I Have A Room

艺人：Joni Mitchell（琼尼·米切尔）

专辑: Blue (1971，Reprise)

时长：35:41

阵容：

• Joni Mitchell：主唱，吉它
• Stephen Stills：贝司/吉它
• James Taylor：吉它/钢琴
• Henry Lewy：录音工程师

总销量: 1 million

最高上榜名次: #15

• 评价摘抄：

 Sad, spare, and beautiful, Blue is the quintessential confessional singer/songwriter album. Forthright and poetic, 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.

                                             ---Music.com

All her previous albums' poetic and sparsely instrumental strengths culminated in 1971 with Mitchell's masterful "Blue." A million-seller (as "Ladies" soon became) at a time when such feats were exceptional, "Blue" remains the vocal, lyrical, and compositional equal of any celebrated album of rock's first 40 years, whether it be "Blonde On Blonde," "Rubber Soul," "Pet Sounds," "Tapestry," "The Joshua Tree," or "Diva."

"Blue's" doleful, fiercely adroit arrangements were built around Mitchell's supple piano, guitar, and dulcimer, and the songs themselves were so precedent-splintering in their candid self-pronouncements that the mere mention of their titles ("All I Want," "My Old Man," "Little Green," "Carey," "Blue," "California," "This Flight Tonight," "River'" "A Case Of You," "The Last Time I Saw Richard") is sufficient to evoke note-for-note reminiscence among the cognoscenti - along with a mental Rolodex of songwriters who borrowed the melodic/rhythmic structure of the tunes to buttress their own output. But for Mitchell, "Blue" was a triumph that took a stunning toll."I have, on occasion, sacrificed myself and my own emotional makeup," Mitchell told this writer in 1988, "singing, 'I'm selfish and I'm sad' [on 'River'], for instance. We all suffer for our loneliness, but at the time of 'Blue,' our pop stars never admired these things."

Hacking away at every vestigial rule of rock'n'roll's raucous hauteur, the resoundingly intimate "Blue" stretched the tape measure for unfathomed personal inquiry until it snapped free of the spool. The deeper Mitchell delved, the higher her untethered singing flew, trembling with tortured liberty as it swooped into trills and ululations that constituted her own Alberta-bred equivalent of qawwali. Henceforth, a popular singer could test the limits of range, vocal characterization, and technical agility at his or her pleasure.

Just as venturesome were Mitchell's elaborate guitar tunings, which by the mid-'70s had ensured that of the 45-odd guitar songs in her repertoire, only two used conventional Spanish concert tuning. "There are certain simple fingerings that were difficult in standard tunings," Joni details. "My left hand is not very facile; my right hand is extremely articulate, At the time that I began to write my own music, Eric Andersen showed me open G and D modal, dropping the bass string. I had always heard beautiful melodies and music in my head, so I just tuned the guitar to those chords, or slipped into a tuning so that the shapes made by the left hand were simplified."

Emotionally spent in the wake of "Blue," Mitchell left Reprise, her departure accelerated by Warner Bros.' irksome promotional policies as typified by headlines on consumer advertising like JONI MITCHELL IS 90% VIRGIN and JONI MITCHELL TAKES FOREVER. Jumping to the Asylum label, Joni planned a sequel to "Blue" in 1972 called "For The Roses," which was conceived as a possible farewell to the music business. Fleshed out in solitude under the rustle of arbutus trees in her remote British Columbia hideaway, the bucolic project yielded a hit with "You Turn Me On, I'm A Radio," as well as a batch of experimental, tempo-shifting ballads of exquisite beauty, such as "Cold Blue Steel And Sweet Fire," "Barangrill," "Electricity," and "Woman Of Heart And Mind."

                                                 ---www.jmdl.com

"The 'Blue' album, there's hardly a dishonest note in the vocals," Mitchell told Rolling Stone in 1979. "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." With song after song of regrets and sorrow and a smoky-blue cover shot of Mitchell on the edge of tears, this may be the ultimate breakup album. Its whispery minimalism is also Mitchell's greatest musical achievement. Stephen Stills and James Taylor lend an occasional hand, but in "California," "Carey" and "This Flight Tonight," Mitchell sounds utterly alone in her melancholy, turning the sadness into tender art.