joni mitchell - blue - poll

I don't know if I could choose a favourite but I think "The Last Time I Saw Richard" is the one that amazes me the most - it's so, um, dialogic in a Bakhtin sense... she's right about Richard, but he's right about her, and each person's truth is the point where the truth of the other falls down (the fact that the song is not even about a relationship between the two only makes this more interesting).

"He drinks at home now most nights with the TV on and all the house lights left up bright." This could come off as really judgmental but it's not at all, the singer doesn't know if she envies Richard his escape or not, doesn't know if sitting in dark cafes is any more "real".

I'm sceptical of people praising Blue at the expense of other Joni albums but where I think it really is distinct is that it's an album where you can really feel her songwriting changing, reacting to external pressures placed on her. "Little Green" and "My Old Man" are both amazing but they're clearly older songs. With "This Flight Tonight", "A Case Of You" and "The Last Time I Saw Richard" in particular you can feel the whole approach change - that new sense of nervousness, that air of having chosen what she's about to sing at the very moment of singing it, the structuring of everything as a fraught conversation - is it you? is it me?

That's what makes it remarkable - not the confessionalism per se, but the way the album exposes a relationship between feeling and style, Joni having to find new ways to write songs in order to get across the cards James Taylor life has dealt her.

'carey' for when i'm in a good mood, 'richard' for when i'm not

dunno if i'd ever play this record when i'm in a good mood ...

"will you take me as i am, STRUNG OUT ON ANOTHER MAN"

booming lyric imo

I'm not sure I could say this about many other albums, but every time someone has quoted a lyric in this thread I've been able to immediately place it in my head, exactly what song it's in, what it sounds like, what I feel about it -- it's like I know every inch of this album intimately.

But the whole first verse makes up for that. xpost

I'll go for Carey for sheer pleasure, Little Green for lyrical elegance.

― Dorian (Dorianlynskey), Monday, December 7, 2009 5:55 PM (5 hours ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

"will you take me as i am, STRUNG OUT ON ANOTHER MAN"

booming lyric imo

^^^^

The Last Time I Saw Richard

All I Want - how could anyone turn down her persona in this song??

this is making me reconsider

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-q4foLKDlcE

^reconsider my vote that is...

All I Want - how could anyone turn down her persona in this song??

I love the plaintiveness of "I wanna have fun..." - you can almost here a bracketed "is that too much to ask?" afterwards.

it's less sentimental than "little green"

I don't think 'Little Green' is sentimental at all; the gap between the wishes expressed- 'there'll be icicles and birthday clothes and sometimes there'll be sorrow'- and the fact that the narrative voice knows fully the enormity of what is being done and size of the wound being consciously deliberately opened up for both mother and child, mocks the wish as it is expressed. It's an astonishing song because Joni accepts the size of what is being done and doesn't attempt to clothe it in sentiment: she explains the situation but doesn't excuse either herself or the father, but nor, in the strangest most devastating line, does she cloth herself in false guilt: 'you're sad and you're sorry, but you're not ashamed'.......

Even the way it ends, with the little riff repeated an uneven number of times, and the resolving chord coming in slightly off- time and too loud points to this lack of fit between the words said - between anything that words could say - and what is being done.

Could've sworn we did this already but "All I Want," Carey," and the title track are my shit. I went for "Blue" because I can never tell when it ends.

"River" is my shit too. And "Richard." And.........

i meant the melody not the lyrics of "my old man" being less sentimental than "little green's". the first chords of "little green" immediately stir up emotion in me, touch something deep inside whereas "my old man" has a more relaxed, more ripe, bluesy down-to-earth vibe.

i didn't know until recently that this album was a result of being bummed out over james taylor. understandable though. he was one hot junkie.

http://blogs.sltrib.com/burger/uploaded_images/James-Taylor-69374-14-757585.jpg

there's a recording of them playing live together at some point -- they sound great! Nice blend.

man that live youtube clip...wow....what a talent.

He is pretty dreamy. I think only a couple of the very final songs written are about Taylor though - most of the album predates it. "My Old Man" is about Graham Nash for instance (as a side note, when I first got into this album at about 13, it didn't occur to me that "old man" might be used to describe yr boyfriend, i thought it must mean "father", and was kinda confused by the song as a result). There's also an argument that "A Case Of You" is about Leonard Cohen, though I find that unlikely.

Heaps of For The Roses is about Taylor as well - "See You Sometime", "The Blonde In The Bleachers", "Lessons In Survival".

yeah i meant that the actual "blue" vibe of the album was cuzza james. not all the actual songs.

man, reading that hotel california book i was really tempted to start writing down whose songs were about who, but it was endless. joni in particular. but all those laurel canyon people really.

^loved that book. all the stuff about joni was fascinating

I still have to read Hotel California! But I recently read Girls Like Us, about Joni Carole and Carly. That was great.

i was gonna read girls like us, but someone bought it before i could make up my mind to read it. cuz i sell books. hotel california kinda depressed me. everyone got so gross.

