I think the first time I ever became aware of Joni Mitchell’s outstanding 1971 album Blue was in 2020 when Rolling Stone published its list of “The 500 Greatest Albums of All Time.” Whatever. Blue was ranked 3rd. I had been active in music-centric communities on Instagram at the time, and they were mostly hip-hop focused, but there were the accounts that could be described as “elitist” – having a background in hip-hop but have almost “evolved” to listen to music that could be described as “higher-class” – think people like Joanna Newsom, Father John Misty, Neutral Milk Hotel, that kind of thing. Joni Mitchell wasn’t mentioned all that often, but when she was, Blue was always the topic of conversation. 

I didn’t catch everything from Blue on first listen, like how the melody of “River” takes the melody of “Jingle Bells” and puts it in a minor key, or the double entendre when she exclaims, “Oh, Canada” in desperation on “A Case of You.” Or just how the word “blue” is said on four of the first five tracks (the absolute bop that is “Carey” being the only exception). But I did catch the general brilliance of Blue. It’s an album that really gives you a space to think and grieve and love; Mitchell’s voice is expansive and beautiful, the acoustic-filled instrumentals range from deeply, almost too optimistic (“California” and “All I Want”) to setting the scene of some of the most despondent and heartbreaking and wishful songs I’ve ever heard (the aforementioned “River” as well “Blue,” and “Little Green”). Good naming convention. 

None of those things are the core, the crux, and really, the thing that makes Blue stand out 50 years later, though. Blue is talked about in the way that is, most importantly, for its lyricism. As that same Rolling Stone article skillfully notes, Mitchell’s approach to songwriting is “wholly unguarded.” And it’s true. She rips down all the walls from any secrets she could be hiding from the listener and becomes entirely bare. There are two things that you need to know about Joni Mitchell: she loves to travel, and she cannot find a good, consistent love for the life of her. Like Barry Bonds in 2004, Blue nails the second one out of the park. “All I Want” is a great example of this; it’d be incredibly common and easy for Mitchell to simply write about the good that she wants to find in a relationship, but she fully acknowledges the problems that are arising with her partner that make the road to love just a little longer. “When I think of your kisses, my mind seesaws/Do you see, do you see, do you see how you hurt me, baby?/So I hurt you too/Then we both get so blue,” she sings in one of my favorite sets of lyrics across the entire album. At first glance, her musings seem a little simpler than one would expect, but the way she sings it is so magnificent and makes up for any apparent shortcomings (which, in my opinion, there are none). She puts this small but high emphasis on the “too” at the end of the third line, and her heart is on display for all to hear immediately. 

I think, lyrically, “A Case of You” is my favorite across the entire album. It’s her second most popular song, second only to “Big Yellow Taxi.” Some songs are incredibly popular for a good reason. This is one of them. The title takes its name from this pair of lines in the chorus: “Oh, I could drink a case of you, darling/And I would still be on my feet.” Absolutely brutal. Joni expresses in the very beginnings of the song that this relationship is not one that’s good for her (“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” and my personal favorite set of lines from anywhere across the album in “On the back of a cartoon coaster/In the blue TV screen light/I drew a map of Canada/Oh, Canada/With your face sketched on it twice”), and yet, she can and still will have so much of this partner. She knows it’s unhealthy, and yet, she’s addicted. She even compares him to holy wine.

I want to talk about that second set of quoted lyrics in that small section in the parentheses – the one about Canada. Mitchell is a native Canadian, born in Alberta, and a recipient of the Order of Canada. Whenever I listen to that section, I always imagine her in some café by herself. It’s not raining, but it’s getting to the point where she should be leaving, but she just can’t – she won’t. Everything around her is blue – the TVs, the furniture, all of it. She needs to have something – anything to bring her comfort because she’s drowning in melancholia otherwise. The album was inspired by her breakup with equally famous musician Graham Nash the year prior, and man, this song and this verse sound like it. She needs comfort, so she draws her home. And even thinking of Canada, she feels exasperated – as if losing “the best baby that [she] ever had” is so much larger than her homeland. And that’s expressed by drawing his face on it twice; there isn’t enough space for her in the relationship. She doesn’t see herself as important enough in the relationship, just her boyfriend twice over. Wholly unguarded is correct.

