FEATURE:
A Case of You
Joni Mitchell’s Blue at Fifty
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I will put out a few features…
regarding Joni Mitchell’s Blue. Her iconic and genius album turns fifty on 22nd June. I would urge people to investigate the personnel, background and information regarding the album as it is fascinating. Arriving a year after the phenomenal Ladies of the Canyon, Blue took Mitchell’s work to a new level. I am going to bring in a couple of features/reviews in a bit. First, a little overview regarding a masterful album:
“Blue is the fourth studio album by Canadian singer-songwriter Joni Mitchell, released on June 22, 1971, by Reprise Records. Written and produced entirely by Mitchell, it was recorded in 1971 at A&M Studios in Hollywood, California. Created just after her breakup with Graham Nash, and during an intense relationship with James Taylor, Blue explores various facets of relationships from infatuation on "A Case of You" to insecurity on "This Flight Tonight". The songs feature simple accompaniments on piano, guitar and Appalachian dulcimer. The album peaked at number 3 on the UK Albums Chart, number 9 on the Canadian RPM Albums Chart and number 15 on the Blllboard 200.
Today, Blue is generally regarded by music critics as one of the greatest albums of all time; the way Mitchell's songwriting, compositions and voice all work together are frequent areas of praise. In January 2000, The New York Times chose Blue as one of the 25 albums that represented "turning points and pinnacles in 20th-century popular music". In 2020, Blue was rated the third greatest album of all time in Rolling Stone's list of the "500 Greatest Albums of All Time", the highest entry by a female artist. It was also voted number 24 in the third edition of Colin Larkin's All Time Top 1000 Albums (2000). In July 2017, Blue was chosen by NPR as the greatest album of all time made by a woman”.
I feel each of the ten tracks are flawless. With their own sound and story, there is a lot of variety on the album. Whilst the acoustic guitar, to me, is the dominant instrument, I think that the compositions are rich and wide-ranging. I have heard some call Blue a simple Folk album. There is something more soulful and eclectic to be found. Perfectly sequenced so we open with the gorgeous All I Want, with the title track in the middle of the pack, and working up to the finale, The Last Time I Saw Richard, everyone has their favourites. I might do a tracks ranking in a future feature. If I had to select three tracks from the album that are my favourite, I would pick Carey, Blue and A Case of You. Before getting to an extensive and interesting review from Rolling Stone, this feature in Americana UK caught my eye. They discuss (among other things) the inspiration behind the tracks:
“The songs on ‘Blue’ were largely inspired by various relationships Mitchell had seen crumble in the years before she laid down said album; Graham Nash – of Crosby & Stills fame – was one such relationship, inspiring ‘My Old Man’ and ‘River’, while her romance with James Taylor saw her writing ‘This Flight Tonight’, ‘All I Want’, and the titular ‘Blue’. The songs ‘Carey’ and ‘California’ came together during Mitchell’s trip through Europe in the spring of 1970, the former of the two based around a holiday romance she had in Greece. The remaining three songs that make up the collection (‘All I Want’, ‘The Last Time I Saw Richard’ and ‘Little Green’) were composed a few years earlier but didn’t end up being recorded until 1970 with the rest of the tracks.
One of the beautiful things about the album is how distinct each song feels, their stories unique and captivating; to try and pour over each of these would require something of almost novel length, so instead we’ll stick to a few of the most compelling tracks – even if that’s a very difficult selection to make.
The background on aforementioned ‘Little Green’ is fascinating: Mitchell wrote the song in 1966, expressing the feelings she had upon placing her daughter up for adoption the previous year. She had fallen pregnant at age 20 while attending art college, and with abortion not an option, had decided that to give the child up was the only choice she had left (she concealed her pregnancy as best she could because, as she would later reflect, the shame cast upon young, unmarried and pregnant women was immense: “You have no idea what the stigma was. It was like you murdered somebody,” she said). After the birth, she was kept in the hospital for almost two weeks due to complications, which meant she had time to forge a bond with her daughter, and thus decided to rush into a marriage of convenience to keep her. The marriage (to the man it is largely accepted was the inspiration behind the last track on ‘Blue’, ‘The Last Time I Saw Richard’) fell apart within a month and ultimately, Mitchell felt she had no choice but to give up her child. “Born with the moon in Cancer / Choose her a name she will answer to / Call her green and the winters cannot fade her / Call her green for the children who’ve made her / Little green, be a gypsy dancer,” she sings heartbreakingly to the gentle strum of an acoustic guitar of the girl that she named Kelly (hence the reference to green with its kelly hue). The story has a happy ending of sorts in that Mitchell was finally reunited with her daughter in 1997.
