Blue (SACD)

Sourced from the original analog master tapes and housed in a mini-LP gatefold sleeve, Mobile Fidelity's numbered-edition hybrid SACD presents the landmark album with reference-grade detail, tonality, and directness. Marking the first time the beloved LP has received audiophile-quality treatment, it's one of six iconic 1970s Mitchell records Mobile Fidelity is reissuing on definitive-sounding vinyl and SACD sets.
Everything about Blue sounds more intimate, involving, and inescapable on this disc. Mitchell's voice, positioned front and center, and primarily accompanied by minimalist acoustic guitar, piano, and dulcimer playing, comes across clearly and prominently. Suspended notes and radiant chords double as question marks, commas, and phrases. The in-the-room presence and spatial dimensions make absolute the full-range spectrum of introspective emotions - hurt and distress, self-awareness and joy, difficulty and uncertainty, warmth and desire - Mitchell navigates, queries, and contemplates throughout the record. The defenselessness the singer once spoke about is laid bare here in transparent fashion. As it should be.
Deemed the third Greatest Album of All Time by Rolling Stone; universally celebrated by critics, fans, artists, and educators; and defined by a spell of disarmingly vulnerable songs that are at once confessional, intense, spare, honest, painful, hopeful, and exquisite, Blue charts love, spiritualism, independence, and loss like no record before or since. Widely considered the album that established the singer-songwriter template, the largely autobiographical LP changed everything shortly after its original release in June 1971. Amazingly, it continues to do so more than five decades later.
An incalculable influence on generations of artists, it stands as the through-line from Carole King, Elton John, James Taylor, Joan Armatrading, and Leonard Cohen to Patti Smith, Carly Simon, Emmylou Harris, and Rosanne Cash to 21st century contemporaries like Brandi Carlile, Taylor Swift, Sharon Van Etten, and Courtney Barnett. Teetering between agony and optimism, it is - to borrow a phrase from Mitchell's eternal "A Case of You" - a bottomless "box of paints."

This Hybrid SACD contains a 'Red Book' Stereo CD Layer which is playable on most conventional CD Players!