Blue
Joni Mitchell was emotionally wide open when she recorded Blue, and she has said that if someone came into the studio during sessions, she would burst into tears. The doors were locked. Only Mitchell and engineer Henry Lewy were allowed inside. It took her several years to recover from how exposed she felt making it.
The songs came from a period of total personal upheaval. Mitchell had ended her relationship with Graham Nash, spent time living with a cave-dwelling hippie community on the Greek island of Crete, traveled through Europe, and fallen deeply in love with James Taylor, who plays guitar on the album and whose heroin addiction is referenced directly in the title track. Taylor was recording his own album at A&M Studios at the same time, and the two of them appeared together on Carole King's Tapestry sessions during the same weeks. Taylor later described it as a calm, peaceful, amazing, creative time, and said Mitchell had quit smoking, her voice was at the height of its powers, and everything felt natural and easy.
What Mitchell made from all of it is the standard against which confessional songwriting has been measured ever since. "A Case of You," "River," "California," "The Last Time I Saw Richard" — every song is a masterclass in saying the most precise and painful thing with the fewest possible words. Pitchfork once called it the purest emotional record ever made by a human being. That is not an overstatement.
Prince recorded more than three dozen songs during the Purple Rain sessions, with recording taking place from March 1983 through March 1984. He was simultaneously writing music for two other acts, shooting a movie, and building a stage show. When he recorded "When Doves Cry" and stripped out the bassline entirely, he reportedly told the engineer "nobody would have the balls to do this." That song went to number one and stayed there for five weeks. The album knocked Bruce Springsteen's Born in the USA off the top of the charts and then held its position for 24 consecutive weeks.
Purple Rain is the album that transformed Prince from a critically respected cult figure into the biggest pop star on the planet. It won him an Academy Award for Best Original Song Score. If you have never heard it front to back, start with "Let's Go Crazy," let it run through to the title track, and understand why an entire generation considers this one of the defining records of their lives.