joni mitchell - blue - poll

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.