A love letter to Joni Mitchell’s Blue | Rhiannon Lucy Cosslett

I've known this album for only 20 of its 50 years, but it has seen me from childhood to adulthood, and its genius only grows

I couldn't look at people without weeping," Joni Mitchell said, about the time she wrote Blue, her best-loved album, which is 50 years old today. Like every aspiring literary sad girl, I know Blue by heart, though I have loved it for only 20 of its 50 years. I haven't been to California, either, nor did I live through the sexual revolution, or know the pain of giving up a child for adoption. Yet this album has seen me from childhood through to adulthood; its essence has fused with my own.

In her essay The Joni Mitchell Problem, Meghan Daum wrote of the album's unparalleled adulation: The clause Joni and Me' has been written upwards of 10 million times, mostly in diaries with flowers drawn in the margins ... there is nothing original about being a late 20th-century-born female who feels that every life event ... was accompanied by a Joni song that was custom written for the occasion."