Seven Attempts to Write about Blue

The memoiristic introduction

I can’t quite recall exactly where or when I bought the ragged-sleeved copy of Blue that I played on loop for a whole semester when I was sixteen, but I do remember the intensity of the kinship I felt with Joni, with the album. I titled one of my photos that spring after a lyric in “All I Want,” “I am on a lonely road and I am traveling.” The literal journeys in Blue - Joni’s trek through Europe after breaking up with Graham Nash, her flights across the country to see James Taylor - serve mostly as an entry point into the journey of introspection that comprises Blue. “All I Want” has always felt like the overture to me because it introduces Blue’s unusual perspective. Blue isn’t an album about heartbreak, it’s an album about being, being a human, being a lover, being a mother, being a friend, about trying to do right by those you love.

Socio-literary analysis

Joni Mitchell’s voice sounds fresh here, even forty years later. It’s one of the most mature voices I’ve ever heard discussing relationships. From the start, we have the problem she grapples with throughout most of the album: “I hate you some, I love you some / Oh, I love you when I forget about me.” And it’s a problem that resonates widely because we’ve all either felt that ourselves, or seen it in others, but never been able to articulate it before. It has an epiphanic quality. And she understands what it actually means for a relationship to be something healthy: “All I really want our love to do / is to bring out the best in me and you.”

Sentimental music criticism

In the tendency to think of folk music as an American genre, it’s easy to forget that two of its finest performers, Mitchell and Neil Young, are Canadian. I love how her Canadianness comes through on “Little Green,” in her accent - “sorrows” like “sore-ohs” - and her images - “like the nights when the northern lights perform.” It’s easy to imagine her as a girl, an only child in rural Ontario watching the aurora from her window.

The thorough explication

Joni has a way of mixing the everyday with the abstract such that her metaphors and comparisons never come across as pretentious. Somehow, hearing the familiar articulated in fresh but understandable terms transforms it entirely. “I miss him and feel lonely when he’s gone”  becomes “when he’s gone, me and the lonesome blues collide / the bed’s too big, the frying pan’s too wide.” It’s like the opposite of a cliche, which reduces something complex to a phrasing so tired that we ignore it. That single egg floating in an oily sea of empty skillet, that unmussed sheet crop up so unexpectedly that you’re forced to linger on the thought.

Quasi-academic rejection of implicit belittling

Much has been made of Joni Mitchell’s Blue as a masterpiece of the “confessional” singer-songwriter genre. Kris Kristofferson apparently told her upon hearing the record for the first time, “Joni! Keep something of yourself!” as if lyrics of unmitigated honesty with straightforward imagery were somehow indecent or that she’d lose herself in telling her story. There’s an air of condescension to all of it: “Confessional,” as if there’s some sin for which she’s seeking absolution. Allmusic frustratingly describes her as possibly “the most important and influential female recording artist of the late 20th century,” throwing in that little “female” qualifier lest we overestimate her talent.

The last-ditch self-interview

Supposing you did want to distill your thoughts on the album, what would you say?
Blue makes you better. Think of all the pathological sentiments in pop and rock songs out there, now think of the dazzling self-awareness Joni demonstrates. “California”: realizing travel won’t fix you, watching the Vietnam War from afar, missing the joy of being in a place populated by those dear to you. “Blue”: trying to love and help someone mired in drugs and mental illness (James Taylor, in this case). “The Last Time I Saw Richard”: the strangeness of losing a friend to his dramatic personality and lifestyle change, the role of the artist in a materialistic society. Every track on there teaches me something each time I take the effort to listen attentively. Most great songs have lyrics that fall into inane/terrible/nonsensical buckets; it’s so much more rare than we think that a song’s words actually bring as much, if not more, quality to it than the hook or the production or the instrumentation.

