Blue

About

<b>100 Best Albums</b> For most, a greasy skillet is a nuisance in the kitchen sink, an upcoming chore. But for Joni Mitchell, it’s a ripe romantic metaphor in waiting. In “My Old Man,” the second track on her fourth album, 1971’s <i>Blue</i>, the singer-songwriter plays the piano while singing a sunny ode to the life she shared with a “singer in the park” and “dancer in the dark” who keeps her blues at bay. She boasts of their bond, as strong as a marriage without the formality of it (“We don’t need no piece of paper from the city hall”), and pays him one of the highest compliments a musician can bestow (“He’s the warmest chord I ever heard”). But the bridge of “My Old Man” offers a chilly, atonal changeup in the midst of Mitchell’s warm affection that bubbles up from a deeper, darker place than the pleasantries: “But when he’s gone, me and them lonesome blues collide/The bed’s too big, the frying pan’s too wide.” <i>Blue</i> is brimming with moments like this—otherwise pedestrian snapshots that Mitchell renders eternal. It’s not enough for her to say she’s lonely when her lover leaves; her ache is visceral, one that’s felt in the space he leaves behind in a tangle of bedsheets and the skillet that makes one breakfast instead of two. When Mitchell wrote <i>Blue</i>, she had long since moved on from the Saskatchewan stages of her early years and the folk scene of Toronto: Then three albums deep into her career, she had built an international following on the strength of her songwriting, her cloud-grazing voice, and the intimacy she conjures when she brings both to the microphone. Her preceding album, 1970’s <i>Ladies of the Canyon</i>, delivered the effervescent “Big Yellow Taxi,” one of her biggest hit, along with the moody “Woodstock” and sing-along classic “The Circle Game.” She became a Laurel Canyon fixture as the ’60s roiled into the ’70, as well as the favorite singer-songwriter of some of the world’s favorite singer-songwriters—from Graham Nash (her longtime love and likely muse for “My Old Man” and “A Case of You”) and David Crosby (who produced her debut album) to Leonard Cohen (another former flame who’s also rumored to have been the inspiration for “A Case of You”) and James Taylor, with whom she struck up a romance at the top of the decade. .

via Apple Music

The Clerk says

Start your shelf to read the full take →