A few weeks ago, I booked a summer trip to Mallorca and Menorca, two of the four main islands of Spain's Balearic Islands. Since then, I've done very little to prepare for the trip, other than listening to Joni Mitchell's legendary 1971 album “Blue” over and over again, especially the fitting lyrics from her song “California”: “So I bought a ticket, got on a plane to Spain, and went to a party along a red dirt road/Where there were a lot of nice people reading Rolling Stone and Vogue.”
Anyone who knows me can attest to the truth of this anecdote. As a lifelong Joni fan (we're on a first-name basis here), I never miss an opportunity to have her songs as the background music of my life. But as I was listening to Blue again ahead of my trip to Spain and today (!) the album's 53rd anniversary, I was struck by how much Joni's travel-inspired lyrics still resonate after 53 years – and even more so now. As we enter another beautiful summer travel season, listening to this album can't help but bring to mind the nostalgic travel vibes we should all carry with us in the months to come.
The title and blue cover would lead many to assume that Blue is a somber or sad break-up album. But while it certainly deals with the breakdown of a relationship, full of raw vulnerability and despair, at its heart it is also a groundbreaking travel story, a record of the singer's journey on the road during her tumultuous twenties (she was 27 when it was released). The New York Times even called it “the heroine's journey that Joseph Campbell forgot to plan.” Joni wrote many of the songs on Blue while wandering alone in Europe after breaking up with her then-boyfriend, British singer-songwriter Graham Nash. They were living together at the time in the woodsy Laurel Canyon area of ​​Los Angeles, the pulsating heart of late-'60s folk music. Joni and Graham seemed like the ultimate California golden couple, but she felt restless and uneasy about the seemingly perfect home life unfolding before her eyes. In the 2003 cult-classic documentary “Joni Mitchell: A Woman of Heart and Spirit,” she explains that she didn't want to be like her two grandmothers, who were creative at heart but couldn't pursue their dreams because of family obligations.
“I suddenly remembered that my grandmother was a frustrated poet and musician. She kicked the kitchen door off its hinges on the farm. My paternal grandmother, at 14, stood behind the barn crying her last tears because she wanted a piano and said, 'Wipe your tears away, you foolish girl, you'll never have one,'” she recalls in the documentary. “And I thought maybe I had the genes to make that happen for these two women. As much as I loved and cared about Graham, I thought maybe I would kick the door off its hinges like my grandmother had. But I shouldn't. It would have broken my heart.”