Notes for an ambitious conclusion

Blue is an album with a narrative thread
blue imagery and the blues, like an internal rhyme
It’s never bleak; this is what’s truly stunning about it I think
uncrushable vitality
“All good dreamers pass this way someday.”
The promise to yourself that you will feel better. Live to live it out.
“only a phase, these dark cafe days”
Here is a woman who overcomes nearly crippling childhood polio, who makes it out of rural Canada, who drops out of art school to become a singer, who has to put up her newborn for adoption because neither abortion nor parenthood are options, who pays her dues in the tiny venues until she finally starts to make it. And suddenly she is in Laurel Canyon and Crosby, Stills & Nash are forming at her party.
It’s not at all surprising, her maturity and her grace of character.
It’s not the voice we usually hear (the voice of the addressee of “Blue” being that usual voice, perhaps), but it was the voice I always wanted to.

Liner Notes

I grew up with a boom box boasting three modes: cassette, compact disc, and radio. I used all three, listening to Harry Potter tapes and $3 CD singles and Rick Dee's Top 40. I mixed media too, recording my favorite songs onto cassette when they'd come on the radio. I loved how different the controls felt. Pushing the Play button on a tape was mechanical, the way it would lock down until the side ended when it would pop up with a click. Playing a CD was just a simple tap on a flat button, the sound of the laser sliding into place and the disc whirring beginning even before I'd moved my finger away. I changed the radio station by rolling a dial back and forth, trying to align the selection line with the markings on the wheel.

It wasn't for a lack of playable media that I decided to bring my dad's old turntable out of its exile on a shelf in our library. In fact, I didn't own a single record, and all my parents had were the final edit of their LP collection from years before: their Beatles albums, some Elton John, and not much else. Wanting to use the turntable came from something else entirely, the hunger a lonely thirteen-year-old girl feels for authenticity.

So one night, I carried the old Sony turntable down the hall to my room, plugged it in, and set one of the old LP's onto the platter. I hit Power and then Start, and watched the tone arm rise from its corner and sluggishly hover its way to edge of the disc. The needle made contact. No sound came out. But then I could hear the music, faintly, like listening through a heavy door. Where was it coming from? I cocked my head, moved it closer and farther until I ascertained that the music issued from the point of contact between the needle and the record, like an infinitesimal finger strumming a tiny guitar.

By the end of that evening I'd co-opted my dad's receiver, uncovered the two little speakers stored in the highest cabinet in the family room, and culled from the record collection all those albums and 45's I deemed musically worthy. I had dozens of CD's, hundreds of mp3's, and scads of tapes (even in that latter day of 2004), but the turntable was special. The records were special.

I could stare at the needle skating across the disc for two sides and then some, awed into stillness by the way the album sang at the touch of the needle, no magnets or lasers, just a whisper resonating through a string into a tin can, really.

Every time I pack for a move, I wonder whether I should sell my record collection, pare it down like my parents pared down theirs twenty years ago, keep the LP's mostly for the beauty of their sleeves and the nostalgia of what they've meant to me over the years. But I don't. I even buy more, sometimes. Last year, I bought a media cabinet to keep them dust-free and vertical.

It's not that I don't keep up with music technology, either. I caved and bought an iPod five years ago, and my Spotify account has become my chief means of listening to music, quite often from my smartphone. But music for me is time and place and people, something fundamentally physical. The notion of analog wins me over. I can no more part ways with my albums than I can with the memory of how it was to see and hear at once the music that I so deeply felt.

The idea for this blog came to me while riding the bus to work, fresh off a Fiona Apple concert the night before, listening to Sharon Van Etten and thinking about how few female music critics there are and how few female musicians there are whose work is taken seriously. Pop might be dominated by Taylor Swift, Beyoncé, and Rihanna, but alternative and indie has always been a man's world, critics and creators alike. It occurred to me that I could throw my words into the ring. I've loved to write longer than I've loved music, but I've begun to tire of constantly writing with central focus on myself. The project invented itself in an instant.

Female musicians, female writer. Histories, legacies, anecdotes. Albums, tracks, artists. The experience of listening and resonating.