Sometimes an album can be successful upon release, but still not be fully appreciated until years later. Such is the case with Blue, Joni Mitchell's 1971 classic, released 55 years ago today.

Blue cracked the top 10 of Canada's top albums chart, and climbed all the way to No. 3 in the United Kingdom. In America, it peaked at No. 14 on Cash Box's Top 100 Albums and No. 15 on the Billboard 200.

Impressive, but only a preview of what was to come. In the ensuing decades, Blue came to be regarded as one of the best albums ever, and has been named by multiple publications as the top album of all time by a female artist.

The focus of Mitchell's work on Blue was her personal relationships and dalliances, some of them (Graham Nash, James Taylor) high-profile in nature.

The rawness of her lyrics and soulfulness of the music helped the album become iconic over time.

The best ever by a woman

In 2017, NPR released its list of the "The 150 Greatest Albums Made By Women." Blue occupied the top spot, ahead of The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill and Nina Simone's I Put A Spell on You.

"After nearly fifty years, Blue remains the clearest and most animated musical map to the new world that women traced, sometimes invisibly, within their daily lives in the aftermath of the utopian, dream-crushing 1960s," wrote NPR's Anastasia Tsioulcas. "It is a record full of love songs, of sad songs; but more than that, it is a compendium of reasonable demands that too many men in too many women's lives heard, in 1971, as pipe dreams or outrageous follies."

Three years later, Rolling Stone ranked Blue No.3 on its list of The 500 Greatest Albums of All Time. It remained in that spot when the rankings were updated in 2023, trailing only Pet Sounds by The Beach Boys and What's Going On by Marvin Gaye.

"From its smoky, introspective cover to its wholly unguarded approach to songwriting, Blue is the first time any major rock or pop artist had opened up so fully, producing what might be the ultimate breakup album and setting a still-unmatched standard for confessional poetry in pop music," Rolling Stone wrote, calling Mitchell "a lonely painter, aching to make sense of all her heartbreak."

"Along with its romantic melancholy, Blue was the sound of a woman availing herself of the romantic and sexual freedom that was, until then, an exclusively male province in rock," the outlet added.

Mitchell herself has acknowledged the quality and impact of Blue, telling Rolling Stone in 1979 that "there's hardly a dishonest note in the vocals."

"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. Or to be happy. But the advantage of it in the music was that there were no defenses there either," Mitchell added.