Joni Mitchell - Blue

Released - June 1971

Genre - Folk

Producer - Joni Mitchell

Selected Personnel - Joni Mitchell (Vocals/Guitar/Piano/Dulcimer); Stephen Stills (Bass/Guitar); James Taylor (Guitar); Pete Kleinow (Pedal Steel); Russ Kunkel (Drums)

Standout Track - Little Green

As I've mentioned in some of my reviews for her earlier albums, my love of Joni Mitchell goes back a long way. Due to my mum's almost obsessive love for her music, her songs were part of the general tapestry of sound that surrounded me as I grew up. Still, it was generally a sort of passive osmosis that resulted in her work being familiar to me, and when I came to give her discography proper attention at uni, there was many an "Oh, this song!" moment as various fragments of song from my childhood and adolescence gradually slotted into place in history. There were only two albums that, when I came to listen to them properly, were completely familiar in their entirety, and they were 1976's Hejira and 1971's Blue. From this I can only surmise that they were my mum's favourites, and rightly so. Whether that relentless osmosis of hearing them over and over again for years is instrumental in this appraisal or not, it's a no-brainer for me that Blue and Hejira are Mitchell's two creative pinnacles. Which one is her masterwork is too close a call, really - Hejira has the greater musical ambition and personal resonances for me, but Blue has the heart and the majesty. It is the most heart-stoppingly beautiful and personal thing Mitchell ever recorded, perhaps even the most starkly profound and personal record ever made (it's up there in my book with Antony and the Johnsons' I Am A Bird Now). It manages to be cold, distant, sad, quiet, yearning, joyful, loving, tender and warm all at the same time, embracing all the dissonances and complexities of a woman in emotional turmoil.

Blue represents the moment at which Mitchell finally decided to focus all her attention on her own emotions and demons for inspiration. While earlier songs like "Both Sides, Now" had been introspective reflections on life and love, the majority of her work had involved her taking stock of the world around her and reporting on it, and the level of self-analysis and reflection seen on Blue was unprecedented. In the wake of the huge commercial success of Ladies Of The Canyon, Mitchell broke up with Graham Nash and was soon pursuing an intense relationship with James Taylor. It was Taylor that would prove to be the critical influence on Mitchell's songwriting for the new album, which was recorded in the wake of their subsequent break-up, which left her totally devastated. Quite what the atmosphere must have been like in the studio, with Taylor himself overdubbing guitar parts for such intensely personal songs about his relationship with Mitchell, is anyone's guess, but it resulted in something phenomenal. Quite when these songs were composed isn't clear - they might have been written during the relationship itself or after it was broken off, but either way there's a terribly fragile, tremulous sense of vulnerability in all of them. The deceptively sunny and upbeat opener "All I Want" paints a seemingly rosy picture of a relationship, but behind its surface reveals a woman petrified of being unable to attain the things she wants, to be able to make the man she loves happy, to find the person she wants to be with on her "lonely road." The beautiful "A Case Of You" makes a similar point, looking back to the tentative and excited early days of a love affair from the perspective of the end of the relationship, likening that love to a sort of poisonous addiction impossible to ignore. It's a breathtakingly beautiful song, and sets Mitchell as one of the rare songwriters able to capture the heady ecstasy of love and the trembling fear of disappointment and loneliness in one broad stroke.

Other songs are more clearly influenced by the break-up itself - the wonderful "River," set to Mitchell's full, rolling piano accompaniment, paints the marvellous image of Mitchell skating away from the heartbreak of having lost someone important to her, and "Blue" is another heart-stopping moment that emerges directly from her relationship with Taylor. Again set to Mitchell's piano (she had used the instrument prior to Blue, but never with such an assured and subtle touch - here the piano ballads actually stand out more than her guitar-based songs), it's a cryptic song that could be about any number of issues related to depression and drug dependency, but feels like an allusion to Taylor's heroin addiction and her desperate efforts to help him rise above it and not to lose the person she loves to something so hopeless. The other ballad that really grasps the listener's attention is "Little Green," a much older song that has nothing to do with Taylor and actually dates from the very early days of her songwriting career. At the release of Blue, "Little Green" was dismissed as an oddity, its story nothing but a cryptic mystery. It was only when Mitchell later confessed that she had had a child in the late 60s that she had had to put up for adoption due to her inability to raise it herself that the song suddenly took on whole new reserves of meaning - "Little Green" herself was Mitchell's pseudonym for the child she gave away and read in the context of its true meaning, the song becomes a thing of real beauty. It's made all the more poignant with the knowledge that this was a song she had hung onto for four years, refusing to allow herself to be honest and open enough to record it until her break-up with Taylor prompted her to look into herself and air her own demons. It's one of her most tender and raw and honest moments, and the first Joni Mitchell song I really fell in love with as a child.

Even on such a bleak and heartbroken record, though, there are moments of lightness and of joy. Both "California" and "Carey" are more upbeat, hopeful songs in the mould of "Chelsea Morning" from Clouds or the wonderful "Conversation" from Ladies Of The Canyon. True, both of them only achieve their sunny disposition by virtue of a yearning for somewhere warmer and better, or nostalgically reminiscing about the joys of Mitchell's travels in Africa, but amid such cold and bleak surroundings, those two songs really shine out as the only beacons of relative optimism and comfort. Vocally, Mitchell is on incredible form, ranging from the hushed intimacy and fragility of "Blue" to the cheerful bounciness of "This Flight Tonight" without ever struggling to convince. Her array of sidemen, meanwhile, are tastefully relegated to the background to allow Joni herself, the undisputed star of the show, to shine. It's only really on the likes of "This Flight Tonight" that any of them really get their own moment to demonstrate anything, and the rest of the time things are rightly grounded in the glacial beauty of Joni herself at her guitar and piano. It's not always an easy ride and it tugs the listener through their fair share of heartbreak and confession and weakness, but it's one of the most majestic creations in music history. It was with Blue that Joni Mitchell truly earned her stripes as the Queen of Folk Rock.

Track Listing:

All songs written by Joni Mitchell.

1. All I Want

2. My Old Man

3. Little Green

4. Carey

5. Blue

6. California

7. This Flight Tonight

8. River

9. A Case Of You

10. The Last Time I Saw Richard