I think I scared my mom when I bought this, because she'd just finished reading a book where one of the characters was a gay teenager who happened to love Joni Mitchell. Hopefully she knows I'm just really sensitive... But she didn't give me any Iron Maiden CD's for my birthday that year, so I'm probably in the clear.
And it was worth it: Blue is an absolutely beautiful album, in a way I've never heard from any other artist. Joni seems to stay the slightest bit detached -- a little is always lost between writing a song and singing it for the 500th time -- but she still wears her heart plainly on her sleeve, her voice cracking and aching and jumping and staying extraordinarily elegant the whole way through. Her melodies are gripping and unconventional, and the sound is sparse: an acoustic guitar or piano with minimal embellishments, putting the spotlight on her the whole time.
She's a great storyteller, and has a real way with simple beautiful imagery that romanticizes even mundane settings. My favorite lyric: "Sitting in a park in Paris, France / Reading the news and it sure looks bad / They won't give peace a chance / That was just a dream some of us had"; my least favorite is "Richard got married to a figure skater / And he bought her a dishwasher and a coffee percolater"; and roughly everything in between is really interesting, even if I can't always figure it out.
The only problems are the generally slow pace -- I can always count on this album to put me to sleep with a smile on my face, which is a double-edged compliment -- and a few of the piano numbers, despite tweakings in the melodies and lyrics, sound alike.
But "All I Want" is gripping, "Carey" is a pop masterpiece with great counter-harmonies, and everything else is so soothing and relentlessly personal that it ends up being unlike anything else I've ever heard. Not a lot of variety on Blue, but it sure works as a profound lullabye -- and my teachers don't sound half as nice putting me to sleep.
Epinions.com periodically updates pricing and product information from third-party sources, so some information may be slightly out-of-date. You should confirm all information before relying on it.
- Add to My Yahoo!: 
- Add to Google Homepage: 
© 1999-2009 Shopping.com, Inc.