joni mitchell - blue - poll

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

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

man what the hell, why does tim always say everything I want to say but better

<3

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

way to bury the lede in my heart, Joni.

fuck you k3vin it's Sunday night and I'm v. tired and still a bit hungover and you have me listening to this album again.

the line in this that has always killed me is "will you take me as I am, strung out on another man?"

yeah I think we talked about that line a lot upthread (a decade ago!).

Perhaps even more than the lyrics or the songwriting style (both of which take quantum leaps here), a real breakout development on this album is in Joni's singing, the way she delivers these arresting lines in these incredibly memorable sui generis ways that seem to echo down through decades to you so you just have to think of a song lyric and her timbre and delivery immediately appear in your head.

The album begins with such a statement of intent in this regard: "I am on a lonely road and I am traveling travellingtravellingtravelling", the repetition speeding up and tripping over itself like a colt that hasn't learnt how to canter yet (like maybe her car's about to run out of the gas so she's actually driving faster in a vain attempt to get to the petrol station first). Compare that to the incredibly composed, lyrical torrents of Hejira, where Joni seems to find endless new ways to describe that feeling of rootless, directionless wanderlust, and yet here she captures it all in the accumulation of a single word.

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.