Do you think 'For The Roses' is a little sidelined?

I love that album every bit as much as Blue, maybe more, but I wonder if it would provoke as much discussion.

Also, 'Hotel California' WFT??? at the topless pic of Judee Sill.

post (mellow) n00dz

i meant the melody not the lyrics of "my old man" being less sentimental than "little green's".

Sorry, should have read your post more carefully.

Until that clip, I'd no idea so much of the record was her playing dulcimer!

was just looking at this book -- new, I think: http://www.amazon.com/Will-You-Take-Me-Mitchells/dp/1416559299
my wife's old company published a Joni Mitchell bio a few years ago which was one of the worst things I have ever read. In the intro, the author describes meeting Joni as "like Gaguin meeting Van Gogh!"

Really want to read that book, but it's always been too expensive, considering it's pretty slim.

Do you think 'For The Roses' is a little sidelined?

Yes. Sandwiched between two masterpieces, it's been overlooked, and the melodic/harmonic density is difficult to absorb in a casual listen (considering that most of these songs are just piano and guitar solo pieces, that's a lot to ask). But "Woman of Heart and Mind," "You Turn Me On," "Barandgrill," "Cold Blue Steel and Fire," and "Lesson in Survival" are just brilliant on first listen too.

"will you take me as i am, STRUNG OUT ON ANOTHER MAN"

booming lyric imo

OTM.

It's definitely between California and Case of You, but Carey and This Flight Tonight are close behind.

MMmmm. BUT. The dulcimer on "All I Want" is also made of win.

"you said love is touching souls / ...surely you touched mine / cause part of you pours out of me / in these lines from time to time"

"I met a woman / she had a mouth like yours / she knew your devils and your deeds and she said..."

I love these lines, so subtle and evocative - did Joni meet his mother or his sister or...?

I always assumed she met a former lover -- her mouth was like his, ie: his manner of speaking and words had rubbed off on her.

Yeah that's the other interpretation. Or maybe it's Carole King?

do yall think the fact that Joni Mitchell name drops kids reading Rolling Stone & other hippie-era icons in "California" dates the song?

Nah. I love those name-drops.

The whole song goes out of its way to carbon-date itself, and not in a bad way - "readin' the news and it sure looks bad / seems they won't give peace a chance / that was just a dream some of us had."

Almost gave River an automatic vote because it's December but I played it all over and the cocoon escape fantasy at the end of Richard blew me away.

It's gotta be "River" for me but under the right circumstances I could be tempted by "A Case of You" too.

Yeah, I love those topical details on this record. To me this album really captures something about moving through young adulthood and growing up (among a lot of other things), and having those little details in there gives an idea of what world she was in while that was happening. Being a 27-year old woman in 1971 was very different than being 27 in 1961.

i always thought River was a bit of a throwaway

California might be my favorite

The whole song goes out of its way to carbon-date itself, and not in a bad way

I like her whole stance on 60's idealism

"They won't give peace a chance
That was just a dream some of us had"

after all that stuff about stardust and getting back to the garden, the opening lines of the song just kinda brush it off as "a dream some of us had," so, like, on with the 70's cause there are "lands to see"

which is actually clear-eyed & rational

"Little Green", obviously

I put this on tonight for the first time in a decade-and-a-half. I really wasn't ready for it - the starkness of the arrangements took me aback a lot. The first three tracks in particular are pretty uncompromising as a lead-in; I think it's 'Carey' before we get a backing vocal, and by then I was pathetically grateful for that little bit of colour.

I must have listening to ever-lusher music without realising it, as this initially felt very alien to me - as if it was from another time, like hearing ragtime or ye olde blues. A trick she pulls from time to time is to throw in a couple of odd notes or a strange harmony so that for a second or two I think the tune has gone off in another direction entirely, when it's actually returned to its original pattern straight away. I've grown quite unaccustomed to this sort of songwriting and it's not exactly pleasant, more unsettling.

On the basis of one listen, the best thing here is 'California' - beautiful rolling melody, it feels like the words are tripping over tumbling out of her mouth. So catchy and uplifting. Worst: 'My Old Man', I think her diction there is quite horrible.

wtf @ My Old Man hate.

― Salvador Dali Parton (Turangalila), Monday, December 7, 2009 5:56 PM (4 days ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

i'm gonna blow this damn candle out

I was given this album by a friend for by birthday while at school (her birthday was a few days after mine and we had both been given copies of albums we already owned so we traded). I remember listening to it for the first time and being completely hooked from that first line. It seemed to have a rhythm of its own that didn't remind me of anything I had ever heard. To me "stripped back" singersongwriter meant simple metered folk songs, verse chorus verse, regular downbeats on the guitar. The way it integrated jazz-like flourishes was something that I wouldn't have been able to recognise as I would have considered "jazzy" to be entirely textural: smokiness, neon. The colourfulness of this album has always struck me in contrast to the cover. The sharp brightness of the guitar parts, her singing like you said: flitting, ringing into that heavy vibrato, especially on the soprano notes. Also the romance in the lyrics, the hotel room in Rome filled with white flowers, women in parties in big Castillian houses wearing YSL, very appealing to me then, stuck at home, bored. But its the scenic "goodbye to all that" melancholy that sticks with you. The cracking of the illusion. When you've forgotten yourself, which was the intention all along. I've never gotten over that line.

