No one writes about love the same way as Joni Mitchell. The iconic Canadian singer-songwriter sings about relationships with a disarming vulnerability and piercing generosity that’s been stunning and resonant for 19 studio albums. Her best and best-selling LP—1971’s Blue—was rightfully hailed as a masterpiece and captured heartache in such a defiant and fearless way it’s endured for decades. Tracks like “River” and “A Case of You” rank as some of the most affecting and sorrow-filled breakup songs ever. It’s not just essential listening for anyone going through it but for damn near every listener.
Advertisement
Coming out of several traumatic breakups and personal turmoil, Mitchell put everything she had into the album’s 10 wonderful songs. "There’s hardly a dishonest note in the vocals," Mitchell told Rolling Stone in a 1979 interview. "At that period of my life, I had no personal defenses. I felt like a cellophane wrapper on a pack of cigarettes.” She added, “I felt like I had absolutely no secrets from the world and I couldn’t pretend in my life to be strong. Or to be happy. But the advantage of it in the music was that there were no defenses there either.” Even without the quote, that struggle is easy to hear throughout Blue.David Bazan sounds nothing like Mitchell, but he's also made a career off of songs filled with emotional clarity. With his band Pedro the Lion, the now 43-year-old frontman’s lyrics maturely dealt with knotty issues of faith, political upheaval, love, sex, and crippling doubt, and were performed with the spiritual gravitas of someone going through a crisis of faith, which made Bazan leave Christianity in 2006. Throughout his ensuing solo career (and later Pedro the Lion’s reunion, which brought about the excellent and nostalgic 2019 LP Phoenix), Bazan navigates complex feelings and pain with remarkable depth. When he told Noisey he had never heard Blue, it was a shock.Because experiencing Blue is a must for any listener, we brought over a copy of the seminal LP to Chicago’s Thalia Hall where Pedro the Lion was set to play a show. “I know that she was a singer in the ‘60s. I think she also performed well into the 70s and that she stopped making music and touring at a certain point,” explains Bazan from the venue’s green room. “I know her song 'Big Yellow Taxi' and for whatever reason, there was a lightness to it that kept me from really diving in, which I’m going to realize is ridiculous and probably a mishearing.”
Advertisement
Read on for Bazan’s track-by-track reaction.
1. "All I Want”
Advertisement
2. "My Old Man”
3. "Little Green”
Advertisement
The two actually reunited in the late ‘90s.That’s incredible.Finding your birth parents is already probably such a big thing already….And then to have it be Joni Mitchell? I can’t even imagine.Exactly.This one’s gonna sink me. This is so sad. Was it known that this was a product of one of those musician relationships she was in?It was by her ex-boyfriend who was not a successful musician. It wasn’t even publicly known what this song was about or that she daughter until decades later.It obviously doesn’t matter at all but I just found myself curious.What sort of things did you grow up listening to?Until about the 10th grade, I was only allowed to listen to Christian music so just from the Christian bookstore and then church music that was happening around me. So yeah, there were shelves with tapes at the Christian bookstore, and that was what I got to choose from. Once I was allowed to listen to secular music, there wasn't much that would have been labeled Christian music up until that point that really I continued to listen to. It was just wasn't what I wanted to hear.It must’ve been fun to start discovering all these classic “secular” records at such a formative age.Oh dude, that happened years later. The one exception is that in the eighth grade, I was hanging out with one of my buddies from church camp. We had watched videos about “backwards masking,” about how if you played the Beatles “Revolution #9” backwards you’d get a secret message. It was dumb but it made me want to keep listening to the Beatles. My mind was just blown over and over again from The White Album. He brought a cassette to church the next day for me to secretly check out. I just listened to it on a loop on my Walkman. It changed my life totally but I was forbidden to listen to it. Once it became clear to my parents that I needed this quasi-psychedelic music in my head, then it became a couple of years for my dad to come back to it. That was my introduction to basically anything besides some stragglers from like a Coke commercial. But then during a Pedro the Lion tour in 2000, I was driving with my drummer at the time who’s been my longtime booking agent Trey Many listening to classic rock radio and I had no idea who any of these artists were. He would tell me, “It’s Van Halen. It’s Diamond Dave Van Halen. What the fuck?” I just didn’t know any of it and he guided me through it. My knowledge was very random and very limited. I tried to lean towards Fugazi and the Cure and Nirvana when I was allowed to listen to secular music.
4. “Carey”
Advertisement
5. "Blue”
6. "California"
Advertisement
He had this album from 2012 called History Will Absolve Me and it’s such a beautiful record. The last song on it is called “The Wake” and has stuck with me over the last seven years. It’s a really emotional song.He’s such a good writer. I’ll check that one out. Her singing is incredible here. She can just make her voice do anything.The way she phrases things is so stunning. In a weird way, her phrasing reminds me of this ‘60s songwriter named John Hartford who wrote “Gentle On My Mind” which became a popular Glen Campbell song.She has a flow.While she was recording this in Studio C of Hollywood’s A&M studios, Carole King recording Tapestry in Studio B.That’s a favorite record of mine. It was simultaneously?Yes, and then the Carpenters were in Studio A.That was one of the few bands that my Dad had records of.Every evangelical parent has one secular band to enjoy.Totally. They were so safe it was fine for me to listen to it.When you’re born into that sort of cultural milieu, it just takes awhile to find what you actually like. I’m thinking about that because of this because here there’s just zero conformity in the music and that’s something I really gravitate towards. If you’ve struggled with scarcity in any way in terms of belonging, the drive to fit in is so strong that it changes your personality constantly. It just takes so long to find out how to be yourself without having people around you knocking you for it. Here, it feels like she was powerful enough as a person and artist to just go for it. Also, the way the song changes here. It’s just crazy music. That’s insane.Right? When the band comes in here it’s my favorite part of the record.
7. "This Flight Tonight”
Advertisement
The picture I have is her just being like, “here’s an idea that I can execute immediately” and just knocking it out one by one.It’s stunning to think about how playful and fun this album is knowing that it came from such a terrible part of her life.So was this a record that preceding her mental and emotional state or was it part of her processing?Definitely the latter. She’s described the period of making this record with phrases like “psychological descent” and “mental breakdown.” She’s said that it took years to get over what she was going through.I understand that.
8. "River”
Advertisement