I’M ALWAYS A BIT SCEPTICAL WHEN

people argue about what might be the finest year for music (my only-slightly sanctimonious set response: every year’s great if you dig deep enough). Nevertheless, as 2021 rolls on and we tick off the albums celebrating their 50th anniversaries, it’s easier and easier to understand why so many of you punt 1971 as the annus mirabilis. Already this year, we’ve marked the golden jubilees of

Tapestry, What’s Going On, Déjà Vu, Ram and Maggot Brain, testimony to the range of 1971’s key albums, as well as their enduring brilliance.

This month, we head back to A&M Records in Los Angeles, just down the corridor from where Carole King is recording Tapestry in Studio B. Studio C is tiny, but it doesn’t need to hold many musicians: mostly just Joni Mitchell, a piano, a guitar, and the songs of questing love and heartbreak that will become the most treasured of all her albums, Blue. These songs are small-scale, intimate, unnervingly so at times, but the story behind them takes place on a grand stage, encompassing a schooner in Jamaica, the hippy caves of Crete, jet-set parties in Ibiza, the New Mexico desert and the Isle Of Wight, and the starriest of supporting casts. “There is a certain amount of life in all my songs,” Mitchell says. “If I have any personal philosophy it is that I like truth.” So do we: here’s the real story of one of the greatest albums of any year.