^^^ beautiful.

I assume that k3vin hasn’t gotten to Night Ride Home yet and I am very excited about it.

k3v's still traveling traveling traveling through her catalog

this is obviously a fantastically gut-wrenching break-up record and pretty much exactly what I need right now. I am really into “all I want”, “carey”, and “river” as well, but “a case of you” is the one I keep coming back to. her view of the object of the song seems incredibly complicated, and so verisimilar: the refrain (“I could drink a case of you / and I’d still be on my feet”) seems to suggest a perception of weakness, and even the two times she quotes him (“just before our love got lost you said / ‘I am as constant as the northern star’”) (“you told me: ‘love is touching souls’”), they’re not his words but literary allusions (shakespeare and rilke), which suggests to me a perception of insincerity. but then there’s the end of the second verse: “surely you’ve touched [my soul] / ‘cause part of you pours out of me / in these lines from time to time”. it’s all so very real and, honestly, rude that she would call me out like this

Weird, I was eating breakfast and I got "oooh you're a mean old daddy but I like you fine" in my head. My mom was so taken with that song that she fucked off to Greece and lived in a lean-to for a year until my grandfather demanded she come home.

prince’s cover is great. I wonder why he omits the first verse...I assume it’s because there’s no way it could be improved upon

what stage of fandom am I in when I’m really into “both sides now”?

Which version?

Weird, I was eating breakfast and I got "oooh you're a mean old daddy but I like you fine" in my head. My mom was so taken with that song that she fucked off to Greece and lived in a lean-to for a year until my grandfather demanded she come home.

Which version?

― Tim F, Tuesday, September 3, 2019 2:07 AM (four hours ago) bookmarkflaglink

carly rae jepsen’s

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=97EiUOofOuk

I like both joni versions pretty equally, the main appeal is the lyrics for me

I've always enjoyed Sarah McLachlan's cover of Blue

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s38dMRb2j6w

https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2021/06/20/arts/music/joni-mitchell-blue.html

50 Reasons to Love Joni Mitchell’s ‘Blue’
The singer-songwriter questioned everything on her fourth album. Twenty-five musicians speak about the LP’s enduring power on its 50th anniversary.

She produced it herself. There weren’t women producers then. And she didn’t try a lot of different musical arrangements. So it was very singular. There are few albums that change your life. “Blue” came out when I had just turned 16 and it came at this fulcrum of going out of childhood — feeling all the passion of what I wanted to do with my life, and the urgency and the fear and everything, and then “Blue.” This is a weird thing to be a revelation, given my childhood and my family, but I understood for the first time that a woman could be a songwriter. She just laid it out in these almost journalistic lines that were still so poetic, so dark, and I thought, “That’s what I want to do.” I probably would not be a songwriter had it not been for “Blue.” - Rosanne Cash

This is even more impressive: https://www.npr.org/2021/06/20/1008271419/joni-mitchell-masterpiece-at-50-her-kind-of-blue

^That Ann Powers is brilliant.

Subscriber exclusive: Joni Mitchell opens up to Cameron Crowe about singing again, lost loves and 50 years of ‘Blue’ https://www.latimes.com/entertainment-arts/music/story/2021-06-20/joni-mitchell-cameron-crowe-50th-anniversary-blue

‘I wanna talk to you/I wanna shampoo you’ is one of my favourite lyrics of all time

If you haven't already read it, this is a really great essay kind of tangled up in Blue, by the English poet Amy Key. I believe she's now working on a whole book about Joni etc

https://granta.com/a-bleed-of-blue/

these are awesome:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VYyyf9rRurc

will this embed?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KS1lzfDmKL4

^^the vocals are joni, gorgeous arrangement imo

Those demoes illustrate what a singular record Blue is in her career - "Hunter" sounds like Ladies of the Canyon, and "River", when the French horns come in, is a flash-forward to some of the orchestral overdubs on For the Roses. But neither of those outtakes would fit on Blue as we know it.

Joni was wise (or lucky) that she has kept such a tight grip on these sorts of outtakes over the last 35 years. It gives a real sense of occasion to the release of these Archives boxes that wouldn't be there if the albums had already been reissued two or three times with bonus tracks, demoes, live shows etc.

It's funny that that Paul Horn recording has more down votes than likes, do people think he kidnapped her and forced her to do a wordless version with his flute?

It's so good to hear Hunter properly at last, it has always been tagged on at the end of the Hissing demos.

woah, never thought the second Archives box would come so fast! thats a nice surprise.