5. Joni MitchellBlue
My mum was a folk singer. Joni was like a second mother to me. She taught a young girl about worlds beyond her small and very English comfort zone, about depths of love and philosophies on life and about pouring all of it into songs. I learnt to sing almost before I could speak; hearing my mum sing around the house and rehearsing with her band, then listening to Joni albums from my mum’s collection I learnt to find my own voice and write what I felt.
Blue, apparently written amidst a kind of breakdown is, for me, her most powerful record and it’s probably the gut-wrenching expression in some of the songs that make it so. ‘Little Green’, about the child she gave up for adoption in order to stay free to make music; ‘River’, about hurting someone beloved and wanting to run and hide from the pain of it, and the epic ‘Blue’ that digs deep into her existential crisis: "Blue, songs are like tattoos/ You know I’ve been to sea before/ Crown and anchor me/ Or let me sail away."
