A couple of weeks ago, I booked a summer trip to Mallorca and Menorca, two of the four main Balearic islands in Spain. Since then, I have done approximately zero things to prepare for my travels except listen to Joni Mitchell’s legendary 1971 album Blue over and over again, specifically the fitting lyrics from her song “California”: “So I bought me a ticket, I caught a plane to Spain, went to a party down a red dirt road / there were lots of pretty people there, reading Rolling Stone, reading Vogue.”
Anyone who knows me can confirm this anecdote to be true. As a lifelong Joni fan (we’re on a first-name basis here), I never miss an opportunity to soundtrack my life to her songs. But as I was revisiting Blue yet again, in the leadup to both my Spain trip and the album’s 53rd anniversary today (!), I was struck by just how much Joni’s travel-inspired lyrics continue to resonate even 53 years later. Maybe especially 53 years later. Listening to it now, as we’re heading into yet another glorious summer travel season, I can’t help thinking it’s the throwback travel vibe we all need to carry with us over the next few months.
Given its name and its blue cover, many people tend to think Blue is a somber album, or a sad breakup album. But while it is indeed filled with raw vulnerability and despair, and it does cover the dissolution of a relationship, it’s also a groundbreaking travel tale at its core, one that documents the singer’s quest to find herself on the road during her tumultuous twenties (it came out when she was 27). The New York Times even called it “the heroine’s journey that Joseph Campbell forgot to map out.” Joni wrote many of the songs on Blue when she was wandering around Europe solo, after breaking off a relationship with her then-boyfriend, British singer-songwriter Graham Nash. They’d been living together in Los Angeles’ woodsy Laurel Canyon, which at the time was the beating heart and soul of late ’60s folk music. Joni and Graham appeared to be the ultimate California golden couple, but she was restless and apprehensive of the seemingly perfect domestic life that was unfolding before her eyes. In her cult-favorite documentary Joni Mitchell: A Woman of Heart and Mind, released in 2003, she explains that she didn’t want to end up like both of her grandmothers, who were creatives at heart but weren’t able to follow their dreams due to domestic obligations:
“I just started thinking, my grandmother was a frustrated poet and musician. She kicked the kitchen door off of the hinges on the farm. And I thought about my paternal grandmother who wept for the last time in her life at 14 behind some barn, because she wanted a piano and said, ‘Dry your eyes, you silly girl, you’ll never have a piano,’” she reflects in the documentary. “And then I thought, maybe I’m the one that got the gene that has to make it happen for these two women. As much as I loved and cared for Graham, I just thought, I’m going to end up like my grandmother, kicking the door off the hinges. And I’d better not. It broke my heart.”