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.