Don't do this. Joni would certainly record much better albums than this in the future, but this is still a terrific debut that immediately establishes Joni as a rare talent. Broadly speaking, this album is actually two suites: the first side is subtitled "I Came to the City," while the second is subtitled "Out of the City and Down to the Seaside," and both sides range from good to astounding. The first track, "I Had a King," is somewhat straightforward by Joni standards in a certain sense (it's about the breakdown of her marriage to Chuck Mitchell, whom she had divorced earlier in 1967 and probably should never have married in the first place), but it immediately shows a majesty that she could conjure up in both her voice and the music that few at the time could have matched, and I think it's a fantastic start to her career. My favorite track on the first side is the delightful piano-based "Night in the City," which for me always conjures the image of somebody gleefully walking past brightly lit up buildings and passing under a street light every time she goes high in the chorus of "Night in the *Ci*ty looks pretty to me," but the other tracks aren't far below it. "Marcie" (about a woman waiting for man she pines for to write her back before saying screw it and getting on with her life) was an immediate standout for me (especially the amazing way she sings "Like string and brown *pa*per"), but "Michael From Mountains" (another song about longing for somebody who won't give her the attention she might hope for) and "Nathan la Franeer" (a solid dark acoustic number despite having the most obvious production flaw on the album) are both remarkable in their own way.

The second half is generally similar in quality, with a couple of major standouts supported well by the other material. "Sisotowbell Lane" (Joni claims "Sisotowbell" stands for "Somehow, In Spite Of Trouble, Ours Will Be Ever Lasting Love," and I'm not sure if this is earnest or trolling but it actually works with the theme of the song) is a deeply pleasant song about a longstanding contented love, with two people passing the time by taking turns in their rocking chair and eating muffins and berries that turn their tongues blue, and it might be one of the most charming things she ever wrote. "The Dawntreader" (which might be connected to C.S. Lewis' _Voyage of the Dawn Treader_ but maybe not) is much more about melancholy majesty than about going somewhere in its 5 minutes, but it's an absolutely entrancing melancholy majesty so I'll take it, and "The Pirate of Penance" (which has Joni occasionally in a duet with herself to great effect, like when she sings "She dances for the sailors in a smoky cabaret bar underground), while clearly a relatively minor track on the album, is still a lot of fun.

All this is just setup, though, for the amazing last two tracks. The title track starts with a quiet but firmly plucked guitar that can't help but grab my attention immediately, and ends with one of the grandest sternly played acoustic guitar chords I can imagine, and in the middle is a terrific rumination of how her dreams and ambitions are much less in line with the confines and requirements of conventional society and much more in line with the freedom she observes with birds she sees down by the beach (favorite line: "But sandcastles crumble and hunger is human / And humans are hungry for worlds they can't share"). I can't prove this, of course, but I can't help but wonder if this song was on the radar of ABBA when they put together "Eagle" many years later, and that possibility can only help this song for me. And finally, "Cactus Tree" is simultaneously sad, regretful, optimistic, and defiant all at once: roughly speaking, the song is an acknowledgement of all the men who have loved her and will love her, and a concession that she might ultimately love them too, but that she can't promise that she will love them back in a way that will satisfy them, because trying to make sense of all the opportunity in the world and her place in it might make it hard for her to accommodate somebody else when trying to figure out your own life is hard enough on its own (there's more to it than that, of course: with Joni there's always more). Set to music that somehow manages to capture and magnify all of the emotions of the lyrics, while still being crisp and immediately memorable in a way that Joni doesn't always prioritize, this makes a terrific closer and launching point for the rest of her career.

If you come to this album from later in her career, I suppose there's a chance you could find it a little underwhelming, but if this had somehow been her only album it would still be worth people's attention. Hell, if you started with a later album and couldn't get it into it, this might be a great next stop, because hearing her in a slightly dialed-back version might be just the primer you need to help get acclimated to the approaches she would take later on.

