FEATURE:
Beneath the Sleeve
Joni Mitchell - Blue
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THIS is not the first time…
IN THIS PHOTO: Joni Mitchell Performing at the Isle of Wight Festival in 1970/PHOTO CREDIT: Tony Russell/Redferns/Getty Images
that I have spotlighted Joni Mitchell’s Blue. The fourth studio album from the Canadian icon, it was her most acclaimed album to that point. In fact, it remains her most revered album. That one that has endured and is talked about often. In terms of the all-time greatest albums, Blue is always in the conversation. It was released on 22nd June, 1971, so I did want to mark its fifty-fifth anniversary. Go deep with this true classic. I will get to some features and reviews around Blue. However, from Joni Michell’s official website, we get some insight, background and explanation of Blue’s creation and brilliance from Rob Hughes:
“Commercial success didn’t sit easy with Joni Mitchell. Clouds had gone gold and brought with it a level of popular appeal that took away some of her everyday liberties. Having finished Ladies Of The Canyon in 1970, she vowed to take a year off, ostensibly to recharge her jaded batteries, but also to escape what she felt was an increasing sense of claustrophobia. “I was being isolated, starting to feel like a bird in a gilded cage,” she explained to Rolling Stone’s Larry LeBlanc. “A certain amount of success cuts you off in a lot of ways. You can’t move freely. I like to live, be on the streets, to be in a crowd…”
In many ways, it signalled the start of Mitchell’s conflicted relationship between art and celebrity. Now that the “black limousine” and “velvet curtain calls” of “For Free” had narrowed into the reality of her own life, she needed to regain her peripheral vision, restore a degree of clarity. Mitchell came to despise show business, declaring fame “a series of misunderstandings surrounding a name”. Not for nothing did David Geffen once tell her: “You’re the only star I ever met that wanted to be ordinary.”
There were major upheavals in Mitchell’s private life, too. Her intense love affair with Graham Nash, which had coincided with an accelerated spurt of productivity from both parties, was nearing its end, resulting in a series of petty squabbles. Against this backdrop, Mitchell decided to head for Europe, where she travelled around Greece, Spain and France. Her main seat of exile was the island of Crete, where she took up residence in a cave amid a hippy community in the fishing village of Matala. It was from here that she sent Nash a telegraph home. He was busy laying a new floor in Mitchell’s kitchen when it landed, it read: “If you hold sand too tightly in your hand, it will run through your fingers. Love, Joan.” “I knew at that point it was truly over between us,” Nash recalled, disconsolately, in his memoir, Wild Tales.
Mitchell was introduced to the Appalachian dulcimer on Crete and adjusted to the unhurried rhythm of local life. The experience brought her into contact with a number of characters, who in turn helped reignite her creativity. One such figure was Cary Raditz, a wild-haired American chef who was blessed, in Mitchell’s words, with “fierce-looking blue eyes” and “the mark of Cain on his brow”. The pair began a relationship, sealed by a song she’d written in honour of his birthday: “Carey”.
As more musical ideas started to flow, Mitchell noticed the formation of certain recurring themes – love, loss, escape, a quest for some kind of indefinable spiritual truth. And for all the delicious scenery, food and ready company, she was homesick. Shifting from one continental base to another only amplified the feeling. While in Paris, she poured her longing for her adopted West Coast into another fresh tune, “California”.
She returned to her native Canada in late July, playing Toronto’s Mariposa Folk Festival alongside James Taylor. Mitchell and Taylor had met a year earlier, at the Newport Folk Festival, but now they became romantically involved. A month or so later, she visited him on the set of his Hollywood road movie, Two-Lane Blacktop, where they wrote together and, as Taylor told Uncut in 2015, “had some of the most outrageous good times”. By October, they were sharing a stage at London’s Paris Theatre, recorded for BBC Radio One’s In Concert series, with Mitchell unveiling a handful of new compositions.
