Blue

Ten songs in about thirty-six minutes, and the subtractive test finds little in the songs to take. Inside each, the arrangement has been cut to what carries the voice: four songs are voice and piano alone, one is voice and guitar alone, and where others play they add one colour, not a band. The title song is three minutes of piano and voice with no chorus; Little Green is a ballad of verses with nothing beyond the guitar. The test bites at the lighter edge. Carey is a holiday song on a Greek island and All I Want an opening whose list of wishes runs long; either could go at less loss than any piano song, and This Flight Tonight is the slightest writing on side two. But the lighter songs are the freedom the heavier ones count the cost of.

Score: 8.6 / 10

The disclosure can be stated and it holds: the wish to be free and the wish to be held live in one person and wreck each other, and the one who says so is not exempt. The record does not describe a heartbroken woman from outside; it lets her accuse herself. In River she is “selfish and I’m sad” and runs from the man she could not keep. In A Case of You love is drunk and still not used up, “like holy wine”, and the singer owns herself “a lonely painter”. Little Green discloses, obliquely and with great restraint, a young mother letting her child go. The Last Time I Saw Richard gives the cynic the better lines. The limit: the condition is one consciousness in one year, and much of the meaning is carried by the voice as mood.

Score: 8.7 / 10

Height comes often and is of one kind, beauty under strain. A Case of You rises in its chorus as the voice leaps and the dulcimer drones beneath. River opens and closes on a Jingle Bells figure on the piano, bent toward the minor, and the long-held line on “skate away on” lifts the record’s widest wish. The title song climbs into its upper register over slow piano chords, “songs are like tattoos”, and drops. Little Green holds its height through the last verse, and The Last Time I Saw Richard ends on a piano coda that turns a bar-room anecdote toward its “dark cafe days”. That is a high frequency for ten songs. Carey, All I Want and This Flight Tonight are vivid rather than elevated, and the height never reaches grandeur or terror.

Score: 8.8 / 10

Myth is evoked often and built in one pattern: the wanderer who leaves home to be free and finds that freedom is homesickness. The sequence lays it out, from the opening road, “on a lonely road”, through Greece and Paris to California, where she asks to be taken “as I am”, and the flight back in This Flight Tonight. Around that pattern archetypes are summoned: love as sacrament in A Case of You, the river as escape, the child given away and named for the green of spring, the bar at closing time as a purgatory. The particulars are kept sharp: Matala, a park in Paris, a California Christmas, Richard’s coffee and his wife. What holds the axis below the gate: the archetypes are summoned by image and allusion more than built into load-bearing structure, and the journey is a sequence of postcards, not one journey made.

Score: 8.1 / 10

The inheritance is the folk-based singer-songwriter album of 1970 and 1971, Mitchell’s own Ladies of the Canyon among it, and the turn goes two ways. In content the song stops being a persona or a parable and becomes an unguarded first-person account, with the singer charged as fully as anyone. In music the open tunings, the dulcimer and irregular phrase lengths draw the songs away from folk chord patterns toward harmonies that do not settle, and the piano songs lean toward jazz. The stake was personal more than commercial: a self exposed at the point of rising fame. What holds it below the gate: the confessional mode had precedents in poetry and in Dylan, Cohen and James Taylor; the musical swerve is moderate beside her later records; and the record kept to the song form and to a market that welcomed it.

Score: 8.3 / 10

Change the form and the record stops knowing what it knows. Its knowledge is exposure, and the arrangements make the exposure: one voice, one instrument, and at most three companions. Score River for a band and the singer is no longer alone at the piano at Christmas; the song’s claim, that she is alone because of who she is, is gone. The open tunings make chords that hover between major and minor and sit under the voice without resolving it, which is how the ambivalence sounds. The sequence is counted here, once. Each side ends at the piano, alone, side one on the title song and side two on the cafe at closing time, and the road out in All I Want is answered by the flight home in This Flight Tonight. The limit: the lighter songs are placed rather than required, and the two-sided shape is clear, not inevitable.