The most famous songs, of course, are "Chelsea Morning" and "Both Sides, Now," both of which Judy Collins had previously covered and both of which sound far better in Joni's hands. "Chelsea Morning" is a marvelous track 2, a bouncy, chipper song (with a delightful chorus of multiple high-pitched Jonis jumping in during the final verse) about living in the Chelsea neighorhood in New York City, surrounded by other ambitious artists, and in particular it draws from the colors that would bounce around her apartment in the early morning from a stained glass mobile which she had cobbled together from people's discarded trash. And "Both Sides, Now," well, that's just one of the best songs ever written, a song about how once you move beyond the easily understandable cliches associated with the physical/emotional/philosophical world, you can't help but realize just how little you actually understand, and framed within one of her most memorable melodies and most striking arrangements (it's all about the little details in the acoustic playing) she'd ever put together. I don't know if "Both Sides, Now" is actually her very best song ever (it might be but I don't think it's a runaway winner; Joni wrote a lot of great songs), but it's an absolute stunner regardless.

So what about the rest? "Tin Angel" sounds a lot in mood and function like "I Had a King" from the debut to me, as she wrestles through an internal conflict driven by her thoughts about an old relationship vs her current one, and I don't quite love it as an album opener, but I do really enjoy the moments when the stern facade falls away to reveal something gentler. Much better for me is "I Don't Know Where I Stand," where Joni feels a pull to yield her emotions more fully into a new relationship but also feels a sense of doubt and fear (not only about her own feelings but what she thinks the feelings of the other might be) that makes her act cautiously, and it's definitely one of the best and most beautiful expressions I've heard of the stresses people inflict on themselves in trying to find connection with others. "That Song About the Midway" is apparently about her relationship with Leonard Cohen, with whom she had a torrid love affair upon meeting him in 1967, and I find it fascinating that they were able to stay friends afterwards, because the man described in this song is someone she's overwhelmingly attracted to but spends much of his time luring in other women with the power of his voice and raw energy: I don't find the song especially amazing, but I understand why somebody could. Closing out the first side, then, is "Roses Blue," an interesting ball of acoustic tension (it's about somebody who's really gotten into the occult and ends up unable to function without it) with a great additional guitar placed on top of it for effect (the hell is that, a balalaika? I genuinely don't know), and while a small part of me thinks it could have been shorter (it's only 4 minutes but I can't shake the feeling that a 2 minute version of this would have given this album some interesting tension that could have helped it), I still enjoy it a lot.

The second half, aside from "Both Sides Now," consists of four songs that I'm pretty sure I like a lot individually but that I find somewhat befuddling as a set, which is good and bad. Lyrically, "The Gallery" is apparently another one inspired by her Leonard Cohen relationship, and once again the lyrics leave me baffled that they could remain friends: "I gave you all my pretty years / And I was left to winter here while you went west for pleasure / And now you're flying back here like some lost homing pigeon / They've monitored your brain, you say, and changed you with religion" hits differently when you know about Cohen's brief fling with Scientology. "I Think I Understand" is much gentler, with a pleasant but not especially striking delivery in the verses but a tour de force delivery in the chorus, especially given how brief it is (seriously, the way she sings "I think I understand / Fear is like a wilderland / Stepping stones and sinking sand" can stay in my head forever if it wants), while "Songs to Aging Children" is also very gentle but has a fairly wild arrangement of layered vocal Joni, and while I enjoy it I find it oddly unsettling. And finally, "The Fiddle and the Drum," which comes right before "Both Sides, Now," is 3 minutes of a capella anti-Vietnam protest, and while I'm pretty sure it's great in its own right, it also leaves me feeling completely dislocated in a way that's only remedied by the opening chords of "Both Sides, Now" (and maybe that was the point).

I do admire how Joni clearly made so many deliberate moves to stretch herself for her second album, but I also think she was still in more of a feeling-out period than she would have realized at the time, and it's peculiar to me that all of those deliberate moves to stretch only amounted to a lateral move in quality. And yet, she didn't decline with these changes either, and in the ways she stretches here (in arrangements, in complexity of vocal melodies, in emotional ambiguity), I can definitely hear her sowing the seeds for much of what would come later. This is worth getting early because of "Both Sides, Now," but don't make the mistake I made in just getting this and Blue and stopping there for way too many years.

Indeed, as much as I generally enjoy her first two albums, hearing this album right after the previous two somewhat reminds me of when I watched an HD TV feed after spending my life to that point accustomated to SD. This album offers a great deal more sonic variety than its predecessors: where the first two albums were largely acoustic guitar albums with an occasional touch of keyboards to provide a change of pace, this one is much more balanced between guitar and keyboards, and this album also contains a cello and some woodwinds that provide a lot of color. I wouldn't exactly say that I think this album sounds better because this instrumental approach makes the sound more "sophisticated," but I would say that there's an energy and vibrancy here that Joni couldn't quite unlock with the more limited set of tools she used before. I have read critique of this album for its clear move away from more immediately memorable melodies, but the gains in emotional impact and instrumental atmosphere are much more than enough to compensate for me, and they help make the album into a great experience for me.

