Traveling with Joni Mitchell's "Blue": Lots of Laughs

I am on a lonely road and I am traveling
traveling, traveling, traveling
Looking for something, what can it be? - Joni Mitchell, "All I Want"

Early on the lonely road of this pandemic, I picked up Joni Mitchell's Blue. It came highly recommended by a younger teacher, Justin Loudermilk, and by not one but two different NPR polls that put Blue as best album by a female artist. With that downer title, the eerie cover, and the obscure title song, I was a little apprehensive. But with this album, Mitchell has made a great traveling companion for me, out on my bike or lying awake at 2 a.m. The surprise is, she's funny.

[My appreciation for Joni Mitchell came decades late. Read about my discovery of her in my blogpost Just Songs: Discovering Joni Mitchell 40 Years Later. I respond to a group biography of Joni, Carole King, and Carly Simon in Carole, Joni, and Carly in Context]

The laughs begin with "All I Want." You expect the title phrase to go with some little thing, as, "All I want is" a poached egg, or maybe world peace. Instead, this song turns into a torrent of rhymed desires, some life-long and some immediate, some about herself, some about her companion: "I want to be strong, I want to laugh along," "to get up and jive... to wreck my stockings in some juke box dive," "to knit you a sweater...to make you feel better" and a rhyme that makes me laugh, "I want to shampoo you, I want to renew you...." She's pushing so hard, she could wear a guy down. She admits, with wise self-awareness, that sometimes "I hate you some, I love you some / Oh I love you when I forget about me." For her song about traveling, Mitchell drives the music with an ostinato on the hammer dulcimer, punctuated with off-beat chords.

Then Mitchell tosses wisdom and self-awareness out the window for a romantic fantasy, "My Old Man." Alluding to dance numbers in MGM musicals, she describes him as a "singer in the park, a walker in the rain, a dancer in the dark." When he comes home, she's there waiting for him to "take [her] in his arms" and "tell [all her] charms." It would be like a 60s sitcom marriage, except they "don't need no piece of paper from the city hall" to keep them together. And it's rated R: He's her "fireworks at night." (Thanks to my friend Susan for the insight that this song is fantasy. We've enjoyed the album together many times since the pandemic started.)

In other songs she see-saws between wanting to get away, and wanting to get back.

One fare-thee-well song, "Carey," with its companion piece "California," pulls us into the middle of a short-term relationship that seems to have been stormy, but a joy. The singer, restless on the Greek island Matalla, tells Carey that she has to leave, because

It's really not my home.
My fingernails are filthy, I got beach tar on my feet
And I miss my clean white linen and my fancy French cologne.

So she invites Carey out for a bottle of wine. "We'll laugh and toast to nothing and smash our empty glasses down." She does propose a toast anyway, to "this bright red devil who keeps me in this tourist town." In "California," she's so excited to be coming home from abroad that she'd "even kiss a Sunset pig" [note to non-boomers: that's 60s slang for L.A.P.D. - another of Susan's glosses], but she remembers fondly a "redneck" she met in Greece

who did the goat dance (prim little pause here) very well
he gave me back my smile
(sudden edge to the voice) but he kept my camera to sell

The "red, red rogue" was a good cook, too, she says, and she would have stayed on except for (rhapsodic swoop into her higher register) "California." A few years ago, NPR aired an interview with the eponymous Carey, who remembers working in a cafe in Greece when the famous Joni Mitchell, on retreat from her fame, presented him a tray she'd stacked with empties that he had failed to pick up from her friends' table. He dumped the tray at her feet. Start of a great friendship. It's fun to hear the details, but Mitchell's lyrics and the sheer joy of her playing and singing imply all that backstory. She sings, "You're a mean old daddy, but I like you," she pauses, "fine." So do we.

