joni mitchell - blue - poll

As I was kinda saying upthread, "The Last Time I Saw Richard" is a song which I suspect only Joni could write, she plays both sides of the song so convincingly.

haha yr first post itt is really good although i had a chuckle @ 'in a Bakhtin sense'

Man. I'm glad this is the first bookmark I saw when wandering by - a week of doing PWolf over at OneWeek/OneBand has sent me to Blue and Hejira at every spare moment/opportunity.

The dulcimer is such a gorgeous instrument.

Her pacing on "undoes all the joy that could be" is lovely. Just stretching out those last two words.

'A Case of You' used to be such an easy default answer for best song on Blue and now I don't understand how I was ever capable of not struggling with the question.

Besides maybe 'Little Green' and 'River', which I love slightly less than the rest, I have no idea how I'd answer today.

haha yr first post itt is really good although i had a chuckle @ 'in a Bakhtin sense'

tbh when I read my first post again I died inside a little when I saw this.

guys, i hope u all vote in upcoming joni artist poll. also - this album is so good i can't even listen to it anymore. every time i put it on i just feel entirely overcome with emotion. i have to save it for an evening when i have no responsibilities and don't mind enter blue-affect for a few hours.

i haven't been able to think about listening to it for months but tonight may be the night

my old man is a great song fuiud

we don't need no piece of paper from the city hall/fuck you if you disagree

"he drinks at home now most nights with the TV on/and all the house lights left up bright" = one of the most devastating descriptions in any song

Besides maybe 'Little Green' and 'River', which I love slightly less than the rest, I have no idea how I'd answer today.

oh man "Little Green" just kills me - when she says "you're sad, and you're sorry, but you're not ashamed" I completely collapse. a song of almost unimaginable honesty in my opinion.

yeah how could anyone not love "little green" it destroys me

this thread revive is kind of stressing me out--i can't listen to this album right now, okay???

"child with a child pretending" devastates me

shit i think i'm going to play this album.let me go hide the alcohol first

maybe i'll just play hejira instead as a compromise

I'd have gone with "all i want"

this album and me, we've parted ways
don't know how long, won't count the days
a classic yes, will always be
just not in my heart, no more for me

'richard' is nice but very surprised that won this poll.

I went to Crete a couple years back and stayed near Matala ("beneath a Matala moon" is the line in "Carey" that I'd thought was "beneath a map of the moon" when I owned the album on cassette) and the vibe of that song became so, so, so vivid to me. The wind was in from Africa every night, there's all these little tavernas you can just hang out in, all these caves the hippies used to camp out in (which they thought were monks' quarters but were actually ANCIENT TOMBS)...getting a connection to a Blue lyric made me deliriously happy

:D

i was singing "Carey" to myself all last night.

cdn't bring myself to wrestle with the album tho.

YOU'RE A MEAN OLD DADDY BUT I LIKE YOU

I've always thought that line was "Beneath the mantle of the moon." I've probably misheard a lot of lines on this album.

California is my eternal summer jam, even though I don't live there. So many subtle touches to the arrangement, i fuckin love it when the steel comes in at the very end.

("beneath a Matala moon" is the line in "Carey" that I'd thought was "beneath a map of the moon" when I owned the album on cassette

Always thought this was "the mantle of the moon"!

Love rereading this thread.

this is beautiful, paul horn with joni mitchell on piano and wordless vox

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

it's a scandal that "my old man" got no votes here. an amazing song which is better than the best songs of most musicians/bands.

the real scandal is the size of my bed and my frying pans

I had an old original vinyl copy of this that had clearly been played a thousand times, got it in college when I first discovered Joni's music. This year I got the Rhino remastered 180g vinyl, and while I didn't have a lot of faith in it actually being any better, the whole record just opened up for me all over again, like I'd never really listened to it before. You could isolate just about any single line from this album and people who didn't know it would be like ooohhhhh shiiiiii

that moment in "this flight tonight" when you, the listener, not just the narrator in the song, hear the band through the headphones, is SO. GOOD

hi Brad

a case of you is really fun to play on guitar, obviously not the same as a dulcimer, but those chords are so great. or at least the chords in this tab: https://tabs.ultimate-guitar.com/tab/joni_mitchell/a_case_of_you_chords_957219

brad otm - been loving that song for thirty years and that moment always puts a smile on my face

that + the "help me" callback to it in "the ballad of dorothy parker" = name a more iconic pair of musical moments between two discographies

funny how I listen to this album least of the ones in her major sequence but I'm a sucker for any description that takes me back

"my old man" getting nothing is bonkers. every point in song she says "my" is sublime. "he's the warmest chord i ever heard" is a killer line.

River 8
A Case Of You 7

Ugh. Richard topping ACOY, ok, but River? Mentalism.

Great album at least if you're focused on the heights of the highs, but I'll take the two at least as great follow-ups, thanks. Probably because I prefer Spring and Summer to Winter.

There's a big kerfuffle in the youtube comments for "This Flight Tonight" because apparently when landing a plane you put the flaps down, not up, and raising the flaps would send the plane crashing down noseward. Others in the thread say Joni got it right, or that it's impossible to raise the flaps at all. Any pilots here? I need to know....

Even though Joni's zenith was shorter than Dylan's (to say nothing of his multiple peaks) she really said shit that was out of his range. The emotional honesty of Blue - Hejira is a whole other level. And of necessity, cringe-inducing when we can't acknowledge our own feelings to that extent.

the wind is in from africa

the "jingle bells" interpolation in "river" is really annoying to me and always takes me out of it, which is a shame because the rest of it is so good

it turns out that this album is incredibly good

the line from "A Case of You" that wrecks me & has been doing so forever is right at the top. To begin your song with the line "Just before our love got lost, you said:" - sung like that, framed with that music -- is one of the most remarkable feats I know of. It's like, I'm helpless before I even get to know what's going on.

― a full circle lol (J0hn D.), Monday, December 7, 2009 1:13 PM (nine years ago) bookmarkflaglink

the entire first verse I have had on repeat for the past week or so. the opening line, yes — utterly wounding. my personal favorite bit has been the opening of the second stanza: “on the back of a cartoon coaster / in the blue TV screen light”. intimate, delicate, but assured all at once

good morning!!

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

and I mean, any song that quotes willy s and rilke, two of the seriously baddest mfers ever to put pen to pad, has got my attention

In her songs Joni's boyfriends come off like Jerry in Annie Hall: "It's like when I think of dying. You know how I would like to die? I'd like to get torn apart by wild animals" *rests bare foot against her breasts*

yeah the way she combines vulnerability with this surgical censure is so, so wonderfully painful to live within, I honestly don’t know of many artists I’ve felt are speaking to me like this