Song · Joni Mitchell
“Blue” by Joni Mitchell
From the album Blue (1971)
“Blue” by Joni Mitchell appears on 7 radio countdowns from 3 stations between 2004 and 2023. It was first released in 1971 on the album Blue. Its best result is #262 on the WXPN 885 All-Time Greatest Songs (2004). In the combined RockLists rankings it is #931 indie & aaa song of all time.
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The title song of Joni Mitchell's 1971 album Blue is just her and a piano, produced by Mitchell herself with Henry Lewy engineering, and it's about as close to overhearing a private letter as a record gets. The long-standing consensus is that she's singing to James Taylor; Sheila Weller, in her biography Girls Like Us, points to the song's talk of a junkie's needles and a seashell handed to a lover as the giveaway.
The melody drifts rather than marches, Mitchell's voice curling around the chords like smoke, tender and worried at once. Its afterlife has taken odd turns: A.R. Kane sampled it on "Catch My Drift" in 1989, Blu and Exile built "My World Is.." on it in 2007, and it plays under a key scene in the 2019 film The Last Black Man in San Francisco.
Written with AI assistance from RockLists chart data, MusicBrainz and Wikipedia.
RockLists rankings
Indie & Adult Alternative
All Rock Formats
All-time and decade countdowns
| Year | # | Station | Countdown | of |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2004 | 262 | WXPN | WXPN 885 All-Time Greatest Songs (2004) | 885 |
| 2009 | 760 | WYEP | WYEP 913 Essential Songs | 913 |
| 2012 | 554 | WXPN | WXPN 885 Greatest Rock Songs (2012) | 885 |
| 2014 | 395 | WXPN | WXPN 885 All-Time Greatest Songs (2014) | 885 |
| 2018 | 663 | The Current | The Current's 893 Essential Songs | 892 |
| 2020 | 418 | WXPN | WXPN 2020 Greatest Songs of All Time | 2020 |
| 2023 | 519 | WYEP | WYEP Countdown to Fall 2023 | 1229 |
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