Even the down songs raise a rueful smile. In "This Flight Tonight," while the singer's back to traveling and wishing she weren't, she parodies pop music she hears on her headphones. Mitchell plays a mournful variation on "Jingle Bells" for "River," a song of regret at Christmas time: "I wish I had a river I could skate away on / I made my baby cry." The irony runs thick in "The Last Time I Saw Richard," who lectured the singer on romanticism, then "got married to a figure skater, ...bought her a dishwasher and a coffee percolator," and "drinks alone most nights."

There's another romantic comedy moment in "A Case of You." The man is over-the-top, saying he's "constant as the northern star." She shoots him down: "Constantly in the darkness? Where's that at? If you want me, I'll be in the bar." But then she's obsessing over him. Doodling on a coaster, she sketches his face, twice, inside a map of Canada. Cue a bit of her national anthem, "O Canada."

One song is more sweet than bitter, "Little Green." The singer seems to be instructing person or persons unknown who will be naming the child. "Call her green, and the winter cannot fade her," she sings. When "he," the father, moved to California, she wrote him about the child, "her eyes are blue"; he sent back a poem. There are a lot of epithets for a self-absorbed jerk like that, but she politely observes, "He's a non-conformer." The rest of the song is about hopes for this "child of a child" after the singer signs her away "in the family name." She feels "sad and sorry, but not ashamed" to provide the baby girl a "happy ending," with "icicles and birthday clothes and sometimes" -- she adds for mother and daughter, both -- "there'll be sorrow."

I knew when I started my journey with this album that I'd have to get over my distaste for the title song. I'd complained to my friend Justin how the melody meandered, how the lyrics were obscure, how Mitchell's voice, sustaining high notes, has wobbles so wide you could drive a big yellow taxi through them. He just smiled and said, "Give it time. I think you'll like it."

He's right.

To get it, I first had to discern the unusual form. It's ABBA. No hook. She varies every iteration of the word "Blue," something that bothered me, but now I appreciate how she never settles for mere repetition.

She seems to be calling someone "Blue" as a name, but maybe it's just a description. The lyric isn't so obscure when you appreciate the interlocking images of ocean, tattoo, song, pin/needle. In the first A section, she sings, "Songs are like tattoos." How? "Ink on a pin, an empty space to fill in." With "ink on a pin," the tattoo needle has "an empty space to fill in" on the skin; the songwriter fills in empty space on a page. The singer challenges the other person, "Crown and anchor me, or let me sail away," a call for commitment in a relationship, suggested by a common tattoo image [note to non-Boomers: anchor tattoos were common in the 20th century, at least]. She promises that "there is a song for you."

The "empty space to fill in" touches off the faster-moving B section(s) about spiritual emptiness of people in her time. Still playing with the ocean theme, she sings, "There's so many sinking now" as they try to get "through these waves." They use "Acid, booze and ass / Needles, guns and grass" -- "needles" and such, like the pin, may fill in the empty space. She doesn't seem so sure: "Lots of laughs, (pause) lots of laughs."

In the concluding A section, she comes back to the ideas of song and ocean, offering a shell as "your song from me," explaining, "Inside you'll hear a sigh, a foggy lullaby." I hear it as good-bye.

I found on the internet some bits that give me more to smile about. First, she said in reflection on Blue

"I came to another turning point — the terrible opportunity that people are given in their lives. The day that they discover to the tips of their toes that they're a------s. And you have to work on from there." "Why Joni Mitchell's Blue is the Greatest Relationship Album Ever" The Atlantic, February 2013

She told another interviewer that she was "miscast" when she wrote and sang "Both Sides Now" at a very young age. Hearing her song performed by Mabel Mercer gave her fresh insight on just how good -- and precocious -- the song is. (Mercer's recording of the song as a dramatic art song impressed me, too, around 40 years ago.) Mitchell approached Mercer, grand dame of New York nightclub singers, and told her what a revelation it was to hear her song performed by someone so mature. Mercer, at 70, took umbrage. Mitchell, telling this story at 70, laughed. (CBC, The National, June 11, 2013).

Then, there's the observation about that scary - looking cover. The last laugh is on me: It's a parody of Otis Redding's album Otis Blue.