Joni Mitchell
Blue
Play Blue
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MOG Editorial Review
With just a guitar, a piano, and her lush, airy voice, Joni Mitchell hits harder than other folkies armed with entire orchestras. The Miles Davis-inspired Blue stands as Mitchell's greatest achievement, a harrowing hippie-Americana odyssey of love and relationships spawned from one of the darkest, most fragile periods of the legendary singer's life. As a result, genuinely sad songs like "Blue" and "A Case of You" battle with angry tracks like "All I Want" and "The Last Time I Saw Richard" for hold of your emotions. That's not to say it's all angst: even amidst the blackness, songs like "My Old Man," "California," and "This Flight Tonight" prove that Mitchell's optimism may be bruised, but is still entirely intact.
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AMG Review of Blue
Jason Ankeny
All Music GuideSad, spare, and beautiful, Blue is the quintessential confessional singer/songwriter album. Forthright and poetic, Joni Mitchell's songs are raw nerves, tales of love and loss (two words with relative meaning here) etched with stunning complexity; even tracks like "All I Want," "My Old Man," and "Carey" -- the brightest, most hopeful moments on the record -- are darkened by bittersweet moments of sorrow and loneliness. At the same time that songs like "Little Green" (about a child given up for adoption) and the title cut (a hymn to salvation supposedly penned for James Taylor) raise the stakes of confessional folk-pop to new levels of honesty and openness, Mitchell's music moves beyond the constraints of acoustic folk into more intricate and diverse territory, setting the stage for the experimentation of her later work. Unrivaled in its intensity and insight, Blue remains a watershed.
 "Blue")
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