I drew a map of Canada

In the way that one thing leads to another, I've been going through a Canadian stage.

Finally read a few stories by Alice Munro. She's only 82. And lately I've been listening to a lot of Neil Young because on Father's Day Billie gave me his autobiography. Waging Heavy Peace is the book he wanted to write, which is not the same thing as the one we'd have liked him to write. A bit like his albums really. But that's OK because you wouldn't go as far as to say it's a book "unrepresentative of Neil Young".

Joni Mitchell mentioned her "memoirs" recently. Whether something ever emerges remains to be seen.  In the meantime Michelle Mercer's Will You Take Me As I Am is an intelligent piece about Joni's "blue period", which in her view extended as far as the 1976 Hejira album.  The main focus, though, is on the devastating Blue album of 1971, one of the most exquisite collections of "intimate" songs I've ever heard (she'd rather not be labelled "confessional").

In early 1970 Joni, 26, felt she needed a rest. She'd been "at it" relentlessly. Her second album Clouds was about to pick up a Grammy. Its successor, Ladies of the Canyon, including the iconic Woodstock, was ready for release. Instead of promoting the album, she took a break.  Her personal life, she admitted, was a "shambles".  Her relationship with Graham "Our House" Nash - whose own memoirs are due out next month - was either over or drawing to a close.  She wanted some time to herself.  "You need solitude to make anything artistic," she'd said in January.

So off she went to Europe: France, Spain, Greece, Crete, leaving behind her beloved Martin D-28 guitar but taking, of all things, a mountain dulcimer, on which she composed some of the songs that would emerge on Blue a year later.

I've been thinking about the songs on that album:

Little Green - her adoption song - had been written years ago in her old style (voice + acoustic guitar) and now was the time, she must have felt, to put it out there. "At that period in my life I felt like a cellophane wrapper on a pack of cigarettes," she said years later.

River  - one of the great Christmas songs - was written on piano towards the end of 1969.

Carey, California and A Case of You - dulcimer songs - were probably all conceived while in Europe. Carey and California, in fact, serve as a kind of travelogue, with their references to the places she visited, her fling with Cary Raditz in Crete, her longings for home.  A Case of You, one of her most famous songs, is more elusive. It seems to go way back, beyond Graham Nash, to the time in '67 when her love for the inconstant Leonard Cohen "got lost".

My Old Man is a piano song which could also have been written during her travels ("Maybe I'll go to Amsterdam, maybe I'll go to Rome," she sings in Carey. "And rent me a grand piano and put some flowers 'round my room"). Perhaps it was started earlier - who knows? Certainly by September 1970 it wasn't quite finished (she presented it at her BBC concert as a work in progress, one verse short).

Then in late 1970/early 1971 (probably - I'm guessing) came Blue and This Flight Tonight. Neither seems to have been performed at the few gigs she played between July and November, and both sound like James Taylor songs, her latest flame.

All I Want and The Last Time I Saw Richard - the album's opening and closing tracks - were added at a late stage.  In fact Joni had to call back the master tapes and substitute them for two other songs.  It's one of those happy serendipitous rock and roll moments.  Can you imagine this album without those perfectly formed bookends?

Someone should write a book about these songs - do for Blue what Ian MacDonald's Revolution in the Head did for the entire Beatles catalogue. About their honesty and musical subtlety, about the end of the 60s and its "descent into drug depression", as Joni called it, and about the timeless human tensions between the need for love and freedom.