I don’t remember my reaction that day when Blue finished. I know that I only listened to each track once that day. But I do remember the first track that played after I finished listening to Blue, after the final chord of “The Last Time I Saw Richard” played, and Joni said, “Only a phase, these dark café days.”

“Coyote” is the lead and only single from Joni Mitchell’s rockstar 1976 album Hejira, and it is one of the coolest songs ever. The album takes its name from the prophet Muhammad and his followers’ famous migration (spelled Hijrah) from the city of Mecca to the city of Medina, and that idea of travel pervades throughout Hejira. Its songs are much wider, sweeping, and just overall longer, with Blue being 10 tracks across 36 minutes and Hejira being 9 tracks across 51.

I played “Coyote” 8 times that day. I have 45 plays on it total; it is my most listened-to Joni Mitchell song, and it is my most played song of the year so far. I heard Joni’s opening winding guitar melody matched by Jaco Pastorius’s unbelievable bass melody, and I developed an addiction in real time. The song focuses on the titular Coyote and how Joni initially develops an attraction but eventually realizes his chaotic trickster ways and breaks the developing relationship off. The Coyote is insatiable, womanizing, and is oft-rumoured to be American playwright and author Sam Shepard. I adore “Coyote.” First, it is instrumentally unlike anything on Blue while lyrically giving insight into why she suffers the way she does on Blue. Pastorius’s aforementioned fretless bass is hypnotic, Bobbye Hall’s percussion is incredibly rhythmically defined, and Joni’s expressive voice that always sounds like it’s somewhere between complete desperation and improvement combines with lyrics that are so stream-of-consciousness it’s taken me thrice as long to commit this song’s lyrics to memory as it usually would. 

Those lyrics, though, give us an insight into how Joni’s heart works – how she undergoes the constant relationship heartbreak she does. The song starts with “No regrets, Coyote/We just come from such different sets of circumstance/I’m up all night in the studios/And you’re up early on your ranch.” Before we know anything about Coyote’s true character, we know they don’t work because he and Mitchell are simply too different. Side note: “No regrets, Coyote” is my Instagram bio. Immediately one of my favorite lyrics ever. Later, we get this masterwork: “There’s no comprehending/Just how close to the bone and the skin and the eyes/And the lips you can get/And still feel so alone/And still feel related”. It sounds incredible when hearing it for the first time, and then really analyzing it only makes it better – Joni can get physically involved with the Coyote as much as she wants and/or cares to, and it’ll change nothing about their relationship. Not only does she partially fear that he’ll completely devour her, she’s ultimately unable to develop an emotional connection, and it kills her. 

Sonically, Hejira is a whole different ballgame from Blue. Whereas Blue is crushing because Mitchell puts it all on wax through acoustic beauty, creating this perfect storm for tears, Hejira is much more spaced-out. “Meandering” is the word that I can’t find myself escaping. “Amelia,” an ode to the ever-iconic aviator Amelia Earhart (but also how many famous Amelias do you really know?) is defined by these wide guitars, a vibraphone, and zero percussion, along with almost cryptic lyrics on Mitchell’s part. She ends every verse with some form of “Amelia, it was just a false alarm,” before the last verse, where she says, “Dreams, Amelia, dreams and false alarms.” She’s almost frantic as she says it, as if she cannot keep entering and entertaining relationships that turn out to be nothing in the end.

Speaking on Hejira as a whole, Mitchell said, “I wrote the album while traveling cross-country by myself and there is this restless feeling throughout it. . . . The sweet loneliness of solitary travel.” If she’s right about one thing, it’s the restlessness. I think the biggest realization I’ve come to about Hejira and Joni Mitchell’s pursuit of love in general is that Mitchell’s love of traveling and her inability to find love are directly related. On the album’s title track, a 13-verse, utterly sprawling and neo-Western-sounding epic that is almost 7 minutes and feels like 10, Mitchell gives maybe the most important lines on the album: “I’m porous with travel fever/But you know I’m so glad to be on my own/Still, somehow, the slightest touch of a stranger/Can set up trembling in my bones.” Mitchell wants love. She wants to settle down. But she is incapable. Because love, in many ways, provides comfort – a new type of comfort that one has never experienced before in their life, that although forces them to constantly get out of their comfort zone and try new things, also allows them to be content with their life and be able to fall into one’s arms and remove themselves from the outside world, if only for a moment. Mitchell can’t; her comfort is defined by moving – by never being in one place for too long. See the final lines on “Hejira”: “I’m traveling in some vehicle/I’m sitting in some café/A defector from the petty wars/Until love sucks me back that way.”

