joni mitchell - blue - poll

it's not my favourite of her albums but i have periodic obsessions with it, one of which has just kicked in this week, and it's probably the album of hers most concerned with "classic songcraft".

best is so so tough but worst is definitely "my old man".

as far as i'm concerned anything from the title track through to the end is in the running for best track.

this is one of my favorite albums of all time, but I can't really vote in this poll. agree about "my old man," but having to choose between "all I want" and "river" and "this flight tonight" and "little green" and "a case of you" and for that matter "carey" would be like having to choose between six different friends who all at some point or other had saved you from drowning. just seeing the cover of this record fills me with gratitude & wonder.

A Case of You

I realized how great "Little Green" was only a few months ago; it's one sustained beautiful melody. The way she sings "crocuses" and "tomorrow" define sensitive singing.

"California" when I'm up and "The Last Time I Saw Richard" when I'm down.

Yes, very difficult to choose one from this, as I tend to listen to it in one big gulp. In my mind I have always connected this album with Blood on the Tracks, and in some ways the design of their covers expresses the differences between them. But if I'm ever in the mood to hear one track, it's probably "This Flight Tonight", which I also put on a lot of mixtapes back in the day.

Totally amazed when I discovered it was the same song as the Nazareth hit.

The Last Time I Saw Richard

This Flight Tonight -- love everything about that song

^^^^ yup

California, i love the lyrics

listening over and over again to this today - really love how scientific and precise her confessionalism is, like she's dissecting herself and her acquaintances, but without ever sacrificing emotional intensity - by the time the album ends you feel quite drained. i think i'm going for "the last time i saw richard". or "blue"...or "a case of you"...

and yeah "california" - love how it's about feeling at home somewhere you don't actually come from, that feeling of belonging which you almost have to be an outsider to know

I'll go for Carey for sheer pleasure, Little Green for lyrical elegance.

wtf @ My Old Man hate.

I think it's gotta be a Case of You, but agree with J0hn -- I have special associations with all of these so it's really hard to pick. ("You're in my blood like holy wine," is such an amazing moment.)

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.

"---well, surely you touched mine"

this is pert near impossible.

"River", because it's coming on Christmas.

'Carey'. Gah, I need to listen to this again, right now.

Little Green breaks my heart every single time.

Could vote for any of these, but I'll go with "River."

but when he's gone
me and them lonesome blues collide
the bed's too wide
the frying pan's too wide

those lines from "my old man" have always made so much sense to me. definitely one of the contenders for best song not only lyrically but also musically. what a sweet sad melody. it's less sentimental than "little green". but there is a down to earth feeling which makes "my old man" quite special in the course of songs of this album. "the last time i saw richard" is the next song on the subject of leaving. but choosing a best is something impossible, there will be a favourite for each day of the week, a fave for each month of the year, a fave for each decade in your life. did we ever have a thread about the one album you would take to the island?

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 (the fact that the song is not even about a relationship between the two only makes this more interesting).

"He drinks at home now most nights with the TV on and all the house lights left up bright." This could come off as really judgmental but it's not at all, the singer doesn't know if she envies Richard his escape or not, doesn't know if sitting in dark cafes is any more "real".

I'm sceptical of people praising Blue at the expense of other Joni albums but where I think it really is distinct is that it's an album where you can really feel her songwriting changing, reacting to external pressures placed on her. "Little Green" and "My Old Man" are both amazing but they're clearly older songs. With "This Flight Tonight", "A Case Of You" and "The Last Time I Saw Richard" in particular you can feel the whole approach change - that new sense of nervousness, that air of having chosen what she's about to sing at the very moment of singing it, the structuring of everything as a fraught conversation - is it you? is it me?

That's what makes it remarkable - not the confessionalism per se, but the way the album exposes a relationship between feeling and style, Joni having to find new ways to write songs in order to get across the cards James Taylor life has dealt her.

