On Joni Mitchell’s Blue… from the BLUE ISSUE by Kate Monro

In mining for these stories, in digging around the ether and asking people to talk about Blue, I started numerous conversations with people about their attachment to this record. But few followed through and committed their thoughts to paper.

Partly because writing isn’t the easiest thing to do, no matter how motivating the subject or skilled the writer. But mostly, I think, because Blue is such an intensely personal record that there is virtually no chance our response to it could involve the mundane or the everyday. The easy to reveal. Blue is a record that ties people, in the way an umbilical cord ties a mother to a child, to the guts of our lives. The raw. It might require a little emotional surgery to expel our stories and expose them to air.

But also, it’s Joni. This is a record that demands a meaningful response because Joni went all in. She didn’t hold back. She wasn’t tepid in her delivery. Your response needs to honour that. To contextualize, Joni revealed herself on the sparse, spare sounds of this album at a point in history when people didn’t really do that. It was the early 1970’s. Such naked revelation wasn’t the norm, and guess what? People loved her for it. Not just women, but men too. Joni gave everyone permission to be their vulnerable selves.

I can only tell you what I think. And I think she also cracked open the sweetness of feeling blue. The deep, if not consciously acknowledged thought that if we felt happy the entire time, the feeling would cease to have meaning. That we need to layer in the blue to survive. Blue is an intrinsic part of being human…and sometimes, there is almost a pleasure to that pain. A reminder of our fragility. These feelings add depth, understanding and empathy to the experience of being human. We need blue.

Finally, to finish on a contradiction, how loaded is the word blue? How eager are we to plant our interpretations onto Joni, to decide that this record was only ever about the painful parts of her life? When actually, as one writer points out, blue is the hottest part of the flame. There was a lot of heat in Joni’s life. This record is the purest expression of that.

Karen Elson

You can hear Joni’s blue longing throughout this record. Starting out with All I Want, she’s on a lonely road, she’s in love but it’s complicated.

She hates her lover and she loves him, the poignant line “Oh I love you when I forget about me” cuts like a knife in its brutal honesty. Little Green absolutely crucifies me. It’s about her long lost daughter Kelly who was put up for adoption when Joni was

a struggling artist back in Canada, hence the name green, a play on Kelly Green.

On Carey, the tone becomes lighter. Joni is singing about another romance in a far off place. It seems transitory and fleeting but she sings about it tenderly, the wind coming up from Africa, beach tar on her toes and copious amounts of wine at the mermaid cafe with her mean old daddy Carey.

As we move into Blue the album’s title song, her longing and reflections on this gilded era of music becomes apparent. Lots of laughs but the darkness underneath threatening to take them all into the deep dark blue, this song for me represents the duality in creative life. On the outside it can all look so beguiling but in the inner sanctum it can be truly lonesome and blue.

The summery California tinted landscape takes a departure on River. The piano dancing around Jingle Bells and Joni crooning about a winter landscape and how she wished she had a river she could sail away on, this song we feel her reflecting on her own personality, her omission of being selfish and hard to handle, and how she pushed her lover away by her behaviour is one we can all relate to.

Joni’s poetic language literally flows like a river in the entirety of Blue. I’m taken to far off places, invited in to view her dancing the night away, to see glimpses of her profound sorrow, get carried away with her romances and feel her joyful spirit radiating throughout the record.

Yet she never gives too much away. Just enough so that you can see glimpses, like peeking through a keyhole, so we can relate and mourn for our own sorrows and hers, she captures the colour blue perfectly... blue with sorrow, blue with joy, and it comes to mind that Joni’s blue indeed is the warmest colour.

Jordan Walker-Shuttlewood

Like most teenagers, especially those with no interest in following a crowd or who were simply ‘different’, finding an identity or a musical herd was mandatory. This normally comprised of music you felt you naturally identified with, in my case synth, alternative and punk; mixed with classics you just kind of borrowed from an elder sibling, parent or cooler friend...

I had the coolest older mate. She was about four years older, she had awesome coloured hair, smoked, drank and boys thought she was cool and interesting. So I borrowed a lot of her albums, to cool up.

The Police, Bowie, Blondie and The Smiths were a good start. Then I found Joni. The album was blue.

What a revelation. This album came out just before I was born, but like the other albums borne out of the decades of free love, free spirit and post war liberation of popular culture, I was bewitched by its simplicity and innocence, and have listened to it with the same affection since.

The thing with Joni is that she can pierce through the complexity of the human heart with such simple and humble verses. She observes raw emotions and comfortingly, she normalizes one’s frustrations about infatuation, devotion and loss. Because you never think anyone can understand you when you feel deep, angry, bitter, pathetic, helpless pain.

Music can heal pain. If the artist’s words are derived from similar experiences, it can be arresting. This is what Blue meant for me. And universally, I think anyone who listened to this album when it first came out will fish it out and listen to it again and again

- because as you grow older, the album becomes more and more relevant. It’s a staple album in the life lessons box of tunes.

Thank you Joni. I’m so glad I found you.

Hud

I had no idea about the album when it came out. Joni wasn’t on my radar given I was 10 years old at the time; I wasn’t exactly the target audience. She stayed off my radar as I became a teenager and got into Deep Purple, Led Zeppelin, and Status Quo. Punk happened and off I went merrily down that revolutionary brick road. All I knew about Joni was Big Yellow Taxi and a gawky Canadian singer.

I found Blue about seven years ago doing my YouTube jukebox thing where I follow whatever interesting tracks appear in my sidebar. I can’t remember what I was listening to when I saw Blue appear but I thought, hey, I really ought to give Joni a listen. So I did. I was captivated, and then I listened to the rest of the album and it blew me away.

