming the winning bidder (honestly, I would have paid almost anything) I drove the 115 miles up to Hudson, New York to pick up the painting. My producer, Rebecca, came along on the field trip to make a little video of the reunion. The folks at STAIR couldn’t have been nicer and were happy the artichokes were going back to the family.
When the painting was safely home, I checked Henry’s archive and discovered that “Round Blue Green Contact” had first been exhibited in 1967 at the Speed Art Museum in Louisville, KY. Right there in the file was a photograph of it on the museum wall.
And I found another of Mom and Henry checking out the show, which was a huge moment for him. The Speed, the oldest and largest museum in Kentucky, was in Henry’s hometown. For him it was a triumphant homecoming.
What I've seen
"Fairfield Porter: What Everyone Knows" at the Art Students League of New York
Apart from my stepfather (and I freely admit to a bias there) Fairfield Porter is probably my favorite painter. So walking into the new exhibition of Porter’s work now at the Art Students League on West 57th Street was an absolute thrill for me.
I may have a bias towards Porter too. He painted in a barn out back of his house in Southampton, NY about a mile from my stepfather’s studio. I biked past it on South Main Street regularly as a kid although I didn’t know of him or his work til later. (Porter died in 1975 at age 68.) His paintings of South Main Street in the fall and winter are one of the reasons I fell in love with his work. I love his seascapes too, like this one now on view at the Art Students League…
There’s something poetic in the way Porter painted the Southampton that I knew. I was drawn to his sense of color and the stillness in his work, an awkwardness even. “They’re slow paintings,” the art dealer Betty Cunningham has said. “I think it takes a long time to see him.”
It took a long time for the art world to acknowledge Porter as a painter. He was a respected critic, but as another esteemed critic Robert Hughes wrote, many thought “that his work was ‘soft’: civil and private, figurative in a time of heroic abstraction.” After reviewing a 1993 Porter retrospective at the Parrish Art Museum in Southampton, Hughes himself called Porter’s work “among the finest landscape painting ever done by an American.”
In the summer of ’93, I covered that exhibition for CBS Sunday Morning and made a pilgrimage to Great Spruce Head, the Porter family island in Maine where the artist did some of his most striking landscapes and seascapes. You can still find that piece on YouTube here:
Porter studied at the Art Students League from 1928-30. The exhibition includes his enrollment card. The League itself is a magical place, celebrating its 150th anniversary this year. Its students and teachers have included many of the greatest artists in our history.
Some Observations on Turning 70
(June 23, 2026)
I don’t like calendars or clocks. They refuse to wait.
They’re always advancing, even when you’re tired or you’re late.
So why do I feel like I got here early, arriving at my 70th birthday way too soon?
It feels like September, when it should be June.
I was born in June, a beautiful summer’s day.
That’s what my parents said anyway.
I really can’t remember that date I’m supposed to celebrate.
And now I kinda hate to be reminded how long it’s been.
I’ve tried a trick - to add it up in different ways.
But it comes out to 36 million minutes. Or 25,567 days.
Seventy years in days - it’s the same, but sounds even worse, like I need a nurse or something.
And if I look up ahead, the next big mile marker has, oh no, an eight oh on it. Oh god.
But I interviewed 80-year-old John Lithgow the other day,
the actor doing eight shows a week on Broadway.
And he looks great. He just won a Tony.
I’m Anthony. Please don’t call me Tony.
My mother hated that name.
Who knows where the times goes?
Is there some “cloud” where minutes & memories are stored?
If I could buy more minutes, how many could I afford?
And would they be the exciting minutes? Or the ones where I was sad?
Or just bored?
I hope I’m over the hill, 'cause I no longer have the legs
to get me up the damn hill.
I groan when I get out of a chair. I have less hair.
Aches & pains? I don’t even wanna go there.
I asked Springsteen once if he was a better songwriter
at 55, which then seemed like old age.
“Not better,” he said, “But wiser.”
Twenty years later he’s still on stage.
You can be taught new tricks, as long as you’re alive.
I just started a new YouTube show and learned how to say,
“Please like & subscribe!”
It’s call Alchemy, ya know, the YouTube show.
Yes, even in this little poem, there’s a promo.
So on we go, no time to waste. Tomorrow is day number
twenty five thousand five hundred and sixty eight.
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