FEATURE:
All I Want
Joni Mitchell’s Blue at Fifty
___________
I shall try not to repeat…
PHOTO CREDIT: Redferns/Getty Images
what I did with a recent feature about Joni Mitchell’s Blue turning fifty. It is such a remarkable and important album, I wanted to bring in some other features regarding the album and its story. I know that, on 22nd June, people all around the world will celebrate the genius fourth studio album from Mitchell. It is a flawless piece of work that hits you in different ways the more you listen. To me, Blue is one of the most personal and raw albums there has been. This article from Hotpress goes into the confessional nature of it. The interview was originally published in 2000. There are some interesting paragraphs and sections I wanted to pull together:
“Joni Mitchell may not have actually started the singer-songwriter phenomenon, but she sure as hell moved the genre centre stage. In terms of the "confessional" nature of the Lyrics, and the use of language that is so precise and so poetic there isn't room for a wasted syllable, her 1971 album Blue was a watershed.
"The emphasis on lyrics, I think, began with Dylan" she suggests. "That's where I picked up the gauntlet. I always wrote poetry, but I never liked poetry! I only wrote it when I was emotionally disturbed. Like, when a friend of mine in high school committed suicide. Or something like that. There were things that would make me go home and write. And then I'd put it in a drawer and, sometimes, when I had to turn them into English class, I would. And it was recognised, in High School, that I was a writer. But I never based my identity in that. Besides, I liked to dance! So, for a dancer, the Lyrics didn't really matter. 'Tutti Frutti' was fine by me" Joni admits that when Bob Dylan first arrived on the scene she was not impressed! Mostly because he seemed, to her, like little more than a copycat of Woody Guthrie.
"I have this need for originality," she explains. "It's actually in my stars. I was born on the Day of the Discoverer and that, I believe, had a profound influence on this need to be original. And also, because I've always been a painter, there is the painter's need to discover a new voice. Whereas musicians go into a tradition, with no need for discovery. But there came a point when I heard a Dylan song called Positively Fourth Street and I thought 'oh my God, you can write about anything in songs'. it was like a revelation to me."
Joni Mitchell suddenly becomes more contemplative. "But, seriously, I have felt the sting of religious hypocrisy. I was sick a lot, as a child. In Catholic hospitals. Yet, on the other hand, a Sister Mary Louise, once said to me 'you're exactly what I need'. She thought I was like a Thomas Merton, tried to get me to convert to Catholicism, thought I was divinely inspired until my work got quite carnal. But before that happened, I did play at Nuns' conventions for her and she really believed I had, as I say, some kind of divine spark."
Reflecting further on that "acid, booze and ass/needles guns and grass" line, does Joni understand why more and more people these days might turn to drugs for a "high", fearing that all true spirituality has gone from contemporary society?
"I understand," she says, softly. "I've never done junk but it is a kind of velvet blanket that has this internal comfort. Yet, better not to start. What if you liked it?"
Kilauren is the daughter Joni was singing about in 'Little Green' from Blue. "The time of her birth really was traumatic for me," Joni continues. "That's why I could identify with the women who were sent to Magdelene Laundries in Ireland, which I wrote about in that song for Turbulent Indigo." "But, to get back to why I wrote those songs on Blue, the point is that soon after I'd given up my daughter for adoption I had a house and a car and I had the means and I'd become a public figure. The combination of those situations did not sit well. So I kind of withdrew from music and began to go inside. And question who I was. And out of that, Blue evolved. I guess I was being a 'shrink' to myself! And if I, in the process of doing that, found something I thought was universal I was willing to open up at that level."
Joni Mitchell pauses. But only to take a drag from one of her seemingly ever present cigarettes. "There wasn't much illumination in psychology books at that time. I'm not sure there is now," she continues. "There was a lot of pigeon-holing and labelling, nothing very useful if you were really thinking. There didn't seem to be anything good to hang onto. Even the good books. And believe me, I searched through a lot of them. Dao-ism, what-ever. I became a seeker. I also was contemptuous of the kind of pseudo-spirituality afoot at that time which I found unsettling. So the point was that if I was to discover any illumination, it had to be backed up in the character of someone. I wasn't setting myself up as any sort of guru! But if I was to find a revelation, I felt it was more honest to present it, with a character, which I was drawing off myself. A character that was vulnerable and lost”.
There is no doubting how seminal and seismic Blue is. Since its release in 1971, it has influenced so many songwriters and resonated with so many people outside of music. As I have said before, the lyrics are personal to Joni Mitchell - though they also mean a lot to so many others. Not to mangle this article from Far Out Magazine, but they look at a 1990s interview (where she spoke about the acoustic guitar):
“There are two prominent motifs that run through Joni Mitchell’s iconic 1971 record Blue, an album that came out on this day some 49 years ago. The two profound themes are a perfect summation of Mitchell as a songwriter, firstly her intent to share herself more than ever before on this album and secondly to do it while using the often forgotten instrument the dulcimer.
It’s hard to imagine Joni Mitchell without her acoustic guitar in front of her. The image of Mitchell using the classic instrument to share her soul is so ubiquitous with her iconography that it is difficult to envisage her playing anything else.
