Blue Monday

Joni Mitchell has been amazing from the very first notes of her very first album, but she still doesn’t get anything like the mad respect that’s her due. She’s praised, sure, but almost always as an afterthought — after the usual rundown of Bob Dylan and others, Mitchell gets “Oh yeah, she’s great, too.” A big part of the reason, I think, is that early on she turned away from tight, rigid pop song formats. After the folkie-girl- with-a-guitar format of her first few albums, Mitchell turned to a looser, jazz inflected sound, grounded not in bluesy forms but in the kind of fusion jazz that very quickly became unfashionable. Plus (or maybe minus), the song of hers that gets played on the radio most often is “Woodstock,” a tune I would be very happy not to hear again for the resat of my life.

Anyway, it’s big news around here that she’s about to release her first album of new material in something like a decade. Crooks and Liars has the debut video of one of the upcoming disc’s songs, “If I Had a Heart,” but in keeping with today’s theme let’s also throw in a video of Joni performing “Blue,” from the album of the same name. For lagniappe, here’s her performance of “Coyote” in The Last Waltz — the most underrated moment in a most overrated movie.