Blue Review

Ten songs, almost no band, and a level of disclosure that other writers spent the following decade trying to match. Mitchell is working with dulcimer, piano and open tuned guitar, and the arrangements are so bare that every decision registers: a piano figure that refuses to resolve, a vocal that jumps an octave mid phrase, James Taylor's guitar entering once and then leaving.

The writing is the reason this record turns up near the top of every serious canon. She is exact about places and people, she gives herself no cover, and she is harder on herself than on anyone she is leaving. River, A Case of You and Little Green are the ones that get quoted, but the sequence is doing the real work, moving from restlessness through grief to something like acceptance without once announcing that it is doing so.

The single honest complaint is that it can be a hard listen, because the intimacy leaves the listener nowhere to stand. That is also why it has outlasted almost everything released beside it. Every confessional singer songwriter record since has been measured against this one, and most of them lose on specificity rather than on feeling.