She returned to London at the end of November to perform at the Royal Festival Hall, where the new songs were met with unanimous approval by reviewers, among them the NME and Melody Maker. The latter’s readership was similarly smitten with Mitchell, voting her 1970’s Top Female Performer in its year-end poll (ahead of Aretha Franklin, Grace Slick, Sandy Denny and the recently departed Janis Joplin), despite her paucity of live shows.
Back home by early ’71, Mitchell and Taylor were viewed by the American music press as Hollywood’s golden couple; two young, photogenic singer-songwriters whose liaison embodied the free-spirited ambience of Laurel Canyon. Both set about preparing their respective solo albums, with Mitchell singing backing vocals on what would become Mud Slide Slim And The Blue Horizon – most notably on his cover of Carole King’s “You’ve Got A Friend” – and Taylor repaying the compliment by adding guitar to “California”, “All I Want” and “A Case Of You”. They also accepted an invitation from King to appear on a reworked version of “Will You Love Me Tomorrow” for Tapestry, then being cut in the same A&M studio that Mitchell had booked.
The relationship quickly turned sour, however. Apparently devastated by Taylor’s decision to call it off, Mitchell funnelled her pain into the other songs she was recording for the appositely named Blue. The album duly became a document of a life in flux, a diary of physical and emotional displacement set against a backdrop of restless travel and doomed love affairs.
Short of the affectations of Clouds or the airy folk-pop of Ladies Of The Canyon, Blue was almost uncomfortably direct. Mitchell again refused to coat the songs in fussy arrangements, preferring to place her voice front and centre over spare guitar, dulcimer and piano, her vulnerability plain for all to hear. She later told Rolling Stone that “at that period of my life, I had no personal defences. I felt like a cellophane wrapper on a pack of cigarettes. I felt like I had absolutely no secrets from the world, and I couldn’t pretend in my life to be strong. Or to be happy. But the advantage of it in the music was that there were no defences there either.”
She was to use a more curious, semi-grotesque analogy in 2014’s Joni Mitchell: In Her Own Words, telling interviewer Malka Marom that she’d dreamed she was watching “a bit fat women’s tuba band. Women with big horns and rolled-down nylon in house dresses, playing tuba and big horn music, and I was a plastic bag with all my organs exposed, sobbing on an auditorium chair at that time. That’s how I felt. Like my guts were on the outside. I wrote Blue in that condition.”
The implication here is that Blue is an unwavering litany of distress and despair, an inventory of misfortune with no light relief. But it’s actually a counterweight of ecstasy and agony, of the best and worst of times. Nash is supposedly the subject of the piano-led “My Old Man”, Mitchell riding the climatic extremes of romantic love in breathy soprano. “He’s my sunshine in the morning/He’s my fireworks at the end of the day/He’s the warmest chord I ever heard” she sings at her sunniest, her voice adopting the shifting cadences of jazz. It’s in direct contrast to the clouds that descend in his absence: “But when he’s gone/Me and them lonesome blues collide/The bed’s too big/The frying pan’s too wide.”
The exquisite “A Case Of You”, also rumoured to be about Nash, finds her trying to absorb the lessons of a failed love affair that refuses to let her move on. As if to measure the depth of its impact, Mitchell addresses her quandary in religious terms: “Oh, you’re in my blood like holy wine/You taste so bitter and so sweet.” The sensitivity of her lyrics is echoed in the deft accompaniment of Taylor’s acoustic guitar and in the poignant tones of Mitchell’s dulcimer, the latter providing much of Blue’s graceful fragility. As testament to its enduring pull, “A Case Of You” became one of her most-covered tunes, siring versions from as far afield as KD Lang, Nancy Wilson, James Blake, The Decemberists’ Colin Meloy and Prince (as, naturally, “A Case Of U”).
Of the trio of songs considered to be inspired by Taylor, “All I Want” alludes to the jalousies and insecurities that appear to have undermined their relationship from an early stage. All Mitchell wants, she sings, her fluted voice rising and dipping over silvery dulcimer, “is to bring out the best in me and in you too”. But it feels like honest delusion rather than realistic hope. Her opening lines give a truer indication of her emotional condition: “I am on a lonely road and I am travelling/Travelling, travelling, travelling/Looking for something what can it be/Oh I hate you some, I hate you some, I love you some.”