Score: 8.7 / 10

Evidence rather than promise, over about fifty-five years, and of two kinds. Musicians return to the making: the open tunings have been transcribed, catalogued and taught, and singers keep finding new readings of A Case of You and of River. Listeners and critics return to the meaning: the record has been read and reread as the founding case of a whole kind of song, the first-person account in which the singer is charged along with everyone else. On the critical side the depth is more semantic than formal, among players more formal than semantic, and the two together keep the figure high. The limit: much of the return is to four songs rather than to the sequence, and the record as an order of ten is revisited less than its parts.

Score: 8.6 / 10

The field is the singer-songwriter album of the early 1970s, crowded in the year of this record. The intrinsic force is real: the record showed that the popular song could carry a woman’s first-person account of love, failure and choice, unsoftened and including her own faults, and that it could do so with an art of harmony and phrasing her peers did not have. That reorganised what a song could say and who could say it. It is held near the bar because the means were shared, the confessional turn in poetry and the examples of Dylan and Cohen, and another singer-songwriter record of the same months reached many more listeners. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: the record is named as a source by singer-songwriters across five decades, by the women songwriters of the 1990s and the 2010s explicitly, and A Case of You and River became standards; the reach is in songwriting and voice, less in recorded sound.

Score: 8.7 / 10

Survival is weighed over about fifty-five years, on form, presence and fabric. The form survives whole as released, in print since 1971, and it is heard as an album rather than as two hits; it has no hit single of its own to outlive it. Presence is continuous and wide and has grown: the record is ranked higher now than on release, its songs are sung by singers born decades after it, and River has entered the Christmas repertoire. That presence earns one tenth for its width and is not taken as proof. The fabric carries almost no date: voice, piano, dulcimer and guitar, recorded close and dry, and nothing on it depends on the studio sound of its year. It stands a tenth below Kind of Blue at 9.0, older and as present, and far below what has lasted centuries.

Score: 8.9 / 10

Command of the recorded medium, with the words weighed elsewhere, and the making is load-bearing in the voice and the writing. Mitchell’s voice moves over wide intervals, from the chest to a clear head voice, and her phrasing stretches and compresses the bar to follow the sense, so that speech shapes the melodic line. The harmonic writing is her own: open tunings on guitar and dulcimer give voicings no standard tuning offers, and the piano songs place suspended and unresolved chords with judgment. Henry Lewy’s recording is close and plain, so breath and string noise are part of the sound. The costs: her piano playing is functional more than fluent, the leaps and swoops become mannerism in All I Want and This Flight Tonight, and the band songs are plainer than the solo ones. It stands below Kind of Blue at 9.3 and Low at 9.0.

Score: 8.8 / 10

One law governs: an unguarded voice, close to the ear, with the least accompaniment the song will bear, telling the truth against its own interest. Take the two most distant elements. Carey is a happy drinking song on a Greek island, with others playing; Little Green is a ballad of a child given away, for voice and guitar alone. Both obey the law: the voice is the same, and so is the candour. The Last Time I Saw Richard brings in comedy and satire, and the law holds there too. The range of tone is wide, from joy to desolation, and the range of instrument is kept within strict limits. The limit: the range of form is narrower than the range of tone. These are all songs of verse and chorus, or of verses alone, with no extended structure.

Score: 8.7 / 10

Judged on what the record holds, with no discount for the album form. Consciousness is held fully, in the self-accusation of River and A Case of You. Love and marriage are held, from My Old Man, with its refusal of the paper and its loneliness, “the bed’s too big”, to Richard’s marriage. The family is held in Little Green: a child, an absent father, a mother who gives the child to others. Travel and exile are held across Europe and home. The nation appears in California, where they will not give “peace a chance”, and the sacred is evoked in “holy wine”. What holds the axis lowest is the form: labour, the state and history are glimpsed, not integrated, and the natural order is image. It stands a tenth above Kind of Blue at 7.2, because its words reach the family and the nation.

Score: 7.3 / 10