Description

Joni Mitchell had made her own covers for her first three albums, playful self-portraits full of flowers and colour. For Blue she stepped out of the frame. The cover is a single photograph by Tim Considine, a close-up of Mitchell singing with her eyes almost closed, the whole image drenched in deep blue so that her face seems to float in it.

The picture was older than the album. According to the archivist Joel Bernstein, Considine took it years earlier, at the Troubadour club in Los Angeles in 1967 or 1968. Art director Gary Burden, who designed sleeves for many of the Laurel Canyon musicians, built the cover around it, adding little more than her name and the title in plain type.

The colour is the whole idea. Biographer David Yaffe described the photograph as Mitchell "singing, possibly in ecstasy, possibly in sorrow, probably in both, [as] she is sinking into the color blue." It suits an album of raw confessional songs about love, travel and loss, released by Reprise on 22 June 1971. The plain blue portrait made a quiet record look as intimate as it sounds, and it has become one of the most recognisable covers in popular music.

Credit

Photography by Tim Considine; art direction by Gary Burden