Blue

1	All I Want 3:32
2	My Old Man 3:33
3	Little Green 3:25
4	Carey 3:00
5	Blue 3:00
6	California 3:48
7	This Flight Tonight 2:50
8	River 4:00
9	A Case of You 4:20
10	The Last Time I Saw Richard 4:13

Barnes & Noble

On 1971's, Blue, Joni Mitchell took a poetic look inside and produced some of her most enduring work. The first song, "All I Want" begins "I am on a lonely road and I am traveling/Looking for something to set me free," and those sentiments set the tone for the recording. With great eloquence, she examines the expectations of romance, the cost of wanderlust, and the discipline of art. On the title track she sings "Hey Blue/here is a shell for you/Inside you'll hear a sigh/A foggy lullaby/There is your song from me." Featuring remarkably spare accompaniment by Mitchell, and guests, James Taylor and Stephen Stills, Blue highlights Mitchell's maturity as a singer. When people speak of Mitchell as the godmother of Lilith Fair, this is the Joni they speak of. Martin Johnson

All Music Guide

Sad, spare, and beautiful, Blue is the quintessential confessional singer/songwriter album. Forthright and poetic, Joni Mitchell's songs are raw nerves, tales of love and loss (two words with relative meaning here) etched with stunning complexity; even tracks like "All I Want," "My Old Man," and "Carey" -- the brightest, most hopeful moments on the record -- are darkened by bittersweet moments of sorrow and loneliness. At the same time that songs like "Little Green" (about a child given up for adoption) and the title cut (a hymn to salvation supposedly penned for James Taylor) raise the stakes of confessional folk-pop to new levels of honesty and openness, Mitchell's music moves beyond the constraints of acoustic folk into more intricate and diverse territory, setting the stage for the experimentation of her later work. Unrivaled in its intensity and insight, Blue remains a watershed. Jason Ankeny