For the past couple of months I’ve been trying to recruit a friend I made on Instagram to write a post for The Broken Record. His name is Todd Drootin and he sells high quality pressings of a fairly wide variety of great titles under the moniker LP guru. I’ve personally bought several records from him, all at what I consider to be great prices for the quality. If you’re interested in finding great titles that sound great, guaranteed, I strongly urge you to check out his site.

Besides the great work that Todd is doing with LP guru, which I honestly think represents the future of the vintage vinyl business, I also consider him a master of the Instagram record post. There are quite a few vinyl enthusiasts on Instagram posting these days, some with more to say than others, but for me Todd just nails the format. His posts hit a sweet spot between engaging personal stories, concise insightful commentary and wonderful musical choices. I always look forward to seeing what records he posts and I can’t get enough of what he says about them.

A while back Todd posted Joni Mitchell’s Blue and his comments resonated with me in a huge way. Here’s what he says:

“The first time I heard Blue, I practically physically rejected it like an organ transplant gone wrong. I was in the early stages of my career in the audiophile record world at that point, and I suppose that I let the heaps of praise lavished on it by so many people turn me against the album before I even gave it a fair shake. Of course, I was being a dummy; being a contrarian is fine until you’re just turning against things for the sake of it. These days I’m an unabashed Joni fan, and even if Blue isn’t my personal favorite of hers I thoroughly enjoy it and appreciate it for the masterpiece it obviously is.”

What I related to in Todd’s post was a first experience with Blue that closely mirrored my own. When I played the record for the first time, with it’s reputation looming, I felt compelled to leave it on the turntable for as long as possible and try to love it. It took no small amount of self discipline to keep playing that record and years went by before I played it again.

I’m now on my fifth copy of Blue and find myself drawn to it more every time I hear it. No doubt many, many others have been drawn to this record, as evidenced by the fact that most copies are now in terrible playing condition after countless spins on the turntable and no fewer trips in and out of the jacket. Even copies that are in “good condition” are often pressed on noisy vinyl which, on an album almost entirely devoid of drums and bass, has a significant impact on listenability and must have challenged the convictions of even Joni’s most ardent fans.

I agree with Todd, Blue is a masterpiece. It is also an extremely difficult recording to reproduce, even with a clean copy that plays reasonably quiet, and the challenge of finding a copy Blue that brings Joni’s music to life should not go under appreciated. The music is so personal and the performance so intimate that any sonic obscuration of any significance is, in my view, a profound obstacle to fully appreciating her art.

I’ve owned a copy Blue for a while now that revealed enough for me to realize that I needed to find a better one. Recently I found a copy that has brought me close enough to the music to have something worthwhile to say about it, and to discuss why sonically, Blue is a tough nut to crack.

Musically and sonically, it’s the reproduction of Joni’s voice that makes all the difference. On copies where the vocals don’t resolve well, the sweetness and breathiness of Joni’s singing is absent and the vocals can literally sound hard and be hard to listen to. With such a copy, any audiophile worth her or his salt will, like Todd, reject Blue “like an organ transplant gone wrong.” But on copies that are mastered well and have been pressed cleanly enough to give full expression to the vocals, Joni’s voice draws you to her like a guru offering darshan to a supplicant.

The other big challenge with playing Blue is that, with bass and drums mostly absent on the album, there’s very little to anchor the sound. This can result in brightness and harshness that may push listeners away. At times I’ve found that, no matter the strength of Joni’s performance, I simply couldn’t sit through the record because of the way it sounded. Fortunately I managed to remedy this with a better copy and some fine tweaking of the VTA which lifted the weight of the midrange up and warmed up the sound significantly.

The first time I “got” Joni Mitchell was a special evening not too long ago when my mother and my sister were at my and my wife’s house for dinner. I had recently posted an article on The Band’s Music From Big Pink and brought up a clip from Martin Scorsese’s concert film The Last Waltz to jar their memories of an event that, while crystal clear in my own mind, was absent in theirs.

When I brought up a clip from the film, Joni was performing her song “Coyote” and it was the first time I had ever seen an image of her beyond the photos from her album covers.

I was captivated. Joni’s charisma and the openness with which she tells her stories is, frankly, impossible to look away from. People who love Joni Mitchell REALLY LOVE Joni Mitchell. I’d never got why until seeing her perform in the film.

Since then I’ve been seeking that moment again when playing Blue. It hasn’t always been easy, at least not with the copies I’ve had to listen to. But as I’ve begun to acquire better copies, and have improved my systems’ ability to play them, I’ve come to embrace Blue as Todd puts it, “for the masterpiece it obviously is.”