'carey' for when i'm in a good mood, 'richard' for when i'm not

dunno if i'd ever play this record when i'm in a good mood ...

"will you take me as i am, STRUNG OUT ON ANOTHER MAN"

booming lyric imo

I'm not sure I could say this about many other albums, but every time someone has quoted a lyric in this thread I've been able to immediately place it in my head, exactly what song it's in, what it sounds like, what I feel about it -- it's like I know every inch of this album intimately.

But the whole first verse makes up for that. xpost

I'll go for Carey for sheer pleasure, Little Green for lyrical elegance.

― Dorian (Dorianlynskey), Monday, December 7, 2009 5:55 PM (5 hours ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

"will you take me as i am, STRUNG OUT ON ANOTHER MAN"

booming lyric imo

^^^^

The Last Time I Saw Richard

All I Want - how could anyone turn down her persona in this song??

this is making me reconsider

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-q4foLKDlcE

^reconsider my vote that is...

All I Want - how could anyone turn down her persona in this song??

I love the plaintiveness of "I wanna have fun..." - you can almost here a bracketed "is that too much to ask?" afterwards.

it's less sentimental than "little green"

I don't think 'Little Green' is sentimental at all; the gap between the wishes expressed- 'there'll be icicles and birthday clothes and sometimes there'll be sorrow'- and the fact that the narrative voice knows fully the enormity of what is being done and size of the wound being consciously deliberately opened up for both mother and child, mocks the wish as it is expressed. It's an astonishing song because Joni accepts the size of what is being done and doesn't attempt to clothe it in sentiment: she explains the situation but doesn't excuse either herself or the father, but nor, in the strangest most devastating line, does she cloth herself in false guilt: 'you're sad and you're sorry, but you're not ashamed'.......

Even the way it ends, with the little riff repeated an uneven number of times, and the resolving chord coming in slightly off- time and too loud points to this lack of fit between the words said - between anything that words could say - and what is being done.

Could've sworn we did this already but "All I Want," Carey," and the title track are my shit. I went for "Blue" because I can never tell when it ends.

"River" is my shit too. And "Richard." And.........

i meant the melody not the lyrics of "my old man" being less sentimental than "little green's". the first chords of "little green" immediately stir up emotion in me, touch something deep inside whereas "my old man" has a more relaxed, more ripe, bluesy down-to-earth vibe.

i didn't know until recently that this album was a result of being bummed out over james taylor. understandable though. he was one hot junkie.

http://blogs.sltrib.com/burger/uploaded_images/James-Taylor-69374-14-757585.jpg

there's a recording of them playing live together at some point -- they sound great! Nice blend.

man that live youtube clip...wow....what a talent.

He is pretty dreamy. I think only a couple of the very final songs written are about Taylor though - most of the album predates it. "My Old Man" is about Graham Nash for instance (as a side note, when I first got into this album at about 13, it didn't occur to me that "old man" might be used to describe yr boyfriend, i thought it must mean "father", and was kinda confused by the song as a result). There's also an argument that "A Case Of You" is about Leonard Cohen, though I find that unlikely.

Heaps of For The Roses is about Taylor as well - "See You Sometime", "The Blonde In The Bleachers", "Lessons In Survival".

yeah i meant that the actual "blue" vibe of the album was cuzza james. not all the actual songs.

man, reading that hotel california book i was really tempted to start writing down whose songs were about who, but it was endless. joni in particular. but all those laurel canyon people really.

^loved that book. all the stuff about joni was fascinating

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.

no big news here to anyone who knows me but i put this album on today and wept uncontrollably through the whole thing

<3 this album and this thread

“Shittin’ in a park in Paris France”

This album is too much of a downer, prefer C&S

You're too much of a downer.

Little Green kills me every time.

River was the first Joni song that clicked with me after a friend put it on a mix cd. I struggled with her swoopy singing until then, but once it clicked I was fully on board.

In France They Shit On Main Street.

Perhaps a little too unfettered and alive

My dog does it, why can't I?