The album has somewhat odd sequencing: the album ends with three of her most famous songs, but up to that point the album doesn't bother with anything remotely approaching a hit, instead simmering at a low boil with songs that range from "this is quite nice" to "holy hell this is an awesome deeper cut," and honestly I kinda like the implicit challenge in this approach. The best song in the first half, and one of my favorites she ever did, is "For Free," a song I first heard in a cover done on the Byrds reunion album (I still like that cover quite a bit), but which goes way beyond that in its original form. At first pass, the song (done as a slow melancholy piano ballad except for when a clarinet briefly pops in) is about a famous musician observing a street performer not making any money, but of course there's more to it: the song is more about the famous musician herself, longing for the innocence and connection and joy that comes from playing music just for its own sake (the most painful moment of the song is when she thinks about going over, asking for a song, and harmonizing along, but instead has to walk away because she's on a schedule), but instead having to partake of the good and bad that comes from doing music as your profession at a high level. It's a song about music, but like so many of Joni's other best songs, it's a song about feeling like you've lost something that you can never get back, and it rattles me every time I hear it.

The rest of the first half doesn't quite measure up to "For Free," but I still enjoy it a lot. The opening "Morning Morgantown" is a tribute to the good aspects of American small-town life (milk trucks, a gentle pace that allows you to sit and sip lemonade, strangers saying hello to each other) while completely ignoring the darker sides (honestly I'm fine with that, not everything needs to be a dark exploration of the American soul), and the piano part that it centers around is bright and cheery in a way that always puts me in a great mood immediately. After "For Free" comes "Conversation," a song about a woman who serves as regular confidant (especially about relationship difficulties) to a man she's fallen for, and how she both hopes he'll eventually pick her and also has to carefully conceal her feelings both to him and his partner. "Love is a story told to a friend / it's second-hand" and "She speaks in sorry sentences / miraculous repentances / I don't believe her" are among many great lyrics here, but this song isn't just about lyrics; the acoustic base (with a marvelous vocal melody on top of it) eventually gets covered in a great combination of multiple Joni "doo doo doo" voices and jazzy flute + saxophone that gives the song a terrific pep in its step to the very end. The title track finds the guitar weaving a figure that I always instinctually want to describe as "mystical," and I find it fascinating how the song talks about three of Joni's friends in a way that makes them feel like they belong more in a well-written fantasy novel than in real life, but also implicitly suggests that there's something about the nature of the canyon (in this case Laurel Canyon, a neighborhood in Los Angeles) that makes half-real/half-mystical people like this a possibility in the first place. "Willy" is a song about Graham Nash (his middle name is William), with whom Joni paired up for a while (more on that later!!), and it's such a gentle piano-driven song of total contentment and bliss that it breaks my heart every time I hear it (given what we know now): the line "Willy is my child, he is my father" that begins and ends the song could make somebody raise an eyebrow, but if you parse it as something like "Willy is my Omega, he is my Alpha" it makes more sense. And finally, the first side rounds out with "The Arrangement," a directionless piano haze about how life gets swallowed up in the pursuit of things and titles; the ending lines of "You could have been more than a name on the door / You could have been more ..." always hit me less as an interesting musical idea in and of themselves and more as a dying whisper of regret, and this song always leaves me shook at the end.

The first three tracks of the second half are essentially more of the same, and while I don't love these songs I still think they're good enough. "Rainy Night House" starts the second side with the same sort of piano melancholy that "The Arrangement" used to end the first side, and it's another song about how hard she fell for Leonard Cohen (even if the song uses other people as proxies for them): the best moment of this one is when Joni sings "I am from the Sunday School / I sing soprano in the upstairs choir" and a Joni choir answers with "Aaah-aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaah." The following "The Priest" (this time a dour acoustic song) is also often interpreted as about her time with Leonard Cohen, and in a certain sense this is where the album starts to tire me a bit, yet the final verse ("Oh come, let's run from this ring we're in / where the Christians clap and the Germans grin / saying let them lose, crying let them win / oh make them both confess") is so deeply unsettling that it ends up making the song worth it for me. "Blue Boy," then, ends the long stretch of deeper cuts with another melancholy piano ballad, about (I'm admittedly guessing here) a romance that ultimately falters because of the man's emotional distance from his woman: she longs for him until he comes home one day and finds she's lost her ability to care for him: this is probably my least favorite on the album, but again, it's still a long way from bad.