However, Blue rests on one unusual instrument, the dulcimer. Mitchell picked up her first dulcimer in 1969 at the Big Sur Festival and instantly began playing it, though she admits speaking with Jeffrey Pepper Rodgers that she never really knew how to play one.
“I had never seen one played,” remembered Mitchell. “Traditionally it’s picked with a quill, and it’s a very delicate thing that sits across your knee. The only instrument I had ever had across my knee was a bongo drum, so when I started to play the dulcimer I beat it. I just slapped it with my hands.
“Anyway I bought it, and I took off to Europe carrying a flute and this dulcimer because it was very light for backpacking around Europe. I wrote most of Blue on it. Some of the album’s best songs were composed on the instrument including ‘A Case of You,’ ‘All I Want’ and ‘California’ and Mitchell’s connection to the instrument runs deeper still.
It can be quite revealing being very honest in a record. Maybe Mitchell, looking back, felt quite exposed. She revealed more about how hard it was to be so open on an album such as Blue:
Mitchell continued to shed light on the deeply personal moment of the record: “It begins with a sense of isolation and of not knowing anything, which is accompanied by a tremendous panic. Then clairvoyant qualities begin to come in, and you and the world become transparent, so if you’re approached by a person, all their secrets are not closeted.”
The ‘Big Yellow Taxi’ singer continued: “It makes you see a lot of ugliness in people that you’d rather not know about, and you lie to yourself and say something nice about them to cover it up. It gets very confusing. In that state of mind, I was defenceless as a result, stripped down to a position of absolutely no capability of the normal pretension that people have to survive.”
It was a state of mind that even concerned some of her closest friends who were worried Mitchell was giving too much of herself to the audience. “I played it for Kris Kristofferson, who said, “God, Joan, save something of yourself.” He was embarrassed by it. I think generally at first that people were embarrassed by it, that in a certain way it was shocking, especially in the pop arena.” It’s not an arena for truth in Mitchell’s eyes, “It’s a phoney business, and people accept the phoniness of it. It’s fluff, it’s this week’s flavour and it gets thrown out, and it isn’t supposed to be anything really more than that”.
IN THIS PHOTO: Joni Mitchell playing an Appalachian dulcimer in 1971/PHOTO CREDIT: GAB Archive/Redferns
Just before I round off, there is another article that I feel deserves some attention. Treblezine dove deep into Blue and how she progressed as a musician after its release:
“Blue isn’t necessarily flawless, but even the less dynamic moments speak to something vulnerable and real. In fact, the title track, “Blue” is one of the weaker moments on this wonderfully raw record. It reminds me of her earlier music actually—slightly unsure of where to go. Perhaps this parallels her physical situation of not knowing where to travel to next, or her just-ending relationship with James Taylor. Her voice, which can be so quiet and susurrus at times, is warbly and, as my mother says kindly, occasionally screechy. Mitchell—having used many of her paints as album covers—no doubt brings in some color symbolism here and there. “Blue,” with its elegant piano playing, is by no means a bad or poorly written song; it gets Mitchell’s point of feeling isolated across (though “River” also does this with great results), but it doesn’t soar above the sorrow. Yet, as she puts it herself, “sometimes there will be sorrow.”
After the success of Blue, Joni Mitchell delved deeper into jazz. Court and Spark and Mingus show a move away from folk melodies. However, their themes of love and everyday things like coin rolls or summer lawns or cars on hills or a brood mare’s tail can be traced back to her earlier projects. Her concerns with relationship dynamics or being a prisoner of the “free freeway” appear in Blue. In “A Case of You” she considers the idea of being constant as a northern star and makes a quip about being constantly in darkness. Tasting “so bitter and so sweet,” Mitchell is “still on [her] feet” even after heartbreak, disillusionment. In Mitchell’s music everything is about being connected, about how things join together and fall away. Her melodies come and fade and come again. Her style of playing and her way of layering her tunes with harmonies sung by herself is classic; it’s uniquely her own. Though she changes and shifts her musical aspirations, Mitchell is constant as a northern star in the way she employs music and verse to relay genuine emotion.
At 50, Blue might not have the same dynamic punch, the newsworthy drama of a recent breakup, but it still contains all the emotions and ideas that accompany a relationship in its final throes. Listeners can still learn something about life, about healing and living with grief without it taking over—which can feel especially poignant following a year like the one we just experienced. Blue is atmospheric at times, melody-forward at others, and her guitar and piano playing is top drawer, refined and thoughtful. Nothing is left to chance, even in her jazzier moments. Mitchell is a true pioneer, pushing boundaries and returning to old structures—like the faux “Jingle Bells” bit at the beginning of “River”—and Blue is a monument in her career. It is by no means an end, but it marks a peak, a high point where her talent mixed with raw emotion to create something special, something indelible”.
I would put Blue in my top-twenty favourite albums. I have always loved Mitchell’s songwriting and voice - though I think it is at its best on Blue. Some would argue that other albums are finer and a better representation of her immense talent. There is no denying the place Blue holds in the history books and what a remarkable work it is. Fifty years after its release, one still uncovers gems, layers and elements that they might not have heard on previous listens. Listening to it now, and the sensational Blue has lost…
NONE of its power.