Here's another classic classic, if it's time to replace that old worn-out vinyl!
Blue (1971) is the fourth album of Canadian singer-songwriter Joni Mitchell. Exploring the various facets of relationships from infatuation on "A Case of You" to insecurity on "This Flight Tonight", the songs feature simple accompaniments on piano, guitar, and Appalachian dulcimer. Blue was a critical and commercial success, reaching #15 on the Billboard 200 and #3 in the UK Albums Chart. The single "Carey" reached #93 on the Billboard Hot 100 chart. In January 2000, the New York Times chose Blue as one of the 25 albums that represented "turning points and pinnacles in 20th-century popular music".
History
Despite the success of her first three albums and songs like "Woodstock," 1970 saw Mitchell make a decision to break from performing. After a tough breakup with her longtime boyfriend Graham Nash she set off on a vacation around Europe, during which she wrote many of the songs that appear on Blue.
The album was almost released in a somewhat different form. In March 1971, completed masters for the album were ready for production. Originally, there were three old songs that had not found their way on to any of her previous albums. At the last minute, Mitchell decided to remove two of the three so that she could add the new songs "All I Want" and "The Last Time I Saw Richard." "Urge for Going," her first song to achieve commercial success when recorded by country singer George Hamilton IV, was removed. (It was later released as the B-side of "You Turn Me On, I'm a Radio" and again on her 1996 compilation album, Hits.) Also removed was "Hunter (The Good Samaritan)," which has never appeared on any of Mitchell's albums (however, her live performance of "Hunter" is now available on the , together with two other songs that later appeared on "Blue," "My Old Man" and "Carey," which she morphs into Dylan's "Mr. Tambourine Man" in a duet with her boyfriend at the time, James Taylor). "Little Green," composed in 1967, was the only old song that remained.
There has been persistent speculation that the album, and particularly the title track, were named after fellow songwriter David Blue,Eliot, Marc (2005). To the Limit: The Untold Story of the Eagles, p. 298. Da Capo Press. ISBN 030681398X. who was a friend and possible love interest of Mitchell's when the album was released. She has denied the connection.
In 1979 Mitchell reflected, "The Blue album, there's hardly a dishonest note in the vocals. At that period of my life, I had no personal defenses. I felt like a cellophane wrapper on a pack of cigarettes. I felt like I had absolutely no secrets from the world and I couldn't pretend in my life to be strong. Or to be happy. But the advantage of it in the music was that there were no defenses there either."
The album was influenced by jazz, particularly the music of Miles Davis. Mitchell used alternative tunings on her guitar to allow easier access to augmented chords and notes in unexpected combinations.
Honours
* In 2003, Blue was ranked #30 on Rolling Stone Magazines list of the 500 Greatest Albums of All Time, the highest placement for a female artist
* In 2000, Blue won the top spot in Charts '50 Greatest Canadian Albums of All Time' (Blue was third place in 1996 and 2005)
* In 2007, Blue was ranked second in Bob Mersereau's book The Top 100 Canadian Albums, behind Neil Young's Harvest (which was the second-place finisher in all three Chart polls)
* In 2001, Blue was ranked #14 on VH1's list of the '100 Greatest Albums of All Time', the highest album by a female artist to appear on the list.
* Blue was also voted #13 on Hotpress Magazines 'Top 100 Albums Ever', by various other artists
* In 2002, Q Magazine named "Blue" the 8th Greatest Album of All-Time by a Female Artist.http
* Blue was voted #66 in Channel 4's countdown of the '100 Greatest Albums'
* In 2006, Blue was listed among Time Magazines 'All-Time 100 Albums'
* In 1999, Blue was given the honor of a Grammy Hall of Fame award, which is given to recordings that are at least 25 years old and that have "qualitative or historical significance"
* In 2004, Pitchfork Media ranked the album #86 on its list "Top 100 Albums of the 1970s".