The album’s title track features a suitably haunting piano melody to accompany lyrics that touch on the subject of dark depression. “You know I’ve been to sea before / Crown and anchor me / Or let me sail away,” Mitchell begs with depression not to consume her. “Well, there’s so many sinking now / You gotta keep thinking / You can make it through these waves / Acid, booze, and ass / Needles, guns, and grass / Lots of laughs,” she offers with scorn on the bridge, seeing the hollowness of what relief these pursuits offer. “Blue, I love you,” she eventually admits, coming to terms with a sadness that will forever haunt her.
‘River’ is a bonafide classic, having been recorded by other artists some 400 plus times – mostly for Christmas albums and compilations. While the song itself isn’t about the festive season, it does open with the immortal lines, “It’s coming on Christmas / They’re cutting down trees / They’re putting up reindeer / And singing songs of joy and peace,” which, along with the twinkling piano work throughout and its echoes of ‘Jingle Bells’, invokes feelings of the winter solstice. This is no cheery tale however; instead it sees Mitchell wishing to escape the emotional ties of a bad relationship that has recently ended. “I wish I had a river so long / I would teach my feet to fly / Oh, I wish I had a river I could skate away on / I made my baby cry,” she tells us longingly on the chorus.
While ‘A Case of You’ may not receive as many official recordings by other artists as ‘River’ (or her most re-recorded song ‘Both Sides Now’), it has become a standard for a certain type of singer-songwriter; one who enjoys a picture painted with words in a way few other artists could ever manage. In fact, a better opening chorus surely does not exist: “Just before our love got lost you said / “I am as constant as a northern star” / And I said, “Constantly in the darkness / Where’s that at? / If you want me I’ll be in the bar”,” Mitchell sings with a weary resentment. “On the back of a cartoon coaster,” she continues, “In the blue TV screen light / I drew a map of Canada / Oh, Canada / With your face sketched on it twice.”
While ‘Blue’ may be almost 50 years old, it has a timeless quality, and the influences it has had on some of the greatest singer-songwriters that have emerged this millennium are easy to hear. One such artist is Brandi Carlile, who in October 2019 performed the entirety of ‘Blue’. Before the performance, Carlile summed up the legacy of Mitchell about as perfectly as can be done: “We didn’t live in the time of Shakespeare, Rembrandt or Beethoven,” she said, “but we live in the time of Joni Mitchell”.
There will be a lot of celebration and focus ahead of the fiftieth anniversary of Blue. I am keen to go deep and investigate some of the tracks closely. Mitchell recently gave a rare interview. In my opinion, we will hear new music from her in years to come. I wonder what she thinks of Blue now and whether it is an album that she recalls and cherishes. Whilst a lot of the emotion and rawness of Blue suggests that it was quite a hard album to write and sing, there is so much beauty and grace. Before I wrap up, I wanted to draw in a review from Rolling Stone (from, I think, 1971):
“The last time I saw Joni Mitchell perform was a year and a half ago at Boston's Symphony Hall, in one of her final appearances before she forswore the concert circuit for good. Fragile, giggly and shy, she had the most obvious case of nerves I have ever seen in a professional singer. Her ringing soprano cracked with stage fright and her frightened eyes refused to make contact with the audience. It wasn't until well into the second half of the concert that she settled down and began to enjoy herself; even then it seemed clear that she would have preferred a much smaller audience perhaps a cat by a fireside.
Joni Mitchell's singing, her songwriting, her whole presence give off a feeling of vulnerability that one seldom encounters even in the most arty reaches of the music business. In "For Free," her one song about songwriting, she declared that she sang "for fortune and those velvet curtain calls." But she long ago renounced the curtain calls; and her songs, like James Taylor's, are only incidentally commercial: Her primary purpose is to create something meaningful out of the random moments of pain and pleasure in her life.