As she explained to Cameron Crowe some years later: “In the state that I was at in my enquiry about life and direction and relationships, I perceived a lot of hate in my heart… I perceived my inability to love at that point. And it horrified me some.”
The title track follows a similar line of confession. A sombre lullaby that finds Mitchell alone at the piano, the song appears to directly address Taylor’s heroin addiction – “Ink on a pin/Underneath the skin/An empty space to fill in” – while attempting to strike a note of optimism. Yet the prospect of self-destruction is too enticing to ignore out of hand: “Everybody’s saying that hell’s the hippest way to go/Well I don’t think so/But I’m gonna take a look around it though.” Arguably the most affecting moment on the entire album occurs halfway through “Blue”, when Mitchell sings “lots of laughs” with such forlorn resignation that it’s almost impossible not to well up.
Stephen Stills is on board for the more sprightly “Carey”, bringing a quasi-calypso rhythm to a tune that details Mitchell’s sojourn in Matala. Despite revolving around her activities with Raditz – another devilishly “mean old Daddy” to whom she’s helplessly drawn – it’s essentially a conflicted piece of travelogue that contrasts the simple hedonism of Cretan nightlife with homesickness for California. Mitchell can’t seem to decide what she wants more – the wine, laughter and scratchy rock ‘n’ roll of the Mermaid Café or the comforts of the Canyon. “Oh, you know it sure is hard to leave here Carey/But it’s really not my home,” she declares, double-tracking herself on harmonies, with Russ Kunkel adding tactful percussion. “My fingernails are filthy, I got bleach tar on my feet/And I miss my clean white linen and my fancy French cologne.” Raditz also features in the equally fidgety “California”, in which Mitchell’s loneliness and dislocation are all too apparent.
For all its thwarted romance and soul-stripping, it’s this question that sits at the heart of Blue. Mitchell is ultimately trying to reconcile her life with her art, compressing an elusive search for personal contentment into a grand artistic statement. Blue is sad, funny, poetic, revelatory and often achingly candid. And such an intensive experience that it feels much longer than it’s relatively slight 35 minutes.
Issued in the summer of 1971, Blue did brisk business both at home and abroad, cracking the Billboard Top 20 and peaking in the UK Top 3. It quickly became a landmark against which the work of all confessional singer-songwriters would be measured. Graham Nash says he still has a hard time listening to it. Mitchell herself has called it a turning point in her career.
It was also the album that finally established the 27-year-old as an American superstar. A situation that would once again test her ambivalence towards her own fame”.
In 2021, to mark fifty years of Blue, Ultimate Classic Rock hosted a roundtable with its writers discussing this masterpiece and what it means. In 1971, it firmly established Joni Mitchell as one of the songwriting greats. Even if the attention perhaps made her feel uncomfortable, today, she is surely proud of the impact of Blue:
“As Blue turns 50, we asked UCR’s writers to answer four questions about the album and its legacy.
Is Blue Joni Mitchell’s best album? Why or why not, and if not, what is?
Michael Gallucci: It's not only her best album, it's one of the best, and most influential, albums of all time. There were singer-songwriter albums before Blue; there were even singer-songwriter albums by women before Blue. But after that record, everything changed as far as artists opening a little more of themselves to listeners. It's one of the most personal albums up to that time. Fifty years later, it's still one of the most open, and candid, albums ever made.
Allison Rapp: Yes. There's no doubt that Mitchell's first three albums (Song to a Seagull, Clouds, Ladies of the Canyon) showcase quite a lot of her talent as a lyricist and arranger, but Blue is her most intimate, personal and vulnerable statement as a songwriter. There's an element of wisdom and experience to Blue that wasn't necessarily present on her earlier records, plus the distinct sense that Mitchell, usually fiercely independent, is letting her guard down in a way she had never done before and didn't do as intensely on subsequent albums.
Annie Zaleski: Most definitely. She transformed what folk-rock could be and sound like. Along with Judy Collins, she provided a much-needed female perspective to what was going on at the time in the lives of the post-Beatles generation, voicing with confidence how a rich inner life intersects with a tumultuous outer life.
