The best opening lyric Joni Mitchell has ever written
It’s no secret that Joni Mitchell has a songwriting prowess like no other.
After all, it’s far more powerful to talk about love like it’s a battle, to warn others to “be prepared to bleed” than it is to say expect to be hurt just as it’s far more poetic to compare the passage of time to the “calendars of our lives”, where the earth spins and the sky is forever rushing, than it is to cheapen it with the simple vernacular of everyday words.
In ‘Little Green’, Mitchell captures the bittersweet nature of uncertainty with promises of hope and struggle.
“There’ll be crocuses to bring to school tomorrow, just a little green,” she sings. “Like the nights when the Northern lights perform. There’ll be icicles and birthday clothes, and sometimes there’ll be sorrow.”
In ‘Carey’, the struggles of a fleeting intensity were captured in the connection made when two people have just as little to hold onto outside of each other. And in ‘Blue’, Mitchell highlights the all-consuming nature of loss with rumination on the “waves” of her life being filled with “acid, booze, and ass, needles, guns, and grass, lots of laughs”.
Sometimes, brevity is Mitchell’s strong suit; the moments her wit shines just as much as her insecurities. Other times, however, it’s her verbosity that holds the most weight, a symptom of her writing process of letting the words pour out “copiously” until there’s nothing left to say. When it comes to assessing the best of Mitchell’s lyrics, it’s an impossible game. There’s too much beauty to sink your teeth into, too many ways of saying something so universal yet so precise.
Which is also why picking a forerunner for best opening lyric is nearly impossible. How can you possibly choose one when songs like ‘I Don’t Know Where I Stand’ and ‘Brandy Eyes’ exist? Or the more obvious choices – ‘A Case of You’ and ‘All I Want’. There are barely any other poets who have come up with something as hard-hitting as the opener to ‘Carey’ or the storytelling finesse that hits immediately with ‘Amelia’. But in terms of the best, it’s hard to argue against ‘Both Sides Now’.
“Rows and floes of angel hair,” Mitchell sings. “And ice cream castles in the air / And feather canyons everywhere / Looked at clouds that way.”
One of Mitchell’s most-covered songs, ‘Both Sides Now’ captures the complexities of multiple meanings and perspectives, and how things always look differently depending on the angle you’re peering at them from. It’s classic Mitchell to anchor the very principles of nuance in a life where we’re too often looking for simple categorisation.
But that’s also why that opener is stronger than any of her others. It hits you immediately, the poetry of something so common that we live through in every experience in our lives. But it’s also a beautiful rumination on being able to see love and life from both sides, which often changes with age, shifting from the illusions of youth into something more wise and pensive.
This was always Mitchell’s sweet spot. She’s the ultimate master of the art of the things we can’t see or touch but feel every single day. She takes the definitions of bittersweet and flowers them into bigger, fully-realised stories, world-building from personal experience with a touch of her own observations about the outside world. Little makes sense when you’re younger, just what you feel inside. And that first line to ‘Both Sides Now’ captures both the idealisation of looking at the world around you and only realising later just how much you still don’t know.
