“When I love a song, there is almost always a moment that sounds like how I imagine truth to sound,” writes poet Amy Key in Arrangements in Blue: Notes on Loving and Living Alone. “It’s the moment in the song that touches the bruise you didn’t know you had, the aching, denied part of you. You are found out by it.”
Every observe of Joni Mitchell’s Blue uncovers a bruise for Key. The 1971 album has been expensive to her for 3 many years, since she borrowed the cassette tape from her older sister when she was 14. From the second Mitchell sang, “I am on a lonely road and I am travelling, travelling, travelling, travelling, looking for something, what can it be?” Key skilled a way of longing. At first it was a longing to eat each notice of the album. But as she’s moved by the many years of her life, Key has come to affiliate Blue together with her need for romantic love. She yearns for a associate, however she additionally yearns for a way of self that isn’t outlined by her singleness.
In Arrangements in Blue, Key makes use of Mitchell’s seminal work as a magnifying glass for her feelings and experiences as a single lady. These 10 essays parallel the tracks of Blue, however intimacy with the album isn’t required to grasp and admire Key’s insights. She recounts solo meals and solo travels, and displays on how individuals have checked out her throughout these moments. She confesses all of the methods she’s held out her coronary heart and physique to males who had been glad to obtain however unwilling to open themselves in return. By embracing a vulnerability that matches Mitchell’s, Key reveals the complete spectrum of human feeling with phrases honed as fastidiously as poetry.
Key gives evaluation of Mitchell’s work all through, however Arrangements in Blue isn’t precisely about Blue. It’s a window into the way in which one lady has moved by a world that’s fast to outline ladies by their relationships. It’s additionally an ode to the methods music can provide voice to our feelings, typically shape-shifting over years to stay as related as the primary time we hit play.
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