Blue

Some albums scare me. Scare me for being so good, so close, so close to the truth...

The Truth? The truth of human existence, I guess? The truth of A(N) human's existence?

Scare me for being a record of that truth, preserved in wax, preserved on tape, preserved in 1's and 0's maybe now... but preserved... captured and preserved.

There aren't a lot of these albums... I mean, there are a lot of really good even great albums... but how many transcendent albums are there? How many albums that actually scare you? A handful? 8? 12? I don't know...

But I do know that one of them is the Joni Mitchell album Blue. Quite frankly, this album scares me half to death and makes me want to stop writing music. Okay, that might be going a little bit too far... actually, that's kind of a lesson in inspiration... a lot of great records have intimidated and baffled me, made me want to quit, made me feel completely inadequate in every musical way possible... until I've wrestled with them for years... broken them down... considered them from different angles in different settings in different times of my life...

For instance: Jimi Hendrix. For years, I loved him, I learned just about every note he ever recorded... but I had no clue where he was coming from... it felt like he fell out of the sky, popped out of Zeus' head fully-formed in 1967, and released Are You Experienced?

But the thing is, even the most innovative artists have context... they all came from somewhere, listened to something, watched something... tried to emulate somebody. And once I started listening to Albert King, I finally got where Hendrix was coming from... that's not to say it made him any less impressive to me... but it made him a little less mysterious... it was comforting to think that, just like I was, Jimi probably sat down in front of his record player (okay, mine was a CD player) and listened to Albert King and learned his riffs. What he did with those riffs was incredible... was where the genius lay... and at least I could hear the connection... really, more FEEL the connection and understand the context.

But there's something different about albums like Blue: it's not the musical innovation per se that is so striking... it's the honesty, it's the absolute truth with which the artist approaches the writing and singing... it's what is captured in the songs... One of the many powers of music is its ability to take one back (in an almost Proustian manner) to certain times in your life... a trigger of involuntary memory and a memory that is deeper than just remembering places and things... a memory that is rooted in emotion, in impression, in something larger than words. Again, this base level of existence and meaning.

Blue will always make me think of two times in particular: 1.) Basting chicken wings in my underwear in my tiny kitchen senior year in college with Greg while singing Old Man at the top of our lungs. 2.) Camping with Ben somewhere on the Oregon coast just steps from the water, sitting around a fire under the clear dark ocean sky, listening to the entirety of the album on a Discman in complete silence. 

One of my students recently brought Blue in, and we listened to a bit of it... and I think it stuck somewhere in my brain that I needed to revisit it... I hadn't listened to it in over a year, maybe even two, and no longer had it in my music collection...

So on Sunday, one of the first (and maybe only?) incredible fall days, leaving Madison after a picture-perfect weekend getaway to visit my uncle, as the growing late-afternoon darkness reminded us that the clocks had indeed finally changed, we drove around town, stopping at three different record stores before finally laying our hands on a copy of Blue.

The first notes of All I Want hit as we turned onto John Nolen Drive and put Otis Redding's watery grave behind us. By the time we got on the Beltline and finally the Interstate, we were in the middle of it... For maybe the first time, I listened, really listened to the lyrics... I've always been so overwhelmed and taken with just the quality of her singing, I guess I've never really listened to the lyrics as closely as I should have...

By the time we hit the open road, River was on... and I finally picked up on the lyrical almost bait 'n' switch, how she starts out writing about one thing and suddenly she turns the tune on its head halfway through and it's a love song... and the way she sings "I made my baby cry," which is the thematic turning point... similar to the Death Cab tune "What Sarah Said," actually... that type of songwriting where there's a punchline, a twist... I still haven't figured out how to do that right.

And finally, on to the last two tunes, which I suppose like the last couple of tunes on any album one tends not to hear as much... In this case, A Case of You and The Last Time I Saw Richard. The verse in A Case of You... "I remember that time that you told me, you said Love is touching souls Surely you touched mine Cause part of you pours out of me In these lines from time to time" I mean, wow.

And The Last Time I Saw Richard... "Richard got married to a figure skater And he bought her a dishwasher and a coffee percolator And he drinks at home now most nights with the TV on And all the house lights left up bright I'm gonna blow this damn candle out I don't want nobody comin over to my table I got nothing to talk to anybody about All good dreamers pass this way some day Hiding behind bottles in dark cafes Dark cafes Only a dark cocoon before I get my gorgeous wings And fly away Only a phase, these dark cafe days"

Talk about a marriage of lyrics, melody, and performance, and again this turn of the lyric at the end, where, just as things get darkest, there's ray of hope... The album finished, and we sat in silence... I guess I modeled the Paper Arrows album, whether it was initially conscious or unconscious, on Blue. Or hoped to model it on Blue. I don't know.

Where am I going with this? I don't know that, either. But I do know that the next time I hear Blue, I'll remember the light of the sunset illuminating a V of geese flying low across the November sky as we held on tight and the car rolled southeast along I-90 back to the real world.

And listened. And heard. And felt.

jbg