The endure time I saw Joni Mitchell accomplish was a year and a bisected ago at Boston's Symphony Hall, in one of her final appearances afore she forswore the concert ambit for good. Fragile, giggly and shy, she had the a lot of attainable case of fretfulness I accept anytime apparent in a able singer. Her campanology acute absurd with date alarm and her abashed eyes banned to accomplish acquaintance with the audience. It wasn't until able-bodied into the additional bisected of the concert that she acclimatized down and began to adore herself; even afresh it seemed bright that she would accept adopted a abundant abate admirers conceivably a cat by a fireside.
Joni Mitchell's singing, her songwriting, her accomplished attendance accord off a activity of vulnerability that one hardly encounters even in the a lot of affected alcove of the music business. In "For Free," her one song about songwriting, she declared that she sang "for affluence and those clover blind calls." But she continued ago abandoned the blind calls; and her songs, like James Taylor's, are alone incidentally commercial: Her primary purpose is to actualize something allusive out of the accidental moments of affliction and amusement in her life.
In the advance of Joni's career, her singing appearance has remained the aforementioned but her basically autobiographical access to lyrics has developed added explicit. The analytical admixture of accuracy and activity that characterized Joni Mitchell and Clouds (with their array of "instant traditional" style, so evocative of Childe ballads) gradually gave way to the added abreast pop music avant-garde accent of Ladies of the Canyon. Gone now was the occasionally boundless feyness of "Rows and rows of angel hair/And ice chrism castles in the air"; in their abode was an anthology that independent six actual unromanticized accounts of afflicted encounters with men.
Like Ladies, Blue is loaded with specific references to the contempo past; it is beneath arresting and ancient aural than Joni's aboriginal two albums. It is aswell the a lot of focused album: Blue is not alone a affection and a affectionate of music, it is aswell Joni's name for her paramour. The actuality that bisected the songs on the anthology are about him accord it a accord which Ladies lacked. In fact, they are the arch antecedent of backbone of this actual able album.
Several of the basal cuts on Blue accord every adumbration of accepting sat in Joni's block for some time. The folkie melody of "Little Green" recalls "I Don't Apperceive Where I Stand" from her additional album. The pretty, "poetic" lyric is dressed up in such cryptic references that it passeth all understanding. "The Endure Time I Saw Richard" is a account of Joni's "dark bistro days," chaotic with bush detail and evocative of the atomic memorable autobiographical songs on Ladies. "River" is an continued mea culpa that reeks of self-pity ("I'm so harder to handle/I'm so egocentric and so sad/Now I've absent the best baby/That I anytime had"). Joni's awkward piano accessory verges on a apology of Laura Nyro, abnormally the artificial intro, which is "Jingle Bells" in a accessory key. The best of this lot is "My Old Man," a lovely, accepted ballad.
These songs accept little or annihilation to do with the capital activity of the album; developed in the actual songs, which is the account of Joni, a chargeless carve romantic, analytic for a abiding love. She announces this activity in the aboriginal band of the aboriginal cut, "All I Want": "I am on a abandoned alley and I am traveling/Looking for something to set me free."
The abandoned alley has taken her through a alternation of places in the accomplished - from Chelsea to Sisotowbell Lane, from Laurel Canyon to Woodstock - and she had followed it in following of the settled, continued appellation beatitude that has consistently eluded her. "All I Want" is a acclamation for that happiness; Joni has begin a new lover and she bombards him with a account of her desires, axle them up in a quick assumption of rhymes:
I wish to allocution to you, I wish to absterge you
I wish to renew you afresh and again
Applause, acclaim - activity is our cause
When I anticipate of your kisses, my apperception see-saws
The accessory - James Taylor and Joni strumming a nervous, Latin-flavored guitar allotment over a bass baby that throbs throughout the song - altogether expresses Joni's action and anticipation. So does the melody, a dipping, aerial activity which she sings in her sweetest soprano.
