I think it was 1998. Our drummer, Flash, dumped an excess of vinyl into our living room, and in an attempt to Get With The Old People, I taped Van Morrison’s Moondance and Joni Mitchell’s Blue onto a 90-minute TDK. Van didn’t stand a chance, but Blue quickly jumped into heavy rotation. There was a lot of Jewel and Alanis on the radio that year, supposedly “intimate” ingénue stuff, most of which was either hopelessly gooey or brainlessly strident. Funny that all this “directness” didn’t connect with me, while Joni’s obtuse, poetic songs hit me where it hurt–repeatedly.
Blue sees our heroine giddily and tearfully falling in and out of love, but not so wildly as to miss colorful details (like the one about the guy who “cooked good omelettes and stews”), and not ever tragically enough to completely extinguish her romantic spirit. The closing song, “The Last Time I Saw Richard,” is actually a cautionary tale about this very snuffing out. Joni meets with an old friend who derides the romanticism that’s been on display for the last nine songs, saying, “You like roses and kisses and pretty men who tell you all those pretty lies.” Our speaker protests that Richard’s “just romanticizing some pain that’s in your head” and besides, the songs he picked for the jukebox sing of love, and “love can be so sweet.” (This last line–like the close of each verse–ends in a note that is just incomprehensibly beautiful, by the way.)
In the final verse, the narrator describes how Richard “drinks at home most nights with the TV on and all the house lights left up bright.” Whenever I hear that, I’m convinced that this is just about the saddest song in the world. Mainly because I’ve been Richard, because I’ve been lied to, because I’ve been hurt. Well, of course. We all have. But like the lunch ladies used to say, if you make a sour face and hold it too long, that expression might get frozen there. And in a way that Joni makes perfectly clear, the lunch ladies weren’t lying. May songs like this forever remind me.
