There are tribute shows, there are impersonations — and then there is what Rainee Blake achieves in Joni Mitchell: Take Me As I Am. This is not mimicry; it is possession. When she returns to Edinburgh with her barefoot muse of Laurel Canyon, she doesn’t just recreate 1976 — she re-inhabits it.

The conceit is exquisitely simple. We are invited to a private gathering in the aftermath of Joni’s Miles of Aisles tour, somewhere in that liminal space between exhaustion and creative rebirth. She is on the brink of releasing Hejira, an album steeped in restlessness and the search for meaning, and we, improbably, are her chosen confidants. The stage is stripped of clutter: an acoustic guitar, an electric guitar, the dulcimer she made her signature, and the faint scent of another era hanging in the air.

From the first crystalline notes of California, the room tilts towards Laurel Canyon. The intimacy is startling — less a concert than a séance, summoning the ghost of an era when songwriting was both intensely personal and fearlessly expansive. Between Coyote, Woodstock, and other songs, Blake threads in elliptical anecdotes: art school, pregnancy, a daughter given up for adoption, a brush with Dylan’s Rolling Thunder Revue, and the quiet revelations that surface only when the lights are low.

This year’s iteration feels subtly transformed from last year’s. The sound is more analogue, reedy, looser, and somehow more lived-in — the patina of time settling comfortably over the performance. It plays not as a perfect facsimile but as the thing itself, vibrating with unpredictability.

Blake is technically flawless — the phrasing, the tunings, the sly, sidelong humour — but it is her emotional intelligence that astonishes. She understands that Joni Mitchell is not just a voice or a chord shape; she is an attitude, a refusal to be easily known. That is what Blake delivers. Near the end, she opens the floor to requests, slipping into an unplanned Carrie before a rousing Big Yellow Taxi.

If your idea of time travel is less DeLorean and more the soft light of a bygone Laurel Canyon evening, consider this your passage. Understated, brilliant — and quietly transcendent.