A love song that will not kneel
The dulcimer starts alone, a dry, bright pattern, closer to a kitchen table than to a studio, and Joni Mitchell’s voice enters as if the conversation had already been going on for an hour.
A Case of You was recorded in 1971 at A&M Studios in Hollywood for Blue, which Mitchell produced herself, with Henry Lewy engineering. She plays Appalachian dulcimer. James Taylor plays acoustic guitar, spare, never crowding her. The lyric opens on a line stolen from Shakespeare and then refused: constant as the northern star, she is told, and she answers that the star is constant in the darkness, and that if he wants her he will find her in the bar. It is flirtation and cross-examination in the same breath. The famous boast, that she could drink a case of him and still be on her feet, is devotion and a warning. She will not be bowled over. The album came out in June 1971, and it still sounds like someone who has taken the armour off and kept the nerve.
She has resisted the detective work. Asked, years later, who the song was for, she called it a love song, that is all, and said that art sometimes joins a thing that happened here with a thing that happened there until the join feels like a whole truth. The performance does not need the name. On the dulcimer the chords are simple and the tuning is hers, and the vocal, close-miked, lets small breaks stay in. There is no drummer to tell you where the feeling should land. You follow the breath.
It’s a love song. That’s all. It’s art. Sometimes you write about the exact thing you saw, but other times you take something that happened over here and put it with something over there.
(Joni Mitchell, Mojo, 2008)
Other singers have tried it, Prince among them, drawn by the melody and by the refusal inside it. The covers tend to sweeten the boast or darken the regret. The original does both at once, and keeps a sense of humour in the bar line, which is where the song stays human. Mitchell in that year had, by her own later account of Blue, almost no defences. The advantage, she said, was that the music had none either. You hear it in the way she leans on a word and then lets it go, uninterested in being impressive.
What remains is a standard that does not behave like one. It has been called her finest minute so often that the phrase has gone soft, and still the recording will not flatter the listener. A case of you, and she is standing. The dulcimer keeps its dry light. Taylor’s guitar is a second thought, not a bed. Love, in this song, includes the right to stay intact, which is a harder promise than forever, and a more adult one.