IN THIS PHOTO: James Taylor and Joni Mitchell, 1971/PHOTO CREDIT: Joel Bernstein
In the course of Joni's career, her singing style has remained the same but her basically autobiographical approach to lyrics has grown increasingly explicit. The curious mixture of realism and romance that characterized Joni Mitchell and Clouds (with their sort of "instant traditional" style, so reminiscent of Childe ballads) gradually gave way to the more contemporary pop music modern language of Ladies of the Canyon. Gone now was the occasionally excessive feyness of "Rows and rows of angel hair/And ice cream castles in the air"; in their place was an album that contained six very unromanticized accounts of troubled encounters with men.
Like Ladies, Blue is loaded with specific references to the recent past; it is less picturesque and old-fashioned sounding than Joni's first two albums. It is also the most focused album: Blue is not only a mood and a kind of music, it is also Joni's name for her paramour. The fact that half the songs on the album are about him give it a unity which Ladies lacked. In fact, they are the chief source of strength of this very powerful album.
Several of the lesser cuts on Blue give every indication of having sat in Joni's trunk for some time. The folkie melody of "Little Green" recalls "I Don't Know Where I Stand" from her second album. The pretty, "poetic" lyric is dressed up in such cryptic references that it passeth all understanding. "The Last Time I Saw Richard" is a memoir of Joni's "dark cafe days," cluttered with insignificant detail and reminiscent of the least memorable autobiographical songs on Ladies. "River" is an extended mea culpa that reeks of self-pity ("I'm so hard to handle/I'm so selfish and so sad/Now I've lost the best baby/That I ever had"). Joni's ponderous piano accompaniment verges on a parody of Laura Nyro, especially the melodramatic intro, which is "Jingle Bells" in a minor key. The best of this lot is "My Old Man," a lovely, conventional ballad.
These songs have little or nothing to do with the main theme of the album; developed in the remaining songs, which is the chronicle of Joni, a free lance romantic, searching for a permanent love. She announces this theme in the first line of the first cut, "All I Want": "I am on a lonely road and I am traveling/Looking for something to set me free."
The lonely road has taken her through a series of places in the past–from Chelsea to Sisotowbell Lane, from Laurel Canyon to Woodstock–and she had followed it in pursuit of the settled, long term happiness that has always eluded her. "All I Want" is a manifesto for that happiness; Joni has found a new lover and she bombards him with a list of her desires, piling them up in a quick succession of rhymes:
I want to talk to you, I want to shampoo you
I want to renew you again and again
Applause, applause–life is our cause
When I think of your kisses, my mind see-saws
The accompaniment–James Taylor and Joni strumming a nervous, Latin-flavored guitar part over a bass heartbeat that throbs throughout the song–perfectly expresses Joni's excitement and anticipation. So does the melody, a dipping, soaring affair which she sings in her sweetest soprano.
"All I Want," though it begins the album, marks the end of the long holiday journey described in "Carey" and "California." Both songs have the syncopated, Latin touch that characterizes the best cuts on the album. "Carey," a calypso about dalliance on Crete, had a definite festival flavor, but with a twist at the end: "The wind is in from Africa/Last night I couldn't sleep/Oh, you know it sure is hard to leave here but it's really not my home."
"California" jumps along in short bursts, the lyrics giving snapshots of Joni's European itinerary. Then comes the flowing chorus with its hint of tango, its plaintive pedal steel guitar and its homesick refrain: "Oh, it gets so lonely/When you're walking and the streets are full of strangers." The song is a model of subtle production; James Taylor's twitchy guitar and Russ Kunkel's superb, barely detectable high-hat and bass-pedal work give it just the right amount of propulsion.
