The last time I saw Joni Mitchell perform was a year and a half ago at Boston's Symphony Hall, in one of her final appearances before she forswore the concert circuit for good. Fragile, giggly and shy, she had the most obvious case of nerves I have ever seen in a professional singer. Her ringing soprano cracked with stage fright and her frightened eyes refused to
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make contact with the audience. It wasn't until well into the second half of the concert that she settled down and began to enjoy herself; even then it seemed clear that she would have preferred a much smaller audience perhaps a cat by a fireside.
Joni Mitchell's singing, her songwriting, her whole presence give off a feeling of vulnerability that one seldom encounters even in the most arty reaches of the music business. In "For Free," her one song about songwriting, she declared that she sang "for fortune and those velvet curtain calls." But she long ago renounced the curtain calls; and her songs, like James Taylor's, are only incidentally commercial: Her primary purpose is to create something meaningful out of the random moments of pain and pleasure in her life.
In the course of Joni's career, her singing style has remained the same but her basically autobiographical approach to lyrics has grown increasingly explicit. The curious mixture of realism and romance that characterized Joni Mitchell and Clouds (with their sort of "instant traditional" style, so reminiscent of Childe ballads) gradually gave way to the more contemporary pop music modern language of Ladies of the Canyon. Gone now was the occasionally excessive feyness of "Rows and rows of angel hair/And ice cream castles in the air"; in their place was an album that contained six very unromanticized accounts of troubled encounters with men.
Like Ladies, Blue is loaded with specific references to the recent past; it is less picturesque and old-fashioned sounding than Joni's first two albums. It is also the most focused album: Blue is not only a mood and a kind of music, it is also Joni's name for her paramour. The fact that half the songs on the album are about him give it a unity which Ladies lacked. In fact, they are the chief source of strength of this very powerful album.
Several of the lesser cuts on Blue give every indication of having sat in Joni's trunk for some time. The folkie melody of "Little Green" recalls "I Don't Know Where I Stand" from her second album. The pretty, "poetic" lyric is dressed up in such cryptic references that it passeth all understanding. "The Last Time I Saw Richard" is a memoir of Joni's "dark cafe days," cluttered with insignificant detail and reminiscent of the least memorable autobiographical songs on Ladies. "River" is an extended mea culpa that reeks of self-pity ("I'm so hard to handle/I'm so selfish and so sad/Now I've lost the best baby/That I ever had"). Joni's ponderous piano accompaniment ve
