Joni Mitchell’s “Blue” turned 50 last week. In seeing that news, I remembered a Zadie Smith piece from years ago: she hated Joni Mitchell, until she loved her.
I looked up that writing today, reminding myself that I will never be as brilliant as Zadie Smith in describing anything, including this transformation:
It will perhaps insult sincerely religious people that I should compare something rare and precious, the “leap of faith,” to something as banal as realizing that “Blue,” by Joni Mitchell, is a great album, but to a person like me, who has never known God (who has only read and written a lot of words about other people who have known God), the structure of the sensation, if not the content, seems to be unavoidably related.
In high school, when I started to drive my parents’ car, I collected as much music as I possibly could. It felt like a window – closed, but a window still – to a larger world that, in just a few years, would open up. I had a book of CDs under the passenger seat, and another two rows of CDs lined up in a packet that was velcroed to that little shelf thing that comes down to block the sun. (Visor? I don’t know. I’m not a car person.)
I didn’t pay for “Blue”; I burned the songs onto CDs. They sat alone and out of order. I thought “California” was catchy, but didn’t get the Christmas music of “River”. (This is my summer mix!) “The Last Time I Saw Richard” was too slow. “A Case of You” was famous, but I didn’t know why. I explored the songs because I knew that they were important, that the album was on all of the “Best of” lists, but I didn’t catch anything spearfishing.
Later, as an adult (and with the blessing of streaming), I finally listened to the full album. Whether it was experiencing the entire piece as one, or it was my age, or coming out, or whatever, something clicked.
Or, as Zadie Smith says:
Sometimes it is when we stop trying to understand or interrogate apparently “absurd” phenomena—like the category of the “new” in art—that we become more open to them.
Put simply: you need to lower your defenses.
Like any good great album, “Blue” remains the same but changes each time it plays. It’s a house with secret passageways. Put it on, and you find yourself coming in through the familiar front door, only to realize that the bookcase you walked by last time swings open, that there is a sitting room to the right that you never noticed.
That feeling swept me up this weekend, when I celebrated the 50th anniversary of “Blue” by playing it on the speakers in my house, from my phone, the CD book long gone. I turned the music up. I sang. I took turns skipping around with my arms flung open, to openly weeping. (Twice, to be exact: in Little Green, when she signs all the papers in the family name and, to my surprise, asking California to “take me as I am.”)
Again, Smith: “This is the effect that listening to Joni Mitchell has on me these days: uncontrollable tears.”
That trajectory – the roller coaster that is “Blue”, a different ride every time – is something I wish for everyone. I struggle with friends who haven’t hit their moment of discovery yet. There’s nothing I can do with someone but turn to them and say, “See? See?!”, and hope they understand.
If they agree with me on Joni Mitchell, though, they of course have their own moments: ones that I probably have not yet discovered, still hiding behind the bookcase.
That’s what I reflected on this weekend, while I sang as loud as I could in the kitchen and Brad hid in the bedroom: This is, perhaps, an album best listened to, sung to, alone. Whether in your car at 17, hoping for parties down red dirt roads, or in your 30s, alone in your kitchen and belting about drawing maps of Canada.
It’s nestled in the spaces of that car, and in that kitchen; it’s in that house, where we lower our defenses, and where I’ll continue to return, discovering new rooms with each visit.
It is, ultimately, an observance in exhilaration, as Zadie Smith so perfectly put:
An emotional overcoming, disconcertingly distant from happiness, more like joy—if joy is the recognition of an almost intolerable beauty.