here's a video of images from Matala, set to a live version of Carey

Joni Mitchell's Matala, Crete from Matala Crete on Vimeo.

Joni Mitchell and Brian Blade interviewed at Luminato Festival

Woman of Heart and Mind Documentary

Nazareth - This Flight Tonight

This Flight Tonight is my least favourite song on Blue and I once thought it wasn't much good, but this cover illustrates how wrong I was.

it's that time of year when covers of River surface

here's an mp3 of Rosie Thomas doing it, courtesy of I Am Fuel You Are Friends

and here's Lea Michele from Glee:

 

new video for James Blake's cover of A Case Of You

TV performances of My Old Man

on the Johnny Cash show:

and elsewhere:

Little Green at Cafe Au Go-Go, New York in 1967

this piece about Matala and the incredible comments underneath are what prompted me to start this blog

http://crete.wordpress.com/2008/02/26/joni-michell-in-matala-crete/

In the comments we discover what became of two characters from the song Carey.

Stelios, who ran the Mermaid Cafe, is now living in California, running health food shops and selling water pumps to Africa.

Carey himself is "married with kids and working for an NGO doing financial consulting in third world countries or something like that" (update: he's on LinkedIn).

Here's the performance of Carey which Joni prefaces by telling their stories at length:



She tells another version of the same story at Carnegie Hall.

I went to Matala this year.

These are the caves:

And this the view of the town from the caves, undoubtedly more developed than in 1970:

A 1970 performance of My Old Man

a live performance of A Case Of You

short clip of a documentary about the album Blue, played over a live performance of the song Blue

"I was demanding of myself a deeper and greater honesty. More and more revelation in my work in order to give it back to the people where it goes into their lives and nourishes them and changes their direction and makes light bulbs go off in their head and makes them feel. It isn't vague. It strikes against the very nerves of their life and in order to do that you have to strike against the very nerves of your own."

Does anyone know what this documentary is or where the rest of it can be found?

California on the Johnny Cash show

an interview with Dutch TV

"I think that I began to write intimately about my feelings at the time of my fourth album and that those emotions found fertile ground in other people's unexpressed feelings, and so in a way it could be said that I expressed the unexpressable. It was a very lonely time in America. It was strife ridden. It was difficult. It was the end of America's naivety. We were the good guys up until then. We had an heroic reputation from the war and suddenly there was trouble at home, beginning with the Kennedy assassination. The sixties were a very idealistic time for youth, very hopeful. We did believe we could change the world; (then) we found we couldn't change it very much at all."

Joni Mitchell live at the Carnegie Hall in 1972

This Flight Tonight:



Carey:



All I Want:

Blue:

Carey live at Wembley Arena in 1983

California on the BBC in 1970

Blue is my favourite album of all-time

I first heard my parents' vinyl copy as a teenager. It took a few listens but I grew to love it. I've listened to the album regularly ever since. I never tire of it. For years I thought there was one weak track - This Flight Tonight. I was wrong - This Flight Tonight is great.

My favourite genre of music is "songs of heartbreak and despair". On Blue, you can feel the pain dripping off the tracks as Charles Hazlewood explains at 7.30 in this video:



If what you look for in music is a pure expression of emotion then it doesn't get any better than Blue.

Apart from heartbreak, another theme running through the album is the death of the hippy dream. Once again, I find this topic incredibly compelling. I'm not sure why - maybe it's something to do with my parents, who came of age in the sixties, or maybe the death of the hippy dream is the story of the last 40 years in the West.

One of my favourite tracks from the album is The Last Time I Saw Richard where the two themes - heartbreak and the death of the hippy dream - collide as Joni sees her old lover for the last time, now a pale shadow of his former self living a life of domesticity.



Generally I'm not that interested in biographical information about musicians, but there is something about Blue that made me want to know about the people and places Joni sings about. The songs are so obviously biographical - no-one could fake these emotions. Then there are the celebrities - Stephen Stills and James Taylor play on the album, and Joni dated both David Crosby and Graham Nash around this time so there's the possibility that some of the lyrics may be about them. And then there's the travelling - I love the image of skating on a frozen river at Christmas or being seduced by a cave-dwelling hippy on unspoilt Crete. In looking into all of this I found some amazing articles and videos, hence this blog.