I have a pet project where every year I attempt to play every piece of music in my iTunes (now Apple Music) library on my MacBook (now my MacBook Air). As my library grows in size this has become increasingly difficult to master. There are times when I'd rather listen to the new albums or songs I've acquired rather than work on that project.
This year I started in January with albums and singles whose titles start with "Z" and worked my way backwards through the alphabet. I'm now up to "B". For my drive home tonight I noticed I was close to the last track of Joni Mitchell's "Blue". Why the last track? Because for some odd reason playlists on my iPhone are loaded in reverse order. So if I play through the playlist as loaded on my iPhone then I end up albums being played from their last track to their first track. This means that in order to hear classical music pieces correctly I have to select the album and play it, rather than its tracks as loaded on my playlist.
So tonight, instead of playing through the first half of Bob Dylan's "Blonde on Blonde" in reverse order before arriving at "Blue", I instead selected that album and played its tracks in the correct order...relatively loud.
The one thing about the album is that to date I've never listened to it extremely attentively. In high school, I first laid eyes on the album in the collection of LPs our creative writing teacher had in the classroom. She dissuaded us from selecting it as an album to play in the background while we wrote because she claimed it lived up to its title. I'm not quite sure when I picked up my CD copy of the album...possibly about 15 years ago. That was still a long time after I had seen an exhibit of Joni Mitchell's paintings at an art gallery in Saskatoon, which led directly to me purchasing copies of a couple of her later albums, "Taming the Tiger" and "Both Sides Now"(sic) which featured her paintings on their covers. I probably purchased "Blue", along with "Ladies of the Canyon", around that time. "Court and Spark" and "Hejira" have been in my collection probably a decade prior to those purchases.
My extra focus on "Blue" is more or less a direct result of an article I came across on the CBC website. I don't know if it is a current article but it was a rundown on the tracks on the album collected on the occasion of the 50th anniversary of its release. Having read the impressions various people had about each track, along with some details about the recordings, convinced me to give the album a better listen albeit while I was driving home.
Having done that I believe I have done a bit better in catching up with the album and come to better appreciate the recording. While I've always enjoyed the very accessible (at least to me) "Court and Spark" and the air of mystery which I felt hanging over "Hejira", tonight's listening of "Blue" laid out in better detail the qualities that I had noticed in prior listenings but hadn't grasped very well. I will probably spend at least another night's drive giving the album a playback as I careen down Route 13 back to Yonezawa....