It’s emotionally raw, but at the same time so tender and so honest. It speaks to the sadness in my soul, but not in a depressing way. I actually find it uplifting. It has warmth to it. It resonates with me and I feel very much like I’m listening to a kindred spirit singing her truth. I think it’s a very human record, because she’s laying her soul on the line. Nothing is held back or hidden. It’s all there; her emotion, her pain.

I think it’s as relevant now as when she wrote it. Living in today’s world is often a painful experience; we’re bombarded with so much violence. Blue is something that remains separate from that madness; it has a calm lucid centre, like a pool in a forest. A place to reflect and feed the soul.

What I find incredible is that in the great pantheon of music, Joni seems so underrated. Her talent is breath taking, the musicianship and the lyrics. Personally I think she’s one of the greatest songwriters of the 20th century. On a par with Dylan. But in terms of the soul she communicates, I think she is peerless.

Carey, by Jordan Turner

I am 22 years old, sitting in a dingy dive bar in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, chatting with a friend I made earlier that week in a hat shop. The music playing in the background had ended and seconds later, I was pulled from our conversation. The sound of a familiar strum from a guitar passed through the speakers enveloping me in a state of nostalgia before the first word was even sung.

Where I was didn’t matter at that moment. All I could see was my mother and her business partner, Katerina through my younger eyes. I would have been 7 or 8 years old, watching them sing the same song now playing at the bar. I remember fragrant aromas coming from our small kitchen as they talked about developing a business together. I remember candles being lit. I remember a blue CD cover with a woman’s face pictured, resting on our audio system. I used to sit at the dining table drawing and being enamoured by the electric energy they created together. These two women combined forces to create a bookstore that would become a place that people all over the world would talk about.

Everyone has experienced the frustration of forgetting a song name. You know what it is; you know the lyrics word-for-word. Queue the pantomime exasperation as you snap your fingers, frown and rummage around in your mental attic as you say ‘it’s on the tip of my tongue’. But the song eludes and tantalises you.

Thankfully, shazam exists. And my worries were put at ease when I saw

‘Carey, Joni Mitchell’ accompanied by the picture of the blue album cover pop up on my phone. I was so excited, I had to run back to my little room off Bedford Avenue to listen to the whole album.

Slowly, I journeyed through the songs, lying in bed staring into the bright darkness of a New York night. My memories were unravelling faster than I could process them. When I spoke to my Mum she explained that this album was one that her and Katerina would play during, what I would call one of the most testing moments of her life. She told me about being fired from her job after her boss found out about her plans to start a business, and the countless nights and weeks that Katerina and she had spent covered in book dust, sweat and tears pricing second-hand books for the bookshop.

She told me her worries about not having enough money to make school fees, let alone trying to put food on the table for a growing boy who ate twice as much as he does now. And yet she powered through, on a diet of coffee and Greek love letters, to the sounds of Joni Mitchell.

After our phone call, I walked around Williamsburg listening to the album once more through. Processing the sounds and words, melodies and guitar strums. I pictured my Mum surrounded by cobwebs and boxes, dust and drained coffee-cups, checking books and singing Blue. Cooking meals and singing Blue. Working through her worries, still singing Blue. I put myself in her shoes to feel what she must have felt.

The album finished. I had walked the city. I felt proud. I felt electric, possibly the same way my mother and Katerina might have felt as they discussed their business. Not only did I fall in love with the music of Blue as an adult, but it was a discovery of a chapter in my Mother’s book. One that would become a chapter in my own.

Who’d have thought it would’ve started with a mean old Daddy like Carey.

Jordan blogs at www.mrturner.com.au and his mum is the owner of Gertrude & Alice Bookstore in Bondi Beach, Sydney.

Laura

Sitting on my second hand black leather couch was a young man with sandy blonde hair, teaching me the names of the strings on my guitar to tune using harmonics. College in the late 1970’s/early 1980’s was routine and dry. Just a hurdle to get to real life, and this visitor at first seemed to be just another dry teacher. Everything changed when my girlfriend who was watching us requested he play ‘Carey’.

I hadn’t heard of Blue until then. The sounds of the song coming from his guitar and the words he sang were like a magnet. I learned to play and sing Carey way before I ever owned the album. Playing Joni’s songs prior to the Internet was frustrating with no access to her alternate tunings. ***

I had given up trying to force her sounds out of standard tuning. Tabs provided by members of the JMDL (Joni Mitchell Discussion List) eventually made playing Joni’s songs a whole new world.

One of the first I learned was ‘This Flight Tonight’. The song practically rolled off the guitar in alternate tuning. Little Green became another favourite to play and sing while the link of the song to ‘Circle Game’s’ tuning and lyrics moved the album Blue beyond its borders.

Blue has much more colour and emotion to it than just blue.

The warm feeling of home in California goes with the sun giving its yellow and orange to the blue sky. There is excitement in the light green birth of spring and the Northern Lights. Beyond the lonely road is the rainbow of lively freedom and fun in dancing and shampooing a lover’s hair.

The album seems built on paradox. Maybe the colour blue is a paradox itself, being the colour of the hottest part of the flame and also of ice.

** There are 6 strings on the guitar, the thickest being closest to the head of the guitarist, the thinnest being close to the foot. They are tuned in an agreed upon way called ‘standard tuning’. Joni not only came up with alternate tunings but also a way to tune just the thick string to the piano and then count up the frets to tune the next and then the next.

It is hard to explain without showing you on a guitar. So let me say this: standard tuning is like primary colours; whereas, alternate tunings are like mixing primary colours to create new colours that the artist likes. Joni’s unique sound is because of her unique alternate colours. Sometimes when I ‘get’ a song, meaning that I can finally play it, I am so filled with emotion, I start to cry. There is so much more beauty in Joni’s songs than can be sensed by just hearing them.