Gary Graff: It's her best, but not necessarily the first album I'd refer to new listener. Its virtues - the raw intimacy, the vein-spilling vulnerability, the subtle instrumentation and those no-punches-pulled vocals - make for a tremendous song cycle but not always a comfortable listen. I'd probably send folks to Court and Spark, For the Roses or Ladies of the Canyon as more accessible gateways and then steer them to Blue once they're in the door.
What’s your favorite song on Blue and why?
Gallucci: "A Case of You" is breathtaking in its near simplicity. Mitchell's dulcimer and James Taylor's acoustic guitar are the musical bedrock here, and her lovely lyrics - "I could drink a case of you and still be on my feet" - pretty much disguise a breakup song in some of the most romantic lines ever written. The entire album plays along a similar path, but "A Case of You" is the standout moment.
Rapp: Every song on Blue seems to fit in perfectly with the others and tells its own unique short story, but "Case of You" will always be my favorite, if not just for its lyrics: "Part of you pours out of me in these lines from time to time." "Little Green" is a close second - Mitchell wrote it in 1966, two years before her debut album, after giving her daughter up for adoption, but the song was on the back burner for several years. It's an even more poignant listen knowing the weight the song must have carried for that long.
Zaleski: I know it's a cliche but "River." The more I listen and analyze the origins of the song, the more brilliant it becomes: It's a song full of contradictions - loneliness vs. being around others, feeling stuck vs. dreaming of a better life, solace vs. feeling bereft - but never feels chaotic, just the heartfelt musings of someone trying to figure it all out. Plus, using "Jingle Bells" as a tease for the song is brilliant; it conveys but also subverts the idea of sentiment.
Graff: "California" is a happy respite from the Blue fray. Love the way it personalizes the Golden State as a state of mind and being, and dresses it up with so many details it feels like you're hearing a movie. Plus, how can you argue with any track that has Jim Keltner, Sneaky Pete Kleinow and James Taylor playing on it, albeit quietly?
Is it the beginning of a new era for her? Or is it the end of her first era as a recording artist?
Gallucci: In some ways, it's both. She was slowly building to this moment since her 1968 debut, Song to a Seagull. That's a tentative record, but Mitchell's songwriting showed great promise, and she developed her voice on her next two albums, Clouds and Ladies of the Canyon. While Blue marked the end of this initial growth period, it also gave her the creative freedom and confidence to move on to the next stage of her career with the more jazz- and classical-minded For the Roses and Court and Spark. Every Mitchell album, really, from 1969-76 is a transitional one.
Rapp: Blue, overall, feels like the closure of one door and the opening of another, as though Mitchell had things she needed to get off her chest before moving onward both sonically and emotionally. There were new avenues to discover in terms of arrangements, instrumentation, chord structures and collaborations, but none of it really seems feasible without the definitive statement that Blue was.
Zaleski: I think it kicks off her imperial phase - Blue's creative structures and lyrical vulnerability opened up her songwriting and creativity and empowered her fearlessness.
Graff: I'd call it the latter and ending that first era on a high note. The albums that awaited - For the Roses, Court and Spark and beyond - brought in more instrumentation, a different sense of arrangement, different voices, most notably Tom Scott's, to accent the vocals that laid so bare on Blue and its predecessors. It's very much Mitchell reaching a (very satisfying) peak and moving beyond.
Because they're so intertwined with real (and famous) people, do the songs sound and feel too personal? Or do they strike a universal chord?
Gallucci: The first time I heard Blue, I had no idea the songs were connected to real people. It was only after a few years and countless listens that I found out that Graham Nash, James Taylor and others were the inspirations for these songs. I just assumed Mitchell, as other songwriters had done in the past, had pulled these songs from collective experiences and sources. So, I don't think they're too personal at all. Knowing the backstories now certainly gives the album more perspective, but in no way do they alter my first impressions of the album: I loved the album then, and it's still one of my favorites.