And then, all of a sudden, the album (relatively) turns into a hit parade. "Big Yellow Taxi" is a chipper environmental protest anthem on the surface, about needing to care for trees or not using DDT that kills bugs, but more broadly it's tied into the chorus lyric, "Don't it always seem to go / that you don't know what you've got 'til it's gone?": the title of the song, after all, doesn't come from the environmental lyrics, but from a near-throwaway line near the end where "a big yellow taxi took away my old man" (whether he desired this or was taken by the law is a matter for interpretation). The juxtaposition between the serious message of the words and the chipper nature of the music always cracks me up, especially the final way she sings "They paved paradise, put up a parking lot," and this deserves every bit of its classic status. The album closer, "The Circle Game" (written as a response to the Neil Young song "Sugar Mountain"), wasn't released as a single, but it did get covered a lot, and it strikes me as an ideal balance to the opening "Morning Morgantown," a gentle contemplation of the broader meaning provided by the smaller, simpler aspects of life we might otherwise take for granted in the moment.

Sandwiched between these, then, is "Woodstock," and dammit, if you prefer the Crosby / Stills / Nash / Young version of this to Joni's version, I don't know if I can trust you. Mitchell didn't appear at Woodstock for various logistical reasons, but she took inspiration from the idealism built into the concept of the festival, of people gathering from far and wide to merge their souls through the power of music as if they were returning to the Garden of Eden, and she built a towering moody epic out of this. Joni's electric piano, as well as Joni's choice to accompany herself with a Joni army after each chorus, won't make for as immediately pleasing of an experience as will the CSNY cover that has dominated classic rock radio since, but hearing Joni sing "We are stardust / we are golden / and we've got to get ourselves back to the garden" shakes me in a way that the more polished (and let me be clear, the cover is fine) approach just can't.

Again, I don't think this is the best Joni album, and it's certainly not one of her most accessible, but weirdly, if I could do it all over again, I wish I had gotten this one first. If you've dabbled in Joni and haven't gotten into her (maybe you've just listened to Blue and didn't get the appeal), give this one a try and see if it breaks through: there is a lot to admire here, both with individual songs and with how it holds together overall.

Blue is an explosively emotional album, and part of the reason has to do with her ongoing relationship intrigues (in the time between Ladies of the Canyon and this, she broke off a lengthy relationship with Graham Nash, then entered an intense relationship with James Taylor only for him to break up with her once he became very famous), but this album also acknowledges the pain that related to giving up her daughter for adoption a few years earlier (the details of this only became full public knowledge about 20 years later). More generally than covering specific episodes of her life, this is the album that most clearly shows the listener the absolute emotional roller-coaster of being Joni Mitchell in her late 20s, for better or for worse, but this isn't just a case of intense voyeuristic confessional: the flood of emotions provided by this album is framed in a crispness in her melody writing and song structures that wasn't always the case for her on other albums, and while I'm certainly an enthusiastic supporter of the atmospheric intrigue that Joni could muster up on other albums, I must say that this extra level of compositional discipline (whether it was deliberate or not) suits her well. That's not to say that this album is a wall-to-wall collection of potential singles or anything, nor would I want it to be, but there's something very appealing to me about the control and punchiness provided by this album relative to some of her others.

