Desert Island Dispatches: ‘Clouds’ by Joni Mitchell

By: 
Victoria O’Brien

I had a conversation a couple years ago with my mom about the idea of ‘bucket list concerts’ — those artists we wanted to see before it was too late. Stevie Nicks made the list, so did Shania Twain. One that didn’t make the shared list, but who I’ve often said I want to see live so badly is Joni Mitchell. I was something of a latecomer to Mitchell’s work — I knew Big Yellow Taxi because of a Counting Crows cover that was basically inescapable for the better part of the early 2000s, and I also knew Both Sides Now because my grandparents would play Judy Collins, but I didn’t know Joni’s actual work until I was basically grown up and exploring music from the 70s singer-songwriter period that I’d overlooked. I loved Carol King, so I started looking at her peers — Judee Sill, Joan Armatrading, Linda Rondstadt, Marianne Faithfull, and then there she was, Joni Mitchell.
Both Sides Now was my gateway point and I landed on it as my entry because of an essay I read when I was 21 or 22, which considered how daunting the existential questions of our age can be when we consider them and our future and our place in the world. The essay writer said she sometimes reminded herself, as a grounding mechanism, that she (and millions of others) had seen the tops of clouds — a feat that most of our ancestors couldn’t imagine little more than a century ago — and if that was possible, what else could be? I know that’s a silly reason to land on a particular song (the other, lesser reason was I knew the Judy Collins version), but there it is.
Mitchell wrote Both Sides Now while on an airplane and once said it was due to reading a line in a Saul Bellow novel about a character on an airplane who looked out the window and saw the tops of clouds. Not one to overlook a bit of kismet happenstance, she put down the book and looked out her own airplane window to see the clouds, and the impulse to write seized her. It’s a song about growing up and older, and it’s reflective: the speaker is both hopeful and seasoned. It echoes one of my favorite maxims: true wisdom is admitting how little you know, which is precisely what Mitchell says again and again throughout her song. I don’t know life, or love, or anything at all.
Mitchell turned the song over to Collins, who made it a hit, but eventually recorded her own version for her album “Clouds,” released in 1969. Her career was long and prolific, and she turned out so many more songs that had just as much depth and nuance and wisdom as Both Sides Now in the years that followed. In 2015, she suffered a major stroke and stepped away from public life and performance — I came to her music after that and so considered it more or less a foregone conclusion that I wouldn’t see her live. A couple years ago, she returned with a jam style concert surrounded by friends and musicians who have openly and publicly admired her work. Since then, she’s been doing the odd pop-up show in different cities, jamming with her friends like it’s her own living room, where she’s been known to hold salons with fellow creatives. All this to say, there’s still hope for my bucket list concert, but in the meantime, I will content myself with knowing that I’d take “Clouds” to my little desert island in the middle of the Pacific Ocean any day of the week and that I could be quite happy about that, too.

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