Joni Mitchell: Blue

"This is the effect that listening to Joni Mitchell has on me these days: uncontrollable tears. An emotional overcoming, disconcertingly distant from happiness, more like joy -- if joy is the recognition of an almost intolerable beauty. It's not a very civilized emotion. I can't listen to Joni Mitchell in a room with other people, or on an iPod, walking the streets. Too risky. I can never guarantee that I'm going to be able to get through the song without being made transparent -- to anybody and everything, to the whole world. A mortifying sense of porousness. Although it's comforting to learn that the feeling I have listening to these songs is the same feeling the artist had while creating them: 'At that period of my life, I had no personal defenses. I felt like a cellophane wrapper on a pack of cigarettes.' That's Mitchell, speaking of the fruitful years between [1967] and 1971, when her classic album 'Blue' was released" (Zadie Smith, "Some Notes on Attunement," New Yorker, 12/17/12, pp. 31-32).

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