Joni Mitchell, Blue (1971)

This Musical Life: Essential Albums, Part 4 of 5

Joni Mitchell’s Blue (1971)

Before encountering Blue at the age of thirty-one, my awareness of Joni Mitchell was stuck in a rut limited to “Both Sides Now” (made famous by the Judy Collins version that my mother loved) and the Court and Spark (1974) hit “Help Me,” which reminded me of a theme love song for a 1970s TV movie of the week. I had no idea Canadian ingenue folk singer-songwriter Joni Mitchell was going to deliver a one-two punch with 1971’s Blue that would captivate me to the core.

Apropos of the bittersweet nature of the songwriting – lyrics inspired by Joni’s failed relationship with musician Graham Nash and her short-lived, tormented affair with rising star James Taylor (who plays guitar on three of the album’s tracks) – it was a smoldering, heartbreaking, romantic disaster that brought me Blue in 2002.

Dating in San Francisco was never easy, and I’d met a Svengali of a man who seemed to court me and spark me and spit me out all in one fell swoop over a few whirlwind weeks. Shortly after telling me that, while he loved me, I was a great and beautiful young woman, yadda yadda yadda, but alas, we cannot be together (for some vague noncommittal reason), he said, “I can’t believe you don’t know Blue.”

We had connected musically, pouring over our CD collections on the few nights spent together. Perhaps he’d spotted Ladies of the Canyon or Spark on my shelves. Perhaps it was the other folk-rock artists that tipped him off, probably the plethora of fellow Canadian Neil Young albums. Regardless, he was shocked and almost personally insulted that I didn’t know Blue.

So, his farewell breakup gift – okay, his dump-me consolation prize – was a burned CD copy of Blue for me to play over and over and over again while I cried many tears. How horribly perfect. I booked myself a solo, ten-day holiday to Paris, where I’d never been (save for a transit train once), and took that CD with me in my Sony Discman. I thought, Paris – there’s a place to mend my broken heart. In that magical city, I had a fling with a Parisian, which helped me get over the San Franciscan and my own sorry self. Nothing like a heady kiss under the Tour d’Eiffel to help a heartbreak move along. Cliché, but damned effective. Just like Joni sings whilst strumming her dulcimer in “California,” I was “Sitting in a park in Paris, France,” licking my wounds and recovering through more amore.

All the songs in Blue are exemplary in songwriting and composition for guitar or piano. Joni’s soprano shines through. Her measure of vocal control perfectly accompanies varied tuning and phrasing to draw the listener into a world – her world. That world was my world at the time. Joni was twenty-eight when Blue was made. I was close to her age and felt her pain, her appetites and dreams.

To me, Blue is a traveler’s album. She paints pictures of being on the rough road in “Carey,” of Paris and Greece in “California,” of Canada in “A Case of You,” and of takeoffs and loves on the move in “This Flight Tonight.” “All I Want” tells us the truth of a wanderer’s life:

I am on a lonely road and I am traveling. Traveling, traveling, traveling. Looking for something, what can it be . . .

It’s a perfect album for a woman soul on the crux, the ascent or descent of the twenty-ninth year, the Saturn Return, where one faces maturity and a deepening, whether one likes it or not. Joni rips out her own heart in a rather classy manner, if that’s possible, and shares it with us, where we get to enter our most vulnerable places and also visit our hidden strengths. We find our independence as women, as people, whether we like it or not. We learn through Joni that true love never dies. We may have scars, we may be flattened, but we will always have art – in this case, music – to render something beautiful from the failures. In this way, Joni is our teacher, our muse, our model of endurance and strength. The songs “Blue” and “Case of You” confront us deeply with our struggles of intimacy and the necessity to keep on keeping on, no matter how awful the ache.

Oh, you're in my blood like holy wine
You taste so bitter and so sweet
Oh, I could drink a case of you, darling
And I would still be on my feet
Oh, I would still be on my feet

Soon after my stay in Gay Paree, Blue and Joni accompanied me on my first solo journey to India, where the CD stayed in my backpack for six months of hard, exotic travel. I returned to the U.S. at age thirty-two, a completely changed woman. No longer a girl, perhaps now prepared to emerge as a “Woman of Heart and Mind,” her beautiful track on Blue’s 1972 follow-up album, For the Roses, where she tells the truth about rejecting the L.A. music business BS, stardom, and superficialities:

All this talk about holiness now
It must be the start of the latest style
Is it all books and words
Or do you really feel it?
Do you really laugh?
Do you really care?
Do you really smile
When you smile?

Thank you, Joni. Thank you, disastrous lover. Thank you, Blue. You will always have a special spot in my rucksack pocket.

Click here for the complete lyrics of Blue.

Mitchell Blue Lyrics

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Joni removed her albums from Spotify. You can listen to the complete album on YouTube. And some of the key tracks are below on SoundCloud. Enjoy this classic essential album.