Personnel
*Joni Mitchell - Appalachian dulcimer, guitar, piano, vocals
*Stephen Stills - Bass and guitar on "Carey"
*James Taylor - Guitar on "California", "All I Want", "A Case of You"
*Sneaky Pete Kleinow - Pedal steel on "California", "This Flight Tonight"
*Russ Kunkel - Drums on "California", "Carey", "A Case of You"
Production
*Engineer - Henry Lewy
*Art Direction - Gary Burden
*Cover Photography - Tim Considine
References
This text has been derived from Blue (Joni Mitchell album) on Wikipedia and is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License 3.0Artist/Band Information
Joni Mitchell, CC, (born Roberta Joan Anderson; November 7, 1943) is a Canadian musician, songwriter, and painter. Mitchell began singing in small nightclubs in her native Western Canada and then busking on the streets of Toronto. In the mid-1960s she left for New York City and its rich folk music scene, recording her debut album in 1968 and achieving fame first as a songwriter ("Urge for Going", "Chelsea Morning", "Both Sides, Now", "Woodstock") and then as a singer in her own right. Finally settling in Southern California, Mitchell played a key part in the folk rock movement then sweeping the musical landscape. Blue, her starkly personal 1971 album, is regarded as one of the strongest and most influential records of the time. Mitchell also had pop hits such as "Big Yellow Taxi", "Free Man in Paris", and "Help Me", the last two from 1974's best-selling Court and Spark.
Mitchell's distinctive harmonic guitar style, and piano arrangements all grew more complex through the 1970s as she was deeply influenced by jazz, melding it with pop, folk and rock on experimental albums like 1976's Hejira. She worked closely with jazz greats including Pat Metheny, Wayne Shorter, Jaco Pastorius, Herbie Hancock, and on a 1979 record released after his death, Charles Mingus. From the 1980s on, Mitchell reduced her recording and touring schedule but turned again toward pop, making greater use of synthesizers and direct political protest in her lyrics, which often tackled social and environmental themes alongside romantic and emotional ones.
Mitchell's work is highly respected both by critics and by fellow musicians. Rolling Stone magazine called her "one of the greatest songwriters ever," while Allmusic said, "When the dust settles, Joni Mitchell may stand as the most important and influential female recording artist of the late 20th century." Mitchell is also a visual artist. She created the artwork for each of her albums, and in 2000 described herself as a "painter derailed by circumstance."Interview with the Toronto Globe and Mail A blunt critic of the music industry, Mitchell stopped recording over the last several years, focusing more attention on painting, but in 2007 she released Shine, her first album of new songs in nine years.
Early life
Joni Mitchell was born Roberta Joan Anderson on November 7, 1943, in Fort Macleod, Alberta, Canada, to Bill Anderson and Myrtle Anderson (née McKee). Her mother was a teacher, and her father an officer in the Royal Canadian Air Force. During the war years, she moved with her parents to a number of bases in western Canada. After the war, her father began working as a grocer, and his work took the family to Saskatchewan to the towns of Maidstone and North Battleford. When she was eleven years old, the family settled in Saskatoon, Saskatchewan, which Mitchell considers her hometown.
Her mother's ancestors were Scottish and Irish.Irish Times Magazine, p. 14, July 19, 2008 Her father's were Norwegian. Her paternal grandmother was born on the farm Farestveit in Modalen, Hordaland, Norway. Her paternal grandfather was from Sømna, Sør-Helgeland, Nordland, Norway.
At the age of nine, Mitchell contracted polio during a Canadian epidemic, but she recovered after a stay in hospital. Extraordinarily, this was the same polio epidemic (1951) in which singer Neil Young, then aged five, also contracted the virus.George McKay (2009) '. Popular Music 28:3, 341-365. It was during this time that she first became interested in singing. She describes her first experience singing while in hospital during the winter in the following way:
"They said I might not walk again, and that I would not be able to go home for Christmas. I wouldn't go for it. So I started to sing Christmas carols and I used to sing them real loud ... The boy in the bed next to me, you know, used to complain. And I discovered I was a ham." She began smoking at the age of nine as well, a habit which is arguably one of the factors contributing to the change in her voice in recent years (Mitchell herself disputes this in several interviews).