On no track is this eternal war between Mitchell’s need for comfort and her need for love better displayed than on “Song for Sharon.” The song is 8 minutes and 38 seconds, easily the longest across my knowledge of her discography, and I know most of the words. If “Hejira” is an epic, “Song for Sharon” is a behemoth. Across 10 verses and an instrumental with the consistency of Sugarfoot Moffett, Mitchell, with ridiculous precision, writes to Sharon Bell, a childhood friend, about a day in Staten Island and how she just cannot find love.

I love essentially everything about “Song for Sharon.” How constant the theme of marriage and eternal love is, from just the opening lines: “And I saw the long white dress of love/On a storefront mannequin…Some girl’s going to see that dress/And crave that day like crazy”. The entire 3rd verse, ranging from how she says she’s great at poker but horrible at love because of a reason that would lead her to being very bad at poker, to her getting the most emotive across all of Hejira (with rage, in this case) when talking about a financially unsuccessful trip to a fortune-teller. The almost-lack of decorum when opening up the 5th verse with Phyllis Major’s suicide, while still maintaining lyrical brilliance in the lines “My friends were calling up all day yesterday/All emotions and abstractions/It seems we all live so close to that line/And so far from satisfaction.” It’s not life or death per se, but Mitchell’s constant balancing act between trying to find love and being a woman for herself sure feels like it. How about the entire reason she’s writing to Sharon in the first place? According to Mitchell: “Sharon was a childhood friend of mine from Maidstone who studied voice and was going to become a singer. I was always going to marry a farmer. She ended up marrying a farmer and I became a singer.” Sharon has what Joni can’t seemingly have, she’s done what is seemingly impossible for Joni. Truly encyclopedic in covering its musical and thematic bases, and on that notion, truly perfect.

During last year’s Grammy Awards, Mitchell surprisingly performed her song “Both Sides Now.” It was her first performance where she wasn’t a guest appearance in 20 years. She was 80 years old – at the moment of writing this, 81. I have a video of the entire performance on my phone; it’s 5 minutes and 7 seconds long. I knew the basics of who she was – one of the biggest and most iconic artists of all time, and probably the most prominent artist of the 70s not named Robert Dylan. It’s rare that I take a video in full of an artist whom I’ve never personally listened to in my life before, but I fully agree with the decision because her performance is magnetic. It’s transcendental; she’s like an old queen looking over her kingdom. A cast of all-star musicians straddles both sides of Mitchell, who had a brain aneurysm in 2015, which forced her to completely relearn how to sing. The second she started singing, the crowd erupted; it was magical. Her voice is imperfect; it strains from line to line, and she often relies on the more baritone part of her register. She’s constantly fiddling with her cane as if it’s keeping her in place. When she stops singing for a few moments so a small instrumental section can happen and quickly pass like the tide, the crowd takes their chance and erupts into applause again. Everyone from Dua Lipa to Meryl Streep. “Both Sides Now” is a song about reflection, about having been through every angle of love and still not knowing a single thing about it because love is all-encompassing and trying to get even a single foothold on it is something many people try to do their entire life. Add that to Joni’s aforementioned struggles with love and the historical context of her appearing in front of a televised audience, looking healthier and recovered; it was like I was watching God come down from the sky.

You should listen to Joni Mitchell. Yes, you. Start with Blue and then to Hejira, and then from there, it’s completely up to you. Court and Spark is a great album that’s more whimsical with more conventional song structures, but that doesn’t stop it from having some of the best songs of her discography (“Help Me” and “People’s Parties”). She’s an artist that will transcend you and me, my kids and your kids, and their kids. She takes these concepts of love and relationships and traversing the world, and completely hypnotizes you with undebated vulnerability and incredible word choice. Getting into her music over the last month has been an absolute joy, and I hope that, on some chance day, you will join me on this train.