Blue

by maggi dawn

I recently did that Facebook thing where you post the cover of ten albums that had a huge influence on you. Joni Mitchell’s Blue is one of those albums for me. The title song, along with several others, stand alone as memorable tracks. But to my ear, Blue is an album much more than Jonimitchellbluetanlabel150909_1it’s a song – the songs are so bonded together that they are more like movements of a symphony than individual songs. Blue was a life-changer for me: it changed the way I wrote, the way I played, and in some ways was the doorway to thinking about the whole of life in a different key. Joni is right – songs are like tattoos. They get under your skin and become part of you, and once they are there they are almost impossible to erase.

 

One of the things that makes the album so haunting and poignant is that in every single song, Mitchell tells us she is in one place, wishing she was somewhere else. She’s in Paris wishing she was in California, in Spain wishing she was in Paris, in Canada wishing she was anywhere else but here, in a plane wishing she was on the ground, in a cafe wishing she was in a house, in a bar wishing she was in Europe…  It’s this dislocated, alienated quality that gives the whole album a feeling of disruption and longing – the nervy edge that lies underneath the moments of wild joy in Carey, or deep introspection in Little Green.  What a wonderful album. My old vinyl copy I keep for sentimental reasons. The cassette I used to play in my van on tour a long time back has gone to the record store in the sky. Now, of course, even my CD version is beginning to look a tad dated, and it’s the iTunes version that goes with me. And I daresay I shall own it in another format or two more over the coming decades.  Along with Bach’s double, the Beatles’ Revolver, Morricone’s The Mission, and Paul Simon’s Graceland, Blue is one of those lifetime accompaniments.