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Before embarking on the pivotal transcontinental journey that would inspire so much of her one-of-a-kind 1971 album, “Blue”—released 50 years ago this week—Joni Mitchell considered her grandmothers. Mitchell recalled in a 2003 documentary, One of them “was a frustrated poet and musician, I kicked the kitchen door off the hinges on the farmhouse.” The other one cried for the last time in her life at the age of fourteen behind a barn because she wanted a piano and said, ‘Dry your eyes, you silly girl, you’ll never have a piano. ”
“And I thought, ‘Maybe I’m the one who got the gene that should happen to these two women,'” Mitchell continued. If it stays in place, it could end up kicking the door off the hinges as well. “It’s like, I’d better not,” she concluded.
And so she left the adorable comfort of her domestic life with fellow musician Graham Nash in the L.A. Laurel Canyon neighborhood, booked one plane ticket abroad and plunged into the unknown blue—the light sadness of the album’s title song, the aquamarine flicker of “Carey,” the frozen lapis lazuli of “River”— All the while she smears her hands in indigo for poetic observation and relentless self-examination.
Half a century later, Mitchell’s “blue” exists in that percolating space beyond influence or even legal. It’s an Archetype: The Heroine’s Journey That Joseph Campbell Forgot to Draw. It’s the story of an anxious young woman who questions everything—love, sex, happiness, independence, drugs, America, idealism, motherhood, rock ‘n’ roll—accompanied by the particularly rootless and tuned voices that she aptly described as “question strings.”
Although she was only 27 years old when it was released, Mitchell has already done more than enough living to know how much suffering and sacrifice it would take for a woman to tear up the traditional script and seek freedom on her own terms. She knew of the sleepless yearning, the longing for home life, and she knew grandmothers kicked doors off the hinges. She also knew that motherhood would be very difficult to balance with the artist’s life, as she shamelessly dated her decision to put her daughter up for adoption in the heart-stopping Little Green movie.
But the flip side of these feelings is that a woman who was born Roberta Joan Anderson and raised in Saskatoon, Saskatchewan, has undergone the kinds of things that are confined to most people’s dreams. I learned the feeling of flying.
Perhaps because of its title, “blue” has an unearned reputation for being gloomy or even gloomy. it’s not. From the opening moments of “All I Want” — composed on a hook from the Appalachian Mountains, which she carried on her European travels because she was more portable than a guitar — Mitchell has been fleet and kinetic like one of Edweard Muybridge’s horses. “Alive, alive, I want to get up and jump,” she declares, her dancing feet rarely touching the ground. “Blue” is the film of his journey of adulthood. Across this album, she laughs with the freaks and soldiers, and celebrates with fellow counter-culture expats in Spain, France and Greece. All the while, as one does on even the most exciting of vacations, she will be wondering somewhere in the back of her mind what is going on at home.
By 1971, Mitchell’s concern manifested itself in more than just her lyrics. She felt trapped in the celebrity aquarium—”I’m going to make a lot of money, and then I’m going to stop this crazy spectacle”—but also because of the formal structures of popular music, an art form that I began to think of as also simplified to her prismatic talents. “Blue” and its follow-up, “For the Roses,” marked Mitchell’s last stop before her full immersion in jazz, a type of music that afforded her, later in her career, the true freedom she had always desired. Part of “blue’s” strength, though, is that it seems uncomfortable with the genre, my transition in every sense of the word – “just a dark cocoon before I get my great wings and fly away,” as “The Last Time I Saw Richard”, a closer album, puts it The ellipsis is not exhaustive.
One tried and true way to reduce the power of a song, especially when written by a woman, is to focus very precisely on who she is “about.” And while Mitchell never tried to hide the handful of famous ex-lovers and musicians who inhabit the song “Blue,” the context surrounding the album is merely a superficial concern, distracting from the realization of his songmaking and the peripheral power of his emotions. As James Taylor — who was romantically involved with Mitchell during parts of the composition of this album, and guitarist on four “blue” songs — told me over the phone, the songs “kind of follow their own truth, which can bend.”
Taylor said he knows better than to think that songs are “about” someone: “The song is really about itself.” A few minutes later, though, he vividly remembers the dashing plane ride from Boston to Los Angeles that he believes inspired Mitchell to write “This Flight Tonight,” leaving him alone on the East Coast and unsure of their future. Inclusivity and a highly specific biography coexist in this record – not mutually exclusive. “Blue” is broad enough to assume multiple realities.
“I was asking myself for more honesty and depth,” Mitchell said in the documentary, the kind that goes into people’s lives and “makes the lamps go off in their heads, it makes them feel.” This kind of work, she said, “gets on the nerves of their lives. And in order to do that, you have to get on your nerves.”
Over the past five decades, ‘blue’ has been passed down like a ceremonial ritual, a family heirloom, and all-around balm for the harshest of heartbreaks. To celebrate its 50th anniversary, The New York Times asked 25 artists and writers to speak about its enduring power. These are edited excerpts from the conversations. – Lindsey Zoladze
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