BLUE

Raw, personal, and confessional – this album bleeds aching beauty. Forty years after the day of its release, Blue remains the ultimate singer-songwriter album.

Upon breaking up with her boyfriend Graham Nash in late 1970, Joni Mitchell escaped to Europe writing many of the songs that appear on this album. Most were recorded with very bare production values, just Joni on her piano or guitar. Some songs center around Graham, “My Old Man,” some around her ex-husband, “The Last Time I Saw Richard,” some hint at love interest James Taylor, “Carey,” and some revolve around her lost daughter, “Little Green.”

In 1979 Mitchell reflected, “The Blue album, there’s hardly a dishonest note in the vocals. At that period of my life, I had no personal defenses. I felt like a cellophane wrapper on a pack of cigarettes. I felt like I had absolutely no secrets from the world and I couldn’t pretend in my life to be strong. Or to be happy. But the advantage of it in the music was that there were no defenses there either.”

For the best sounding mastering of Blue look no further than the DCC CD, the original US Reprise vinyl, or the recent WB Rhino LP. Joni’s fourth record continues to place high in nearly every top 100 list of greatest albums. In January 2000, the New York Times chose Blue as one of the 25 albums that represented “turning points and pinnacles in 20th-century popular music”.

(Cover Photographer: Tim Considine)