The most perfectly produced folk album of all time, according to Tony Visconti
If modern folk music’s preoccupation is with anything, then by and large it is with vulnerability.
Bob Dylan said folk music is “a bunch of fat people”, and Leonard Cohen crooned, “We are ugly but we have the music.”
This was far from antagonism by the two maestros, but rather a deeply human sense of self-deprecation. Folk is making peace with your own shortcomings and finding comfort and contentment in the whole human comedy of life.
Very few albums achieve that quite like Blue. On the surface, it is a deeply uncomfortable break-up record that should be sore to listen to, but somehow, like a memory foam bed of nails, Joni Mitchell’s masterpiece provides comfort untold from a stark disposition. While the strength of the songwriting might go without saying, Tony Visconti thinks that its pillow-propped spell was also achieved thanks to masterful production by Mitchell, too.
Visconti is best-known for producing the bulk of David Bowie’s material and being a constant collaborative force for the likes of the Starman and Marc Bolan, but while his style was often on the maximalist side with those figures, he appreciated the near-anti production of Blue as a force to behold.
Mitchell rightfully realised that if the record was to be all revealing, delving into the intricacies of her break-up from Graham Nash, then it ought to sound just as bare and broken too. In essence, Mitchell simply placed the microphones at an intimate distance, hit record, and started playing. The result is raw and natural, as Mitchell explained, “The Blue album, there’s hardly a dishonest note in the vocals.”
She continued to tell Cameron Crowe, “At that period of my life, I had no personal defenses. I felt like a cellophane wrapper on a pack of cigarettes. 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.”
Hiding behind nothing, Visconti thinks that Mitchell achieved “nearly a perfect album.”
Considering he’s been behind the mixing desk on the likes of Blackstar and Electric Warrior, that’s high praise indeed. But he also viewed it as a turning point for Mitchell, which is another thing he knows a lot about, having overseen Bowie’s rise from cult oddity to cultural sensation.
“Mitchell, until this was released, was considered another pretty young woman with a fine folk singing voice. She had a major hit with ‘Both Sides Now’,” he told Classic Album Sundays, “a fairly innocent song rendered in a kind of school girl voice. Blue changed that perception immediately.”
He’s not the first to share that opinion. David Crosby was of the opinion that it crowned her “unquestionably the best singer-songwriter of our times”, Carole King was “blown away”, and Elton John described it as “her masterpiece”. It’s a rare kind of masterpiece that connects with people, too. You could fill the River Nile with the tears that have been wept by the masses while Blue played somewhere nearby.
When an album is as emotionally centred as that, you often neglect to think about the role of production, with its dials and needles, in the mix. But as Visconti explains, that’s a mistake. “She wrote about her personal relationships, with their inevitable tragedies, Joni grew up. The perfect voice of hers took you through emotions you never thought you had,” he continues.
Importantly adding, “It is a simple album, no more than three instruments playing at any given time, no drums either. The most amazing thing about this album is the ‘glass wall’ of the recording studio disappears. It was recorded brilliantly, you are not just listening to a record, Joni is there in the room with you and both of you are naked.”
