issue eight: on joni mitchell's blue
i am on a lonely road and i am travelling, travelling, travelling
The true triumph of Joni Mitchell’s Blue is not the evocative storytelling, the intriguing chords, or the dulcet melodies issued with characteristic aplomb. It is the force of emotion the singer exerts on the listener, pulling them into a world of endless streetlight-soaked vacations and dark cafés where strangers reveal your fate. The music contained between the airy opening chords of “All I Want” and the gentle fade of “The Last Time I Saw Richard” is some of the most meaningful work ever written. I think so because I have spent endless hours with this record, turning it over and making it quiet between my hands, returning to its comforting familiarity time and time again. While the eventual For the Roses and Hejira suggest a beautiful escape through travel, Blue is always headed home: back to California, back to the man who keeps your sadness at bay, back to Detroit in 1968, accepting that all romantics meet the same fate. If you’ve been in love, you should listen to this album—and if you’ve wanted to be in love, you need to listen to it.
There is an unflinching honesty contained in this album’s personal lyrics, one that allows the listener to turn their head back with an unerring sense of déjà vu, relieved to discover that someone else has experienced the same sorrow they feel. Humans are such a lovely lot; even knowing that someone else went through the same thing makes our burden lighter. My little sister often seeks reassurance that her struggles are common, and when she’s obtained proof that the mole is a natural development or that a bad grade on a French test is a familiar disappointment, her relief is plain as day. When I listen to the section of “River” where Joni proclaims that she’s “so hard to handle, [she’s] selfish and [she’s] sad”, I feel the same balm of recognition. My fears are more manageable because she wrote about them. The song is in equal part a balm to my anxiety and a warning sign—she lost the best baby she ever had, you know.
It seems to me that most people spend a long time looking for love only to shy away from it once they have it. In the joyous opening track “All I Want”, Joni sings that she wants her lover to bring out the best in her and her lover (a sweet sentiment, one that touches the heart without verging on the saccharine), but give her a couple tracks and she’s singing about rivers to skate away on. There is no love song without the aftertaste of trepidation, without sweet opening chords that melt into an exhausted refrain of mutual pain. It’s tiresome to be a cynic, but it’s painful when it seems so realistic. One of the most devastating aspects of Blue as an album is Joni’s resignation to things remaining the way they are—her old man will always leave her to collide with the lonesome blues, no one will give peace a chance, and yes, all romantics meet the same fate someday.
What undercurrent defines Blue more than the fear of love’s loss? The A-side is buoyed by endless invocations to the lover, hopes for the future that bleed into the repeated prayer on “California” where Joni wonders whether her object of desire will accept her as she is, a product of her past, tied to the people she used to love. While it is a fool’s errand to assume a linear storyline on any one of her albums, much less a definitive one, there can be no doubt that the songs here present a narrative of love and loss, a cyclical conversation of pain. Perhaps the only answer we attain during this journey comes during the triumphant and iconic “A Case of You”, where Joni proudly declares that she could drink a case of her lover and still be on her feet. Despite the suffering she has endured, she knows it will not be the end of her. That is the element of this tragic love song that makes it one of the greatest ever written.
We begin the album travelling on a lonely road, and we end it in Detroit, sharing our fears for the future with Richard. “The Last Time I Saw Richard” is an understated masterpiece, the lyrics filled in by a poignant conversation while Joni eloquently paints the picture of the scene around her and of the man she is with. The song is profound because minor, intimate details (“he bought her a dishwasher and a coffee percolator”) are tucked between sweeping generalizations about the type of person the album describes (“all good dreamers pass this way someday”). Indeed, that last lyric has become almost meta in the years since the album has been released. All good dreamers pass the way of Joni Mitchell’s Blue, entranced by her narration and overtaken by the emotions her lyrics unearth. This seminal album has haunted the dreams of art that came after it as an influence, bleeding into more modern staples of pop culture than we can count. Perhaps the home that the weary traveller captured in its lyrics needs to find is in its continual re-interpretation—which is to say changing, which is to say pulling off the highway and going home.
If it were that way to begin with, however, it wouldn’t be Blue at all.