In "This Flight Tonight," "A Case of You," and "Blue," Joni comes to terms with the reality that loneliness is not simply the result of prolonged traveling; the basic problem is that her lover will not give her all she wants. In "This Flight Tonight," Joni has walked out on her man, is flying West on a jet, and now regrets the decision. The lyrics, a clumsy attempt at stream of consciousness, are virtually unsingable and Joni's lyric soprano is hopelessly at odds with the rock and roll tune. But the chorus has just the wispiest trace of Bo Diddley and it sticks with you:
Oh Starbright, starbright
You've got the lovin' that I like, all right
Turn this crazy bird around
I shouldn't have got on this flight tonight.
In "A Case of You," James repeats the same dotted guitar riff he played in "California," only the melody here is slow, stately and almost hymnlike. The song is neatly divided in its ambivalence: each verse is about a setback to the affair, followed by a chorus in which Joni affirms: "But you are in my blood like holy wine." In comparing love to communion, Joni defines explicitly the underlying theme of Blue: for her love has become a religious quest, and surrendering to loneliness a sin.
It is only a short step from that to Joni's vow that she will walk through hell-fire to follow her man: "Well everybody's saying/That hell's the hippest way to go/Well I don't think so/But I'm gonna look around it though/Blue I love you." This is "Blue," the last cut on the first side but clearly the album's final statement, the bottom of the slope downward from the euphoria of "All I Want." For all its personal revelation, "All I Want" still sounds like a beautiful pop tune; "Blue," on the other hand, has the secret, ineffably sad feeling of a Billie Holliday song. Joy, after all, can be shared with everybody, but intense pain leads to withdrawal and isolation.
"Blue" is a distillation of pain and is therefore the most private of Joni's private songs. She wrote it for nobody but herself and her lover:
Blue here is a shell for you
Inside you'll hear a sigh
A foggy lullaby
There is your song from me.
The beauty of the mysterious and unresolved melody and the expressiveness of the vocal make this song accessible to a general audience. But "Blue," more than any of the other songs, shows Joni to be twice vulnerable: not only is she in pain as a private person, but her calling as an artist commands her to express her despair musically and reveal to an audience of record-buyers:
And yet, despite the title song. Blue is overall the freest, brightest, most cheerfully rhythmic album Joni has yet released. But the change in mood does not mean that Joni's commitment to her own very personal naturalistic style has diminished. More than ever, Joni risks using details that might be construed as trivial in order to paint a vivid self portrait. She refuses to mask her real face behind imagery, as her fellow autobiographers James Taylor and Cat Stevens sometimes do.
In portraying herself so starkly, she has risked the ridiculous to achieve the sublime. The results though are seldom ridiculous; on Blue she has matched her popular music skills with the purity and honesty of what was once called folk music and through the blend she has given us some of the most beautiful moments in recent popular music. (RS 88)”.
I especially love that review. 1971 was a great year for music. Marvin Gaye released the seismic What’s Going On in May. I feel that and Blue are the finest albums of the year. On Blue, we get something both naked and oblique. I feel Mitchell’s lyrics are at their peak, and I also love her emotional vocal range and how she delivers the songs. I am not sure who said it, but someone said that every song on Blue could be made into a tattoo. Such is the quotability and poetic brilliance of the lyrics, so many lines connect with people around the world! It is amazing how a personal album can be appreciated and understood by so many others. I would advise people to put some money aside and buy Blue on vinyl after its anniversary. As The Quietus reported, Mitchell’s first four studio albums are coming out in a boxset:
“Joni Mitchell's first four albums are to be reissued in a 4xLP box set this June.
The Reprise Albums (1968-1971) features newly remastered versions of Song To A Seagull, Clouds’, Ladies Of The Canyon and Blue, with each album split across two sides of vinyl. A previously unseen self-portrait that Mitchell drew sometime in the period of working on the albums features on the release's cover.
The release coincides with the 50th anniversary of Blue, one of Mitchell's best-loved albums, and it marks the latest instalment in Mitchell's ongoing series of archival releases.
Rhino Records will release The Reprise Albums (1968-1971) on June 25, 2021”.
I have been fascinated with Blue ever since I first heard of it as a child. I love the album now, and I don’t think it has been matched in terms of its impact and brilliance. I am interested to see how the world reacts to fifty years of Blue and how many people discover it for the first time. If you have not heard the album then make sure…
YOU do so now.