linguistic:translation
1970–1972: Ladies of the Canyon and Blue

In March 1970, Clouds produced her first Grammy Award for Best Folk Performance. The following month, Reprise released her third album, Ladies of the Canyon. Mitchell's sound was already beginning to expand beyond the confines of acoustic folk music and toward pop and rock, with more overdubs, percussion, and backing vocals, and for the first time, many songs composed on piano, which became a hallmark of Mitchell's style in her most popular era. Her own version of " Woodstock ", slower than the cover by Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young, was performed solo on a Wurlitzer electric piano. The album also included the already-familiar song "The Circle Game" and the environmental anthem " Big Yellow Taxi ", with its famous line, "they paved paradise and put up a parking lot."

Ladies of the Canyon was an instant smash on FM radio and sold briskly, eventually becoming Mitchell's first gold album (selling over a half million copies). She made a decision to stop touring for a year and just write and paint, yet she was still voted "Top Female Performer" for 1970 by Melody Maker, a leading UK pop music magazine. On the April 1971 release of James Taylor 's Mud Slide Slim and the Blue Horizon album, Mitchell is credited with backup vocals on the track " You've Got a Friend ". The songs she wrote during the months she took off for travel and life experience appeared on her next album, Blue, released in June 1971. Comparing Joni Mitchell's talent to his own, David Crosby said, "By the time she did Blue, she was past me and rushing toward the horizon".

Blue was an almost instant critical and commercial success, peaking in the top 20 of the Billboard albums chart in September and also hitting the British Top 3. The lushly produced " Carey " was the single at the time, but musically, other parts of Blue departed further from the sounds of Ladies of the Canyon. Simpler, rhythmic acoustic parts allowed a focus on Mitchell's voice and emotions ("All I Want", " A Case of You "), while others such as " Blue ", " River " and " The Last Time I Saw Richard " were sung to her rolling piano accompaniment. Her most confessional album, Mitchell later said of Blue, "I have, on occasion, sacrificed myself and my own emotional makeup,... singing 'I'm selfish and I'm sad', for instance. We all suffer for our loneliness, but at the time of Blue, our pop stars never admitted these things." In its lyrics, the album was regarded as an inspired culmination of her early work, with depressed assessments of the world around her serving as counterpoint to exuberant expressions of romantic love (for example, in " California "). Mitchell later remarked, "At that period of my life, I had no personal defenses. I felt like a cellophane wrapper on a pack of cigarettes. I felt like I had absolutely no secrets from the world and I couldn't pretend in my life to be strong."