‘Both Sides Now’ and the book that inspired Joni Mitchell’s greatest song
By the time Joni Mitchell wrote ‘Both Sides Now’, she’d been through a lot.
In 1965, she had given birth to a daughter, a baby girl whose father – an old boyfriend – had left as soon as he heard of the pregnancy. That same year, she married Chuck Mitchell, but the relationship didn’t last.
Eventually, it was decided that Joni would give the child up for adoption. Chuck left, leaving Joni with nothing but his surname. “I was dirt poor,” she told the Toronto Globe and Mail in 1998. “An unhappy mother does not raise a happy child. It was difficult parting with the child, but I had to let her go.”
The period of darkness that followed provided Mitchell with much of the inspiration for her album Clouds. Recalling the moment ‘Both Sides Now’ came to her, Mitchell said: “I was reading Saul Bellow’s Henderson the Rain King on a plane and early in the book Henderson the Rain King is also up in a plane. He’s on his way to Africa and he looks down and sees these clouds. I put down the book, looked out the window and saw clouds too, and I immediately started writing the song. I had no idea that the song would become as popular as it did.”
Published in 1959, Henderson The Rain King arrived over a decade after his first novel, 1944’s The Hanging Man, in which time he’d written a handful of other novels, including The Victim and The Adventures of Augie March.
It wouldn’t be until 1970 that Bellow would publish his National Book Award-winning novel, Mr Sammler’s Planet. Henderson The King tells the story of Eugene Henderson, “a troubled middle-class man who, despite his wealth and social status, can’t escape the sense that his life is empty of meaning. Unfulfilled, he travels to Africa to manifest his deepest desires.”
‘Both Sides Now’ hit the airwaves for the first time in 1967, when it appeared on Judy Collins’ album Wildflowers. Joni Mitchell released the song for herself on 1969’s Clouds, marking the dawn of a long and varied career.
Touching and emboldened by potent emotion, the song has become a mainstay of her canon. But perhaps an even more revealing version of the song came when Mitchell covered her own song. In 2000, she re-recorded a beautifully-arranged orchestral version of the song, the age in her voice adding a whole new layer of meaning. You can hear that version below.
The difference between the versions of the songs is massive. While the original is angelic at times and innocent at others, Mitchell approaches the song in 2000 with a heavier heart and lungs.
A smoking habit has given her vocal a heavy gravelled tone, and her gathered wisdom now casts a sneering glare over the 26-year-old who wrote the track. “I really don’t know life at all,” she growls both to her audience in the new millennium and herself in the past.
