Joni Mitchell, Bob Dylan, Fleet Foxes and Blue

Blue is special for many reasons. Blue is a word of emotional relevance. We empathize with this color, invest so deeply in it and have created art that has served a similar, repeated purpose for so long that all you have to do is say “I feel blue” and we all nod our heads sympathetically . In nature there is only one creature that produces a truly blue pigment – that obrina olive wing butterfly. All other plants and animals reflect blue light instead of producing it themselves. What synesthetes make blue out of us all!

So it makes sense that musicians would be drawn to the color; Blue is not a simple color and therefore not a simple sadness. It seems more like a medium in which one can lose oneself. When I search for “blue” in my saved songs, 94 hits appear. There are so many different works created with so different meanings and intentions, all tied to the color blue (think: “Blue Slide Park” by Mac Miller vs. “Helplessness Blues” by Fleet Foxes vs. “Blue By Joni Mitchell).

It’s a color that gives more questions than answers, something the eccentric and mysterious 90s dream rock / shoegaze band Mazzy Star seemed to understand with their song “Blue Light”: “There’s a blue light / In my best friend’s room / There’s a blue light / In his eye, “the song begins, followed by” There’s a ship / That sails on my window / … There’s a world underneath / I think I see it / Sail away. ”

Possibilities are presented, deep possibilities into which they stare. Big Wild’s “Pale Blue Dot”, an EDM track without text, recognizes the same yearning intensity in the color. With no lyrics, the song just has that driving emotion to focus a huge feeling on one point.

“Pale Blue Eyes” by Velvet Underground redefines its shade of blue, which is easily specified with “pale”, but at the same time makes it naturally personal, which only Lou Reed knows when he refers to the eyes of his beloved. They harbor temptation and mysticism when he pulls out the sentence “Linger on …”. The eyes belong to a married woman; like a blue light illuminating a window, it is somehow out of reach.

“Out of the blue” is an expression of the mystery that all blue fuses into a shroud from which one emerges. It covers our being until we suddenly come out of it. “The Blue”, a neo-soul / hip-hop track by Buddy with Snoop Dogg, is about Buddy’s love that suddenly appears in his life. This expression portrays the liberation from this state of blue as something positive and tells us that blue cannot be a permanent state in which we are allowed to exist. And yet it’s something so many artists crave.

In “Blue”, a piece by Lucinda Williams with her old country charm and a touch more melancholy than usual, she asks: “I don’t want to talk / I want to go back to blue.” which she can indulge in by telling us: “You can count your blessings / I just count on blue.” And of course Joni named her masterpiece after that and collected the songs of an entire album in a collection of blue.

Blue is almost impossible to define except through a series of near misses. “Your heart has a thousand colors, but they are all shades of blue”, complains Gregory Alan Isakov in “All Shades of Blue” exactly how infinite the color is. A particular “quarantine favorite” of mine was “Searching the Blue” by the Arcs, an indie rock band that takes on a dreamy feeling with this track. It just captures that lost feeling as they hope to find something in the mysterious color. Also, similarly, Bob Dylan’s “Tangled Up in Blue” only has about a million things to represent, seemingly everything but the actual color itself. “Tangled up in blue” is the only line he says throughout the song repeated. It’s the thing he can never escape and may never want to escape.

Blue can encapsulate a place (as in “Blue Mountains” by Peter Doran with Haley Heynderickx or “Blue Ridge Mountains” by Fleet Foxes). Often it is a place to flee to or to dream of. The canvas for dreams will start out blue for sure.

Of course, of many different options, blue is also sadness. In Jackson C. Frank’s “Blues Run the Game” (although I also recommend the Simon & Garfunkel version), he admits that “Blues Run the Game” goes anywhere. He is always and consistently surrounded by this special hue and this meaning of blue, as are many other musicians who find an outlet for this feeling in their music.

With that in mind, the color can become suffocating, overwhelming, or just ubiquitous. Do you ever think about what all that blue would do to you?

Daily Arts Writer Rosa Sofia Kaminski can be reached at [email protected].