Rapp: Anyone who's ever loved someone can recognize and relate to the themes in these songs. Her lyricism is sharply specific in many spots on the album, but it's also the palpable emotion Mitchell's vocal delivery that really resonates with others. Of course, the songs are tailored to her life, but in this case, vagueness wouldn't have served the album justice. There's actually a lot of common ground between Mitchell and her listeners when it comes to personal romance and loss, which is a large part of why Blue has stood the test of time. There will always be love and heartbreak, and there will always be Blue to encapsulate that mood.
Zaleski: Not at all too personal; if anything, because they draw from her own life, they have extra passion and meaning. Of course, Mitchell's gift as a songwriter (well, one of them) is channeling real-world experiences into songs that are universal but also applicable to a variety of situations or life experiences. That's because she avoids the trap many lyricists fall into: She's not myopic but able to have some perspective on what she's been through and articulate her life experiences with clarity.
Graff: Boy, that's a toughie - especially since we know in retrospect (and did, to a degree, then) what was going on in her life. These are songs, sometimes explicitly, about very specific people (Graham Nash, James Taylor, Carey Raditz) and travels, with defining details in every one. But Mitchell writes in such a way that invites the listener to find themselves in her stories, and who hasn't felt like they're "on a lonely road ... looking for something to set me free" at some point in their lives?”.
There is this interview that I want to come to next. First published in two parts in Acoustic Guitar magazine (August 1996 and February 1997), Jeffrey Pepper Rodgers recalls sitting down with Joni Mitchell in 1996. Her recollections and reflections about Blue are particularly interesting.
“Even today, Blue stands out for its intensely personal storytelling and emotional transparency. I asked Mitchell whether, at the time she wrote these songs, she was prepared for sharing her interior life with the audience in this way.
I was opened up. As a matter of fact, we had to close the doors and lock them while I recorded [Blue], because I was in a state of mind that in this culture would be called a nervous breakdown. In pockets of the Orient it would be considered a shamanic conversion.
It begins with a sense of isolation and of not knowing anything, which is accompanied by a tremendous panic. Then clairvoyant qualities begin to come in, and you and the world become transparent, so if you’re approached by a person, all their secrets are not closeted. Like a Gypsy, you get too much of a read on who a person is. It makes you see a lot of ugliness in people that you’d rather not know about, and you lie to yourself and say something nice about them to cover it up. It gets very confusing. In that state of mind I was defenseless as a result, stripped down to a position of absolutely no capability of the normal pretension that people have to survive.
When [Blue] first came out, I played it for Kris Kristofferson, who said, “God, Joan, save something of yourself.” He was embarrassed by it. I think generally at first that people were embarrassed by it, that in a certain way it was shocking, especially in the pop arena. People [usually sing], “I’m bad, I’m bad, I’m great, I’m the greatest.” It’s a phony business, and people accept the phoniness of it. It’s fluff, it’s this week’s flavor and it gets thrown out, and it isn’t supposed to be anything really more than that.
By the time I made the next albums, I had stabilized psychologically, I would say, to a degree where, like we all do, I had some defenses. But that descent cracked me wide open, and I remain wide open to this day. I don’t want to develop too many defenses. I’m a kind of experiment, a freak of nature. I’m going through the world in an open way trying to trust in a time when human nature is so mangled and corrupt, probably more so than it ever was, where there is no honor, and greed is fashionable. I know the world is wicked; it doesn’t shock me anymore. As a matter of fact the thing that stuns and shocks me is human kindness; I see so very little”.
The Times also marked fifty years of Joni Mitchell’s Blue in 2021. They talked about the pain that went into the album. Learning about Mitchell’s bravery in putting all these difficult and painful struggles and heartaches into her music. An album that inspired generations of confessional singer-songwriters:
“While Blue expressed disillusionment with the trappings of success, it also came in the wake of Mitchell’s break-up with Graham Nash. A year previously they had been the golden couple of the Laurel Canyon scene. He wrote Our House about their groovy life together. She responded with Blue’s My Old Man, a far more troubled love song on which she admits to having the blues when he’s gone, but also not feeling ready to commit. “I believed in that relationship and suddenly it was over,” Mitchell said. “I also lost most of my Los Angeles friends. When I left him, they took his side.”
