The specificity of her lyrics - the proper nouns and dialogue that charted her wishes, doubts, secrets and regrets, that supported her belief in romantic love as an intellectual endeavor, that positioned the unconventionality of her “dark cafe days” against, say, the “dishwasher and coffee percolator” of a man’s new life on “ The Last Time I Saw Richard” - created a mirror into which we can still look and feel seen. In a rare interview, Joni Mitchell talks with Cameron Crowe about the state of her singing voice and the making of “Blue,” 50 years after its release.Ī law of patriarchy has always been to sweep the details of women’s lives under the rug. Music Joni Mitchell opens up to Cameron Crowe about singing again, lost loves and 50 years of ‘Blue’ Her voice conducted: bringing light to “California” or indignation to “hate” or wings to “fly.” Mitchell confronted her own complexity and put it into every note. “I was used to being the whole orchestra,” she would later note. And as her words enacted a kind of emotional ekphrasis, getting to the core of her desires through precise details, her music itself - her prismatic piano playing, her narrative harmonies and the liminal charge of her dulcimer - told “Blue‘s” vagabond stories too: skating on a river, alone at sea, swaying with an unfamiliar breeze. She wrote, in a possible nod to Nietzsche (after whom she named her cat), of her very blood.

She twisted the knobs of the guitar until they sounded as inquisitive as she felt, and within her suspended chords, which she called “chords of inquiry,” she spoke straight to us. A lover of painting and jazz - of Miles Davis and Picasso, both of whom had their “Blue” periods too - she knew the potency of tone: of finding the correct register of a feeling. She honored emotions as sources of knowledge. Such was the restless dream of “Blue.” Mitchell sang herself into motion. “They’ve found it - then what?”Ĭould there be another way to regard the very nature of fulfillment? “I don’t think it necessarily means trading the searching,” Mitchell added. “Because they’ve come to enjoy the quest so much,” she said. She mentioned her soul-journeying friends - which included the Laurel Canyon rockers who helped inspire her to shake off what little was left of her folk dust, embrace her own sturdy rhythm and delightfully proclaim, “I want to wreck my stockings in some jukebox dive” - who would come to her and say “they FOUND IT!” Two weeks later, they’d be unsatisfied. implies always the search for fulfillment, which sometimes is more exciting than the fulfillment,” she mused in Sounds magazine. During the first print interview she gave following the 1971 release of her fourth album and masterpiece, “Blue,” she wondered, like she did in so many of her songs, whether it is actually possible to be both fulfilled and free. Joni Mitchell was, as ever, in a philosophical mood.

Sonic sings im blue