The Last Time I Saw Richard.

Of course Blue is one of my favorite albums but it sounds stupid to say that. Joni Mitchell’s Blue, which is 50 years old this week, exists somewhere outside of any trivial list I or anyone might make, any bestowing of a subjective distinction or rank.

When I hear it, or any of its songs, the thought is never far of the first time I heard it, or rather listened to it, with a boy named Richard in his dorm room at DePauw University, where I ended up one winter night my sophomore year of college when I was home for the Christmas break. I went to school in Oxford, Ohio at Miami University. DePauw was the small liberal arts college in the town where my family lived, where I’d gone to high school.

I had become friends with a piano student named Nancy, who was wildly funny and wildly talented and just wild, and somehow through her had met Richard, a soft-spoken boy with thick, dark hair and bright blue eyes, wearing a soft, expensive-looking yellow sweater, a vocal performance student in the music school, though no one I talk to now who was part of that group of friends remembers how we met Nancy, who is dead now so we can’t ask her, and they don’t remember Richard at all. A week or two into January, when I was back at school, Richard drove to Oxford to visit me. I don’t remember exactly what happened — I’ve probably pushed it out of my memory because I’m ashamed to have treated him, or anyone, so badly — but in Ohio everything felt different, or I should say I felt differently about Richard. He left brokenhearted.

But before all that, we were alone in his dorm room together very late one very cold night until very early, sitting on two chairs facing each other, his stocking feet between mine, listening to Blue. He knew every word, as I do now. Before that night I used to say, if anyone asked, that I didn’t care for Joni Mitchell because “all her songs sound alike.” I’m nearly as ashamed of that as I am of dumping Richard.

The Richard in The Last Time I Saw Richard is nothing like my gentle, effeminate college boy in the yellow sweater. But still.