Mitchell escaped to Greece, and in early 1970 she was in the fishing village of Matala in Crete when she heard an explosion. She turned round to witness a man being blown out of the doors of a restaurant after the stove he had been lighting exploded. So began her brief affair with Cary Raditz, immortalised on Blue’s Carey in the line: “You’re a mean old daddy but I like you.” Raditz was a true hippy, living in a cave on the coast and refusing to be impressed by the presence of a celebrity in his midst.
Mitchell wrote about their primitive life together on Carey, including her confession that she did actually quite like clean white linen, fancy French cologne and other aspects of bourgeois life. “Cary watched all his friends go kind of gaga over me,” Mitchell told Crowe. “He resented me for that. He was always trying to put me in my place in front of his friends.”
One way or another, these experiences fleshed out Blue. Mitchell really was sitting in a park in Paris reading about the Vietnam War in a newspaper and concluding that peace was just a dream some of them had, when she began to tire of Europe’s old, cold ways and longed for the freshness and optimism of LA, as recounted on California. On The Last Time I Saw Richard she paints a scene of being in a bar at closing time with a folk singer friend called Patrick Sky, who warned Mitchell that hopeless romantics like her end up as cynical drunks. It was rare for singer-songwriters of the time to write so directly from life without hiding behind metaphor.
Back in her native Canada for a Toronto festival, in July 1970 Mitchell hooked up with James Taylor, for whom she wrote All I Want, a beautifully simple expression of not needing anything when you’re with the right (or, in this case, wrong) person. “I want to wreck my stockings in some jukebox dive,” she confessed. Taylor took Mitchell back to his parents’ house in North Carolina for Christmas, where beside the living room fireplace she sang A Case of You, one of the cleverest love songs written. “I could drink a case of you, darling, and I would still be on my feet,” sounds like a challenge as much as a declaration of passion. It has been speculated that Mitchell wrote River about that time, but River is about feeling lonely at Christmas. Perhaps Mitchell was drawing on her feelings for Nash, even as she spent Christmas with Taylor.
Mitchell once compared her state of self during the making of Blue to “a cellophane wrapper on a packet of cigarettes”, although it is only in hindsight that we know just how much she was giving away. At the time Rolling Stone magazine’s Timothy Crosse concluded that the cryptic words of Little Green were “so poetic that it passeth all understanding”. When the daughter she gave up for adoption in 1965 surfaced in the late 1990s, the real meaning of lines like “a child with a child pretending”, a reference to Mitchell being so young and unprepared for motherhood when she became pregnant, was revealed.
Counter to the spirit of a time when stars would drop in on each other’s sessions — and with Carole King recording the equally influential album Tapestry down the hall — Mitchell made Blue with the door of her room at LA’s A&M Studios locked. Taylor contributed some guitar parts shortly before their relationship petered out. “James was a walking psychological disaster anyway,” Mitchell said of their lack of suitability.
After the album was made Mitchell retreated to a cabin in Canada and didn’t play live for a year, but in the process of exposing herself so entirely she helped an entire generation to deal with their own emotional realities. With its cover photograph of Mitchell bathed in a blue light, harsh but tragic, Blue was her unguarded triumph. She concluded in her interview with Crowe, expressing amazement that Blue still means so much to people: “Truth and beauty. That’s what I hope to deliver.” And in a rare video post this week she added: “Fifty years later people finally get it. That pleases me”.
I am going to end with this review, that argues that Blue might be a perfect album. There are few that can truly be called that though, when it comes to this 1971 release, you would be hard pressed to find any weaknesses – or anything less than perfect:
“What makes an album perfect?
