1971: Joni Mitchell, Blue

By Ray Levy-Uyeda

Inward: How does she begin?

Outward: Quick strums on the dulcimer, a southern sitting stringed instrument, somewhere between a slide guitar and a banjo. The melody doesn’t begin until 15 seconds in, words follow, confessional and in that crisp high pitch Joni Mitchell sound. I am on a lonely road and I am traveling traveling traveling traveling. She travels four times, draws the a out in what feels like a wanting wonton vowel, and she tells us she does not know where she’s going. It sounds like she is smiling. 

1943, Joni Mitchell was born in Canada and suffered polio as a child. She spent much of her young years on her back, warned against moving (traveling traveling traveling traveling) and took up painting. She realized she could provoke images (I live in a box of paint). Even in elementary school she thought herself an artist. (Did you know what you were as a child? Or, did it take you longer to allow yourself The Artist?)

Inward: I sat down to write about Blue because it has touched me, as it has many others; I am not unique in my affection for this album or even in my loyalty to it. This is an album that I can only give my complete attention to; it’s not an album I listen to as I write, or consume as I respond to an errant email. It is a sitting by the window album. A looking at the wildfire smoke album. A thought exercise in the values of singularity album. 

I learned to feel with this album and so it feels like mine; no one else can have my emotions. (And then, I wonder, what is falling in love but letting someone else have one’s emotions? A question I’ve been pondering lately.)

Outward: I listen to the album twice in preparation for writing this, (whatever this may be, maybe it’s nothing) but of course I have listened to it many times before. 

Inward: I think I may be in love with Blue. Yes, Mitchell once compared feminism to apartheid, but in conducting a feminist reading of her album, I take what I want and critique the rest. I take All I Want. 

Outward: A year before Blue came out Mitchell performed a version of All I Want in which she omitted the traveling traveling traveling traveling and replaced the second line (Looking for something, what can it be) with Looking for the truth in men and in me. In the months between the 1970 rendition and the recording of the album Mitchell’s uncertainty of her search grew, so much so that in traveling’s stead she started to wander, that is, she traveled without destination (what is, a journey?).  

In this discarded version, Mitchell levels an accusation against her lover, claming, You’re not real. The line is later traded for, Oh I love you when I forget about me, making her the unreal thing. 

During a 1994 interview, 23 years after Blue entered the world Mitchell said to a white woman with an English accent, “I think people would like me to be introverted and bleed for them forever.” Prior to this, taking notes on the album so I can figure out what I feel so I can figure out what to write, I jot down, “She felt so we could feel.” I read Mitchell as an emotional martyr. I find this interview and I am flooded with shame.

Inward: I look for art that does my feeling for me, that tells me when to be angry or flooded or struck or broken down, that tells me when to take all of the water in my body and make it water outside my body. I reveal myself as a writer, a want-to-be poet who outsources the very things that make us writers not hypocrites: emotions. 

Outward: Google says that Mitchell wrote a A Case of You about Graham Nash or Leonard Cohen.

Inward: When I first heard the song I did not understand that you could buy (or drink) a “case” of wine, nor did I understand the metaphor of gulping someone down or the passive aggression of If you want me, I’ll be at the bar. What she means is, if you want me, I’ll be drinking. If you want me, I’ll be numbing myself. 

Later I get it; later I drink with lovers and then without; later I collapse with lovers; later I stay standing. 

Later I cannot hear the song without feeling it. Later still, I no longer listen for emotion but for the poetry of it. I’m learning to write poetry and drawing from teachers in every form. Later later later later. (Traveling traveling traveling traveling). All poetry is telling the truth, I think to myself, vowing to tell the truth so that I know how to write poetry. I cannot figure out, though, why does Mitchell’s seem the most true?

Outward: Just before our love got lost, you said "I am as constant as a northern star," and I said

"Constantly in the darkness Where's that at?” Darkness is a map Mitchell does not know how to read. Maybe she feels her way through.

Inward: I have a difficult time feeling without wanting to numb the feeling — alcohol, sex, television traveling away away away away from emotion — but once I figure out how to bleed for myself I would be eager to bleed for others. If, just to show them that I can. Bleeding for one’s art is somewhere tied into my body, in my thinking that is how great art comes into being. (An l? A d? It’s almost like the word bleeding bled itself out to create being.)

Outward: There are themes in the album: traveling (All I Want, California, This Flight Tonight) home, California (Carey, California, River, Little Green) bleeding, or, revealing oneself, suffering for others, suffering to be seen, pain becoming art (All I Want, A Case of You). The songs were written in Greece, and other places, all about Mitchell desiring a place her physical body was not. 

Inward: When I returned after my first semester away away away away at university I arrived to a California I’m coming home-not-home. The geography had not shifted (I looked at my ticket to confirm that I had arrived in the right “place”), and I recalled that tens of thousands of others wanted to call the Bay Area home as well, and they wanted their restaurants and their buses too. 

Some unknown group of people had begun construction on a mediocre apartment complex offering single bedroom units for $4,000, an operation approved by a body of people elected to make decisions in the best interests of us. Someone new had moved in next door. A coffee shop downtown no longer sold coffee. Later, because we bought our books on Amazon, from the warehouse in the town over, facilitated by the company somewhere in Palo Alto or the like, the used bookstore sold its bookshelves. 

Inward, an aside: How does she begin? How does she end? Oh and love can be so sweet Love so sweet.

Ray Levy-Uyeda is a writer based in the Bay Area, living on occupied Ohlone land. Her work focuses on justice and activism