“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. There are few albums that change your life. And she didn’t try a lot of different musical arrangements. And if you hear that guitar sound right now without hearing anything else, you would go, “Oh, that’s from ‘Blue.’” Let’s make it a little darker, warmer sounding.” And yet it was exactly right for what she was singing, and it cut through in this way that was definitive, and yet didn’t overwhelm her. If you were recording an acoustic guitar today, you would go, “Well, that’s too bright and it’s got no reverb or resonance on it. As James Taylor - romantically involved with Mitchell during parts of this album’s composition, and a guitarist on four “Blue” songs - told me over the phone, songs “sort of follow their own truth, which can be bent.” One tried and true way to diminish the power of a song, especially when it’s written by a woman, is to focus too finely on who it is “about.” And while Mitchell never tried to disguise the handful of famous ex-lovers and musicians who populate “Blue,” the context surrounding the album is merely a surface concern, distracting from the achievement of its song-craft and the oceanic force of its emotions. Part of the power of “Blue,” though, is that it sounds ill at ease with genre, transitional in every sense of the word - “only a dark cocoon before I get my gorgeous wings and fly away,” as she puts it on “The Last Time I Saw Richard,” an album closer that rings out with the inconclusiveness of an ellipsis. “Blue” and its follow-up, “For the Roses,” would mark Mitchell’s last stop before her full immersion in jazz, a kind of music that allowed her, later in her career, the true freedom she always desired. She felt confined by the fishbowl of celebrity - “I’m gonna make a lot of money, then I’m gonna quit this crazy scene” - but also by the formal structures of folk music, an art form she was beginning to consider too simplistic for her prismatic talents. All the while, as one does on even the most exciting vacations, she will wonder somewhere in the back of her mind what’s going on at home.īy 1971, Mitchell’s restlessness manifested in more than just her lyrics. Across this album she laughs with freaks and soldiers, and parties with fellow countercultural expats in Spain, France and Greece. “Alive, alive, I wanna get up and jive,” she declares, her dancing feet rarely touching ground. From the opening moments of “All I Want” - composed on an Appalachian dulcimer, which she carried on her European travels because it was more portable than a guitar - Mitchell is as fleet-footed and kinetic as one of Eadweard Muybridge’s horses. Perhaps because of its title, “Blue” has an unearned reputation for being morose or even depressive. She knew, too, that motherhood would have been too difficult to balance with her artist’s life, nakedly chronicling her decision to put her daughter up for adoption on the heart-stopping “Little Green.” She knew about sleepless, second-guessed yearnings for domesticity, and she knew about grandmothers kicking the doors off the hinges. Though she was just 27 when it came out, Mitchell had already done more than enough living to know how much suffering and sacrifice is required for a woman to rip up the traditional script and pursue freedom on her own terms. It is the story of a restless young woman questioning everything - love, sex, happiness, independence, drugs, America, idealism, motherhood, rock ’n’ roll - accompanied by the rootless and idiosyncratically tuned sounds she so aptly called her “chords of inquiry.” It is archetypal: The heroine’s journey that Joseph Campbell forgot to map out. Half a century later, Mitchell’s “Blue” exists in that rarefied space beyond the influential or even the canonical. “It’s like, I’d better not,” she concluded.Īnd so she left the loving comfort of her domestic life with fellow musician Graham Nash in Los Angeles’s Laurel Canyon neighborhood, booked a single plane ticket abroad and plunged into the uncharted blue - the cerulean melancholy of the album’s title track, the aquamarine shimmer of “Carey,” the frozen-over lazuline of “River” - all the while staining her hands with the indigo ink of poetic observation and relentless self-examination. “And I thought,” Mitchell continued, “maybe I am the one that got the gene that has to make it happen for these two women.” If she stayed put, she might end up kicking the door off the hinges, too.
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