Maybe it's lyrics, composition, the music itself, or the emotion that it sparks. Maybe, it’s critical acclaim, the meaning that it brings, or something special yet undefinable that only the artist themselves can bring to the table. Whatever one may consider it to be, Joni Mitchell's solo 1971 album 'Blue' meets all of these requirements as a masterpiece of performance, production, and song-writing that is without a single weak spot. A decade prior, labels had still seen albums as receptacles for already popular songs. This was until the first half of the 1970s changed the music industry entirely, bringing the idea of the album as a medium to the forefront. Blue epitomises this - its songs all have a gravity of their own, yet still come together as a cohesive work of art greater than the sum of its parts. The perfect record, that, once finished, compels its listener to start it over, without hesitation.
Released over 50 years ago, the album is inspired by Mitchell's travels throughout Europe, where she left the traditional domestic comfort of Los Angeles with a one-way plane ticket to immerse herself in new experiences and pursue freedom on her own terms. Blue reflects the archetypal 'hero's journey' as she brought it to her experiences, travels, retrospective thoughts on the men in her life, her poetic observations and her relentless self examination. Perhaps as a result of this inspiration, 'Blue' gives us the sense that it was crafted to be consumed whilst in motion, immediately opening with the idea of travel, with the line, "I am on a lonely road and I am traveling, traveling, traveling, traveling". Mitchell's clear, yet haunting soprano takes us on an emotional rollercoaster throughout the album - for example, immediately after the beautifully elegiac “River”, a song about loneliness and heartbreak, comes the album's most unabashedly cheerful song, "A Case of You". In the hands of many other artists, this progression would be jarring, upsetting the integrity of the album. However with Joni, it just works.
But on top of the production and performance of the album, it's Mitchell's gift for sophisticated, beautiful melodies coupled with her lyrical language that makes Blue reach the height that it has. From the Ginsburgian imagery of Blue to the exultant "California", to the gentle yet mellow "Little Green", the album contains great range, yet still works as a cohesive whole, with diminished chords capturing the sound of nostalgia throughout the album, as various songs are interspersed with motifs from each other.
Perhaps because of its title; “Blue” has a reputation for being morose, with a certain vulnerability and weariness in Mitchell's voice making it hauntingly yet eloquently vulnerable as it captures moments of intense loss and sadness - making it a great album to cry to! But it would be a mistake to limit the album by perceiving it only in this way. It displays a vast array of emotion, part of what makes it so great, and from the opening moments of “All I Want” Mitchell is full of energy - “Alive, alive," she wants to "get up and jive.”
However all the while, she often links her lyrics back to her past, with the idea of her home in California always somewhere in the back of her mind. The album is highly personal, with many songs alluding to a handful of famous ex-lovers and musicians. And while Mitchell never tried to disguise these experiences, focusing too finely on who a song is 'about' diminishes its power and misses the point of its art - the context surrounding the album is merely a surface concern, distracting from its craft and its oceanic force of emotion.
"Blue" has always had a strong legacy of critical acclaim, winning countless accolades and repeatedly placing in the 'top albums of all time' for multiple music publications, featuring in The Rolling Stone's '500 Albums of All Time' and receiving a perfect score on Pitchfork, going on to inspire the likes of Prince, Bjork, Bob Dylan, and even Taylor Swift. As a New York Times tribute writes, "half a century later, Mitchell’s “Blue” exists in that rarefied space beyond the influential or even the canonical" as "the story of a restless young woman questioning everything — love, sex, happiness, independence, drugs, America, idealism, motherhood, rock ’n’ roll."
The wonder of Mitchell's writing is its seamless blend of personal and public, the mundane converted to the universal. Blue is a dynamic album that cannot be pinned to any specific genre - it isn't a specific album so much as a precise one, an intricate tapestry of ambiguity as her voice combines with her music in a faultless intersection of song-writing, production and performance in a way that reflects true artistry, coming together to make Blue an album that I, at least, consider to be perfect”.
As Blue turns fifty-five on 22nd June, it was important to include it for this Beneath the Sleeve. One of the most influential albums that has ever been released, it was a turning point and pinnacle of 20th-century music. Blue will be discussed for generations to come. Its author last performed live a couple of years ago. I do hope that we see Joni Mitchell on the stage again. So much love out there for her. Blue, fifty-five years after its release, remains this…
PEERLESS album.