The first half of this album, in terms of tone, has three generally chipper (but startlingly deep when you look closer) tracks and two tracks that are about as sad as Joni Mitchell could get. The opening "All I Want" is about trying to balance the happiness one can find in a relationship with the absolute joy and glee that can come from the freedom that life can offer you in other areas: on the one hand, you have lines about wanting to be closely intimate with somebody ("I want to talk to you, I want to shampoo you / I want to renew you again and again" is amazing in this regard), and on the other hand, you have lines like "Alive, alive, I want to get up and jive / I want to wreck my stockings in some jukebox dive" about joyful living, all tied together with "I am on a lonely road and I am traveling / Looking for the key to set me free / Oh, the jealousy, the greed is the unraveling / It's the unraveling and its undoes all the joy that could be" which brings out how these two general desires are largely at odds with each other. This tension is amplified by the battle between the relatively tight melody and the way Joni keeps trying to stretch the structure as far as she can (like how she repeats the word "traveling" four times when the song could have gotten by with just one), and the overall effect is stunning once you get to know the details well. "My Old Man" shifts from the guitar center of the opener to gorgeous piano balladry, with lyrics that look back with longing to her relationship with Graham Nash and how she wishes he would have accepted they could be together and happy without the formal boundaries that come with marriage (the chorus line "We don't need no piece of paper from the city hall / keeping us tied and true" is the kicker here), but also with longing for how much she missed him when he was gone and how happy she'd be whenever he returned. "Carey" (featuring a dulcimer), the last upbeat track on this side, is about a fun time Joni had with a hippie community on Crete, while also acknowledging that, even as she was having fun, she couldn't help but think about all of the other places she wanted to go next, and couldn't entirely live in the moment as she contemplated her possible future travels.

The two other tracks have the names of colors in the title, and I don't think it's a coincidence that the first, "Little Green," names a color that is half blue (the title of the album and presumably the color Joni is associating with herself on this album). "Little Green," as people learned many years later (and not by Mitchell's choice), concerned her child Kelly (whose name was inspired by the color Kelly Green), whom she gave up for adoption when she was poor and when she didn't think she could raise a happy child. The song alludes to sorrowing for everything she won't get to see in her daughter's life, and the acknowledgement that the very nature of the world and the passage of time will remind her of her daughter (like when green grass emerges in the spring), while also alluding to the hope for a better life for her daughter than she could have provided. As you might expect, it's done as a quiet acoustic ballad, and it will absolutely rip your heart out if you're not feeling emotionally steeled. The title track, in contrast, is a melancholy piano ballad, and while I wouldn't quite call it a highlight, it's nonetheless a deeply contemplative look at the hollowness that can from a life of only seeking thrills (the line in the chorus "Acid, booze, and ass / needles, guns, and grass / lots of laughs, lots of laughs" is very much not in praise of those things), and it's a fine way to make the listener pause and take stock of their lives as they ready for the second half.

The second half, in terms of tone, has a similar balance to the first half: two acoustic songs (one upbeat, one upbeat until you examine it closely and realize it's pretty sad), two largely melancholy piano ballads, and a song that smashes emotions together in the form of one of the very elite songs of her whole career. "California" and "A Case of You" are the acoustic songs: "California" is another travelogue, full of jumpy glimpses of the fun and energy of Europe while rooted in her longing for home (with some languid pedal steel providing a fascinating contrast to the overall sound); and "A Case of You" is a fascinating lyrical and emotional miasma, refusing to fully commit to one particular vibe or emotion, but all the more intriguing because it's so evocative lyrically (weaving as it does between religious and sexual imagery) and because it's just so damned memorable and infectious. "River" and the closing "The Last Time I Saw Richard" are the piano ballads: "River" is about (roughly) how her feelings about an upcoming Christmas have gotten mixed up with her feelings about her recently ended relationship, and it's about as naked in its pain / sadness / self-loathing as Joni ever got, repeatedly punctuated with the line "I wish I had a river I could skate away on" and occupied with brief quotes of "Jingle Bells"; finally, the closing "The Last Time I Saw Richard" makes a grand effort at tying the whole album together, ending with her in a dark cafe (instead of dancing in a bar as suggested in the opening song) brooding over love as a concept, trying so very hard to not lose faith in the very concept of love even as it keeps bringing her pain (there are other interesting aspects to the song, not least of which is the fate of Richard as he sold out in joining middle class America), and it's a great capper.

In the midst of this, however, is "This Flight Tonight," which became better known through a top-notch Nazareth cover but is a classic in its original form. This song is about regrets in the aftermath of leaving somebody and taking a flight out West to get away from them, and realizing they're committed to this because the plane can't turn around just because of a momentary wavering. The song is as tense and as catchy as anything Joni ever did, but it also has one of the greatest studio tricks in any song of the era: as the song gets to the point when she's listening to the in-flight music station, the sound quality turns tinny to reflect the low-grade headphones that a passenger would be using to listen to it, then immediately snaps back to the regular production style. The song ends with ambiguity, leaving it unclear whether the person will stay out West or make the impulsive decision to drive back (spurred on by moments like how seeing a falling star in her trip made her nostalgic for her man), but I really hope she stayed.