Her Kind Of Blue: Joni Mitchell's Masterpiece At 50

https://www.npr.org/2021/06/20/ [login to see] /joni-mitchell-masterpiece-at-50-her-kind-of-blue
What happened when Joni Mitchell made Blue? Accounts abound of the recording sessions at the studio owned by A&M Records on North La Brea Avenue in Hollywood in January 1971, and of the months before, when Mitchell started sharing the songs she'd lay down in that room, saying, Hey, listen to this, in the hours after the canyon parties wound down; and of the time before that, when she wandered from Greek hippie communes to Paris hotel rooms collecting the sex and laughs and loneliness from which the songs would come. But the creative process is as mundane as it is miraculous. It's dribs and drabs and then a rush and then back to staring at the ceiling, wondering if the rush will come back. Blue is an album about working through something — a heartache, people say. But it's just as much a document of the process of sharing that heartache, an inquiry into personal storytelling itself. Until Blue, Mitchell was getting there, but she hadn't wholly figured out what she alone could say. That's because what each person alone can say is, in its pure state, incommunicable. Stories are what get left behind as their tellers keep living and evolving. They're always inconclusive.