I came to Joni Mitchell’s Blue late. I guess it’s because I came to Joni late – most pop music wasn’t really on my radar growing up.
Twenty years ago, I bought a CD of Blue based on friends’ enthusiasm, and having heard her jazz album Both Sides Now live with the Detroit Symphony Orchestra. We started listening shortly before moving to Miami for grad school.
This isn’t a musical appreciation of Blue. You can find those everywhere, as we just celebrated its 50th anniversary. In one sentence: it’s a brilliant, magical album of musical and lyrical sophistication.
This is an appreciation for how great music can become personal, can carry additional meanings. Blue, for us, became forever associated with moving, because of all those listenings as we packed and drove across the country. When, two years later, we were moving again, Blue came back on, and the personal meaning was further cemented. Even today, over a decade since my last move, when Blue comes on I feel that need to pack boxes and rent a truck. Even now, when I need to tidy my office, it’s as likely as not that Blue is coming on.
Perhaps I could think of this as a flaw, not a feature. I’m hearing things that Joni didn’t put into Blue, after all. But as I see it, only a great work of musical art is powerful enough to carry that extra weight. Her music was able to take on additional meanings, and that made the music even more powerful for me.
Thanks, Joni, for writing such powerful, beautiful, sustaining music. I couldn’t have made it through the last twenty years without it.