Issy Marcantonio discusses her favourite autumnal album.
I first encountered Joni Mitchell’s fourth album, Blue, towards the end of my time in high school; a time of transition from a youth spent racing towards earning perfect grades to entering the – as yet unknown – sphere of
Joni Mitchell’s first three records established her as a commercially successful folk artist, but Blue marks a different shade of success. During the period Mitchell was incubating Blue in her minds-eye she set about travelling Europe and reflecting on her life as it stood. The result was a painstakingly intricate tapestry of loss, hope, and sacrifice stretched out across the album’s ten tracks.
a painstakingly intricate tapestry of loss, hope, and sacrifice stretched out across the album’s ten tracks
The record opens with the track ‘All I Want’, Mitchells’ wanderlust is evident in her delivery of the opening line “I am on a lonely road and I am travelling, travelling, travelling”. Her voice cascades like a waterfall across the sparse track. Most of the songs on Blue reflect this desire to journey, leave, and occasionally to return home. It’s an attitude that embodies the constant departure of autumn, the melancholic season that decks our environment out in an assortment of hues.
Each song on Blue is simply arranged on the piano, acoustic guitar, and Appalachian dulcimer. Yet, accompanied by Mitchell’s vocals which swoop and soar across the instrumentation, these songs become stamped upon the mind of the listener. On the title-track, Mitchell’s falsetto croon warns us, “songs are like tattoos you know”. Her songs are certainly “ink on a pin/underneath the skin” in the playlist of my autumnal mind and of many others who return to this album, yearning for Mitchell’s wisdom.
Blue weaves together from Mitchell’s travelogue a search for direction and belonging, a universal desire, that Mitchell constructs from the mundane and the exceedingly romantic, alike. There is an intimacy present in this album, particularly on tracks such as ‘A Case of You’ and the album’s finale ‘The Last Time I Saw Richard’. They offer glimpses into Mitchell’s personal love life, glimpses that are as private as a love-letter she may have penned. The lyrics “Love is touching souls/ surely you’ve touched mine ‘cause/ part of you pours out of me/ in these lines from time to time” from ‘A Case of You’ display Mitchell’s vulnerability, but also her genius as a song-writer as each line is composed by weaving poetry and prose.
Blue weaves together from Mitchell’s travelogue a search for direction and belonging, a universal desire
In a 1979 Rolling Stone interview with director Cameron Crowe, Mitchell characterised her state of mind in making Blue as “There’s hardly a dishonest note in the vocals. At that period in my life, I had no personal defences […] But the advantage of it in the music was there were no defences there either”. Mitchell herself was attuned to the interconnectedness of her pain and her joy, the myriad forms of pain and pleasure which found a home in her life. The emotional transparency of Blue encapsulates this attitude and does so with a gusto unmatched by any of her contemporaries.
Mitchell’s Blue is a cocoon of sorts. We spend autumn in bundling up in blankets, sipping hot beverages, and cosying up against the ever-tumultuous weather that reigns outside, creating our own corner of solitude. Joni is a friend to us all in this hibernation period. She reminds us that isolation and autumn are “only a phase, these dark café days!” and we would do well to listen to her and reflect on our own state of being and the momentary nature of the every-day as we enter this strange and magical season.
