Kind of Blue: Joni’s masterpiece track by track

1 'All I Want'

For all the rapturous words bestowed on Blue, it's rarely remarked that it starts with two bars of uncomfortable dissonance: Joni's strummed dulcimer chords grating against an underlying drone. Then come the song's first words: "I am on a lonely road and I am travelling…" Followed swiftly by "I hate you some, I hate you some, I love you…" She's 27 and grappling with the agonies of intimacy and jealousy that tripped up so many of her contemporaries at that age. It's almost unbearably honest about the push-and-pull of romance – rehearsing what she really wants to tell her new beau James Taylor, trying to grow up in ways few of us ever manage.