As a teenager, Joni taught herself ukulele and, later, guitar. She began performing at parties and bonfires, which eventually led to gigs playing in coffeehouses and other venues in Saskatoon. After finishing high school at Aden Bowman Collegiate in Saskatoon, she attended the Alberta College of Art and Design in Calgary for a year, during which she made the acquaintance of another budding singer-songwriter, Harry Chapin, but Mitchell then left, telling her mother: "I'm going to Toronto to be a folksinger."
After leaving art college in June 1964, Mitchell left her home in Saskatoon to relocate to Toronto. She found out that she was pregnant by her college ex-boyfriend, and in February 1965 she gave birth to a baby girl. A few weeks after the birth, Joni Anderson married folk-singer Chuck Mitchell, and took his surname. A few weeks later she gave her daughter, Kelly Dale Anderson, up for adoption. The experience remained private for most of her career, but she made allusions to it in several songs, most notably a very specific telling of the story in the 1971 song "Little Green". Mitchell's 1982 song "Chinese Cafe", from the album Wild Things Run Fast, includes the lyrics "Your kids are coming up straight / My child's a stranger / I bore her / But I could not raise her."
Mitchell's daughter, renamed Kilauren Gibb, began a search for her as an adult. In 1997 Gibb mentioned her search to the girlfriend of a man with whom she had grown up. By coincidence, this woman knew a third person who had once told her that he knew Joni Mitchell years earlier "when she was pregnant." Mitchell and her daughter were reunited shortly thereafter.
Career
1965–1969: Breakthrough
In the summer of 1965, Chuck Mitchell took Joni with him to the United States. While living in Detroit, Chuck & Joni were regular performers at area coffee houses as well as The Alcove bar near Wayne State University and the "Rathskelter" a restaurant on the campus of the University of Detroit. Oscar Brand featured her several times on his CBC television program Let's Sing Out in 1965 and 1966, broadening her exposure. Mitchell attended school at West Virginia University for short period, which led to her song "Morning Morgantown." The marriage and partnership of Joni and Chuck Mitchell dissolved in early 1967, and Joni moved to New York City to pursue her musical dreams as a solo artist. She played venues up and down the East Coast, including Philadelphia, Boston, and Fort Bragg, North Carolina. She performed frequently in coffeehouses and folk clubs and, by this time creating her own material, became well known for her unique songwriting and her innovative guitar style.
Folk singer Tom Rush had met Mitchell in Toronto and was impressed with her songwriting ability. He took "Urge For Going" to popular folk act Judy Collins but she was not interested in the song at the time, so Rush recorded it himself. Country singer George Hamilton IV heard Rush performing it and recorded a hit country version. Other artists who recorded Mitchell songs in the early years were Buffy Sainte-Marie ("The Circle Game"), Dave Van Ronk ("Both Sides Now"), and eventually Judy Collins ("Both Sides Now", a top ten hit, included on her 1967 album Wildflowers). Collins also covered "Chelsea Morning", a recording which again eclipsed Mitchell's own commercial success early on.
While she was playing one night in "The Gaslight South", a club in Coconut Grove, Florida, David Crosby walked in and was immediately struck by her ability and her appeal as an artist. He took her back to Los Angeles, where he set about introducing her and her music to his friends. Crosby convinced a record company to agree to let Mitchell record a solo acoustic album without all the folk-rock overdubs that were in vogue at the time, and his clout earned him a producer's credit in March 1968, when Reprise Records released her debut album, alternately known as Joni Mitchell or Song to a Seagull.
Mitchell continued touring steadily to promote the LP. The tour helped create eager anticipation for Mitchell's second LP, Clouds, which was released in April 1969. It finally contained Mitchell's own versions of some of her songs already recorded and performed by other artists: "Chelsea Morning", "Both Sides, Now", and "Tin Angel." The covers of both LPs, including a self-portrait on Clouds, were designed and painted by Mitchell, a marriage of her art and music which she would continue throughout her career.
1970–1974: Mainstream success
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This text has been derived from Joni Mitchell on Wikipedia and is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License 3.0
