What is the best song ever written about Joni Mitchell?
Sometimes, the simplest answer is the best one. When it comes to cases like this, there is often the temptation to rack your brain, rejecting the first thing that comes to mind in favour of a more niche opinion. But the immediate answer is immediate for a reason—it’s the ultimate one, the clearest one. So if I tried to claim that the best song written about Joni Mitchell was anything other than ‘Our House’, I’d be lying.
There are plenty of incredible options, though. As well as being an artist who has inspired generations of writers since, Mitchell’s artistic power was clearly palpable in person, too. Her peers felt it. Leonard Cohen, one of the key cast members in the story of Mitchell’s musical romantic life, once said that she was a “musical monster” with a “ferocity” in her gift. In so many artists’ comments about spending time with Mitchell, the same rings true. She’s spoken about with awe, especially by the men who were lucky enough to know her more intimately, get to witness her working mind up close and get to love her, and be loved back.
They wrote beautiful songs about her. Cohen penned ‘Winter Lady’. James Taylor wrote her the devastatingly tender ‘You Can Close Your Eyes’, singing, “It won’t be long before another day, We gonna have a good time, And no one’s gonna take that time away, You can stay as long as you like.”
But the immediate answer to the question of the best always lands in one place: ‘Our House’, Graham Nash’s timelessly beautiful ode to their domestic life. It’s a song about being so at peace and so happy that there is a sense of total bliss – a bliss that Nash felt best in Mitchell’s Laurel Canyon home.
The beauty of the song lies in the fact that it’s not really about Joni Mitchell, the folk superstar. It’s just a perfect love song. “Well, it’s an ordinary moment,” Nash said about the track, capturing not a notable celebrity love, but a completely normal one. They’d been out and had breakfast, wandered around an antique shop together, bought a vase and then came home – a classic, peaceful morning for two people in love in the lovely settled part of a relationship. It just happened that those two people were two of the decade’s best talents.
“We got to the house in Laurel Canyon, and I said – got through the front door, and I said, you know what? I’ll light a fire. Why don’t you put some flowers in that vase that you just bought? Well, she was in the garden getting flowers. That meant she was not at her piano, but I was,” Nash added, “And an hour later ‘Our House’ was born, out of an incredibly ordinary moment that many, many people have experienced.”
The normality of it is what makes it the best, partly because that is essential in Mitchell’s own artistic legacy. So much of her lyricism is built from taking utterly ordinary and typical images: parking lots, coasters, sunsets, listening to the radio, and making it bigger and grander. She made a lyrical and emotive language out of codifying these images, in the same way that Nash did about her, turning this typical scene into a perfect image of love.
The final recorded version is beautiful, but it’s the demo that makes goosebumps stand up. Mitchell harmonises lightly in the back, giggles at the lyrics, blushing at this song written about her in a moment that surely must have been so tender and felt so special as she was seen and celebrated by her lover. Nash wrote about Mitchell in the same beautiful way that Mitchell wrote about her own affections, and that’s what makes it the best. That’s why it’s always the first answer.
