2.

Joni Mitchell- Blue

The timbre of the recording is always astonishing to me. It actually links to Prince because he famously covered ‘A Case Of You’ many times over, and ‘A Case Of You’ is probably my favourite Joni Mitchell song of all time. But Blue is just an extraordinary record. Vocally it’s astonishing. It’s the only album that has the tonality that it has. There’s a very high timbre to the guitar tone. There’s very little bass on the record. It operates on a very high timbre, and I love it. I love the guitar sound. She never really repeated it again. It has a very specific tone, and it’s also an album I’ve come to use for testing sound systems! If I’m listening to a new set of speakers or setting up tube amps and audio valve systems it tends to be the audio go-to for testing out that system’s capability.

Her early canon is extraordinary and it differs greatly. The Hissing Of Summer Lawns is another favourite of mine, and that has all sorts of weird rhythms and there are African elements and it’s a really avant-garde record. There’s so much in that early canon that’s extraordinary, but Blue really stands out. It doesn’t sound like anything else that she did and it doesn’t really sound like anything else that was done in that era. Because of the high tones, although it’s still a warm record it doesn’t have the deep resonant warmth of a lot of the folk records of the time.