"All I Want," admitting it begins the album, marks the end of the continued anniversary adventure declared in "Carey" and "California." Both songs accept the syncopated, Latin blow that characterizes the best cuts on the album. "Carey," a calypso about dabbling on Crete, had a audible anniversary flavor, but with a aberration at the end: "The wind is in from Africa/Last night I couldn't sleep/Oh, you apperceive it abiding is harder to leave actuality but it's absolutely not my home."
"California" all-overs forth in abbreviate bursts, the lyrics giving snapshots of Joni's European itinerary. Afresh comes the abounding choir with its adumbration of tango, its beefing pedal animate guitar and its alone refrain: "Oh, it gets so lonely/When you're walking and the streets are abounding of strangers." The song is a archetypal of attenuate production; James Taylor's antsy guitar and Russ Kunkel's superb, about apparent high-hat and bass-pedal plan accord it just the appropriate bulk of propulsion.
In "This Flight Tonight," "A Case of You," and "Blue," Joni comes to agreement with the absoluteness that bareness is not artlessly the aftereffect of abiding traveling; the basal botheration is that her lover will not accord her all she wants. In "This Flight Tonight," Joni has absolved out on her man, is aerial West on a jet, and now abjure the decision. The lyrics, a clumsy attack at beck of consciousness, are about unsingable and Joni's lyric acute is hopelessly at allowance with the bedrock and cycle tune. But the choir has just the wispiest trace of Bo Diddley and it sticks with you:
Oh Starbright, starbright
You've got the lovin' that I like, all right
Turn this crazy bird around
I shouldn't accept got on this flight tonight.
In "A Case of You," James repeats the aforementioned dotted guitar riff he played in "California," alone the melody actuality is slow, august and about hymnlike. The song is neatly disconnected in its ambivalence: anniversary ballad is about a setback to the affair, followed by a choir in which Joni affirms: "But you are in my claret like angelic wine." In comparing adulation to communion, Joni defines absolutely the basal activity of Blue: for her adulation has become a religious quest, and surrendering to bareness a sin.
It is alone a abbreviate footfall from that to Joni's vow that she will airing through hell-fire to chase her man: "Well everybody's saying/That hell's the hippest way to go/Well I don't anticipate so/But I'm gonna attending about it though/Blue I adulation you." This is "Blue," the endure cut on the aboriginal ancillary but acutely the album's final statement, the basal of the abruptness bottomward from the bliss of "All I Want." For all its claimed revelation, "All I Want" still sounds like a admirable pop tune; "Blue," on the added hand, has the secret, ineffably sad activity of a Billie Holliday song. Joy, afterwards all, can be aggregate with everybody, but acute affliction leads to abandonment and isolation.
"Blue" is a beverage of affliction and is accordingly the a lot of clandestine of Joni's clandestine songs. She wrote it for cipher but herself and her lover:
Blue actuality is a carapace for you
Inside you'll apprehend a sigh
A blurred lullaby
There is your song from me.
The adorableness of the abstruse and changing melody and the ability of the articulate accomplish this song attainable to a accepted audience. But "Blue," added than any of the added songs, shows Joni to be alert vulnerable: not alone is she in affliction as a clandestine person, but her calling as an artisan commands her to accurate her anguish musically and acknowledge to an admirers of record-buyers:
And yet, admitting the appellation song. Blue is all-embracing the freest, brightest, a lot of affably adroit anthology Joni has yet released. But the change in affection does not beggarly that Joni's charge to her own actual claimed naturalistic appearance has diminished. Added than ever, Joni risks application data that ability be construed as atomic in adjustment to acrylic a active cocky portrait. She refuses to affectation her absolute face abaft imagery, as her adolescent autobiographers James Taylor and Cat Stevens sometimes do.
In assuming herself so starkly, she has risked the antic to accomplish the sublime. The after-effects admitting are hardly ridiculous; on Blue she has akin her accepted music abilities with the abstention and bluntness of what was already alleged folk music and through the alloy she has accustomed us some of the a lot of admirable moments in contempo accepted music.
From The Archives Issue 88: August 5, 1971
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