“The Blue album, there’s hardly a dishonest note in the vocals. At that period of my life, I had no personal defenses. I felt like a cellophane wrapper on a pack of cigarettes. I felt like I had absolutely no secrets from the world and I couldn’t pretend in my life to be strong. Or to be happy. But the advantage of it in the music was that there were no defenses there either.”
There have been few albums in my life that have impacted my artistry and innermost landscape as much as Blue by Joni Mitchell, an album that came out twenty-five years before I was born.
I was familiar with Joni Mitchell’s music in late high school/early college (actually, my junior year of college I recited “Both Sides Now” as my all-time favorite poem in a creative writing course and proceeded to cry halfway through it Ten Things I Hate About You style in front a guy I really liked, and I think he was put off by that, but if he didn’t fuck with getting emotional over “Both Sides Now,” then we clearly weren’t meant to be in the first place), but the real reason that I got crazily into Joni’s music—Blue specifically—embarrasses me a little. My senior year of college I watched Practical Magic (which is an incredible movie, but it still doesn’t warrant having such an alarmingly stellar soundtrack). In Practical Magic, there is a scene in which Nicole Kidman’s character is driving, singing alone in her car to “A Case of You”—
go to him, stay with him if you can, but be prepared to bleed
and at the time I was dating someone who made me feel like that—a love that is so gut-wrenching, likely unhealthy and unsustainable, yet magnetic and intoxicating—and I had never heard a song that acknowledged a relationship’s intensity, turbulence, and heartbreak while sounding so eloquent, camouflaging pain into a love song.
I dove into the record headfirst the moment the end credits rolled on Practical Magic.
Blue is visceral, emotional, transparent. It’s a gut-punch to parts of you that you might not have known you had. It’s cathartic in an unworldly way that turns something so bleak into something beautiful without trying to turn anything into hope or joy—it just allows you the space to feel ugly feelings without guilt or shame. The minimal production, just Joni at the forefront, makes you feel like you’re sitting on her floor as she sits on the couch in her living room, threading together what feels like your own isolated emotions with hers into an endless quilt (or an endless river iced over to skate away on) that covers the complex and frequently ugly experience of being a human being.
At its core, Blue is an ageless testament to the complexities of love and being—an oscillation between regret and desire, destitution and hope, memory and reality, strength and fragility, youth and age, hate and love, callus and vulnerability.
Supposedly when Kris Kristofferson first heard Blue, he said, “Joni! Keep something to yourself!” and I am glad that she didn’t. Anything less vulnerable would have been a disservice to her—and to us.
Cheers to fifty years. I could drink a case of Blue and still be on my feet.
thank you joni, for everything.
—c