Inspiring Older Readers
Will You Take Me As I Am: Joni Mitchell’s Blue Period by Michelle Mercer
Writing about music is such a difficult thing. Writing about music that is deeply meaningful to you is even harder. Writing about it as a fan is full of potential bear-traps. The truth of all three of these statements is comprehensively illustrated by Michelle Mercer’s ‘biography’ of Joni Mitchell’s seminal 1971 album, Blue.
I’m not a huge fan of the standard pop musician biography. In truth I don’t really care that much about the details of their childhood, their marriages, affairs and domestic circumstances – I’m interested in the songs and the social circumstances that created them. So the promise that this would be a study dedicated to the unpeeling of one specific album – one I rate in my Desert Island Disc top twenty – was an enticing proposition on the assumption that it would forego the usual baggage associated with pop star biographies.
And to be fair, that’s pretty much how it sets out. The willingness to engage with Mitchell’s work as we might do with a poet certainly piqued my interest but sadly that’s as far as the good news goes really. Mercer is a confessed and unabashed fan and she’s quite up front about just what a defining experience this album was for her personally and while I don’t think that kind of confessional need necessarily get in the way, I do think that ultimately it’s the reason why the book becomes a a bit of a rag-bag.
Mitchell is famously grumpy and reluctant to treat her songs as revealing confessionals. She is happy to acknowledge them as autobiography and it is therefore impossible to approach the songs on Blue in any structured way without understanding the place Mitchell was in emotionally when she wrote and recorded the album. All of that is clear and perfectly understandable. The problem is that somewhere in that mix, Mercer lets the personal life of her subject take over and as a result the songs – the poetry of the songs – goes missing. Judging the artistic merit of the album is impossible without a more systematic and structured look at the songs themselves and simply locating them in an artist’s life story isn’t doing the job.
This loss of focus on the songs as songs or as poems is then compounded by Mercer’s desire to wander off onto even less well-grounded meanders through other albums. Reading it you are suddenly struck by the fact that what you thought was going to be a more forensic look at a classic album has somehow become a rather second-rate general biography.
There are so many missed opportunities here. Several times Mercer notes the influence of Bob Dylan’s work or that of Leonard Cohen but this is never properly capitalised on. The fact that Mitchell found herself in an intimate relationship with Cohen seems to interest her more than tracing the musical or lyrical influence he had on Mitchell’s own output.
We are told she admired some of Dylan’s songs and that they legitimised her ability to write lyrics in a certain way. Now, this is an interesting point but that’s where it stays – an interesting point because there’s no real analysis of what that means to Mitchell as an artist.
I found myself getting increasingly tetchy with the book the further in I read and the more we disappeared down a succession of rabbit holes that led to nothing in particular. I wanted a book that would allow me a chance to burrow into the fabric of a great album in which music and lyrics work in a sort of perfect symmetry but what I got was a curate’s egg – good in parts but ultimately not fit to be the meal I needed.
Terry Potter
March 2020