Last week I stood on stage at The Tabernacle in Notting Hill and read this aloud. It was part of One Track Minds, possibly my favourite event to be part of - storytellers talk about the songs that changed their lives, and then the song is played to the audience. This time, Camden Voices choir sang the songs. It really was quite something.

I was the first of us to move into our student house. After unpacking a bit, I lay on the bed’s thin mattress and listened to Blue in its entirety. It was an album I’d swiped from my parents’ house; I suppose I thought that it was about time I started listening to Joni Mitchell. I was 19, and I was naive: I had no idea of the love affair I was about to embark upon. 

Someone had painted the walls of that bedroom the colour of raspberry sorbet. The fading light of a September afternoon played across them as I reckoned with Joni’s voice for the first time. Blue was Joni’s fourth album, recorded on the cusp of the Seventies. At that point she was still singing high and fine and light as gossamer. I’m not sure I grasped the lyrics, or what they were about. But I heard her, and thought it sounded like a wet finger running around the top of a crystal wine glass. It was inebriating, and it was addictive. 

I couldn’t even guess the number of times I’ve listened to Blue since then. Hundreds? Thousands? At some point I decided to delve into her other records. Hejira has something pleasingly dusty about it, Court and Spark boasts the most bangers, Clouds is dreamy and hopeful. I spent a strange, lonely evening walking off my jetlag in a small Japanese town, looking for plasters large enough to cover my tattoo so I could visit the public baths; the whole thing was soundtracked by the grand orchestration of Both Sides Now. I have turned to these records when I have been bereaved or listless, or, more often, numb and I haven’t known what to feel. 

Still, Blue remains my go-to: weary Monday night dinner-cooking? Blue. Long train journeys? Blue. Cruising down the Pacific Coast Highway? Blue. Night bus journeys home, looking across the river? Blue, blue, blue. 

When I was eight, I would switch my allegiance to the different members of the Spice Girls every few months, and over the past decade-and-a-half I’ve done the same with different tracks from Blue. They have patiently soundtracked my young womanhood. Roughly this time every year, as Christmas creeps in around the edges of life, it’s River that takes to the fore - Joni’s song of longing that twists the jingle bells refrain. I walked down the aisle to ‘A Case of You’, a song about heartbreak, yes, but undisputedly also the greatest love song of all time. 

When I was 21 and moved to New York, I discovered what a dive bar was and All I Want became a kind of backing track, solely for the latent, girlish ambition she fits into the lyric: “Alive, alive, I want to get up and jive / I want to wreck my stockings in some jukebox dive”. The spiralling repetition of “travelling” that kicks off that song - and the album as a whole - is often the earworm in my head in times of quiet. Static or otherwise, I suppose we’re all travelling somewhere, most days. 

As the years pass, I find new depths to these songs. Joni wrote them off the back of a break up with Graham Nash and in the midst of a relationship with James Taylor. But while many would argue that Blue’s an album about falling in and out of love, I think it is a portrait of a young woman in flux, and of the dizzying highs and lows borne of trying to figure out how to live.

Joni later said that when she wrote Blue, she “felt like a cellophane wrapper on a pack of cigarettes.” That she felt like she had absolutely no secrets from the world and she couldn’t pretend in my life to be strong. It took me a while to recognise that vulnerability, to go through enough living to understand that it held its own kind of strength. 

Blue, the song, is the album’s melancholy, pensive heart. She accompanies herself on a piano, tumbling chords like waves, and plays with the idea of water and permanence. Among the crystalline narratives of tracks such as Little Green and Carey, Blue can be easily missed at first, like the foggy lullaby Joni describes it as in its lyrics. But, like the songs that lull us to sleep, I’ve found Blue trundling on in my self-consciousness. During those years of listening to the album’s lighter, more elaborate songs, Blue has been waiting for me to be ready for it. Recently, I have been.

Since the first summer of the pandemic, I’ve been questioning what it is to be a woman. Lockdown played with time for all of us, but I found it truncated the girlhood I still thought I had. I thought my friends and I would slide into womanhood with the usual rituals - hen parties and baby showers, grasped-at nights out and messy mornings. Instead, we grew up in isolation: engagements, pregnancies, shifts to the suburbs, seemingly overnight. We’d not hugged one another in months but here was a new move to the countryside on the cards, with a due date, and a dog. I became familiar with a loneliness I didn’t recognise. It drove me out, out of my friendship group and into the confidences of women I barely knew across the country. For a year, I interviewed these women about their lives for an inquiry that would end up as a book. Many of them were strangers and acquaintances. All of them were generous. They were patient with me when I was trying to answer a question I didn’t know how to ask. 

Sometimes, in the car on the way, I would play Blue. It’s a song built on uncertainty, and uncertainty is something I’ve grown familiar with of late. A sense of not knowing what’s beyond you while knowing, deeply, in the waters of yourself. While the rest of the record references people - lovers, friends, people to dance with - Blue is a solitary endeavour. Some people think it’s about James Taylor, but I think of Joni writing it as a kind of self-portrait. Here is a song from me, she finishes, as much to herself as from it. 

When I think about it, I’ve very rarely listened to Joni’s work in the company of others. Much as I lay alone on that bed, in that pink room, I still turn to Joni when I’m by myself. I tend to put Blue on while I’m in transit. I’ve been surprised to find it makes me cry.

Joni lays her stall out early: “You know, I've been to sea before, Crown and anchor me / Or let me sail away”. This command used to wash over me. But the older I get, the less sure I am of some things and the more open I am to figuring them out as they come. Blue is a song that looks back at the hedonism of youth and sees something cast adrift; whether to stick, or twist. It’s a memorial and a determination all at once. It’s a woman saying she has done the things expected of her, and she’s ready for something else. It’s something that I’ve come to recognise, the more women I speak to. 

Blue ends on an upward-tilting chord; it’s a segue into the second side of the record, into that carefree collaboration of California, but I hear it as a question. I hear it as a song that’s asking me something: stick or twist, stay or go, something known, or something different? I can’t answer those questions and know that I’ve made the right choice. What I do know, though, is that in a few years, whatever I did choose, I’ll still be playing Blue, and I’ll hear a deeper version of myself playing back at me.