David Crosby on his favourite Joni Mitchell song
Nobody knew the genius of Joni Mitchell before David Crosby. While Mitchell began her career singing folk songs in her native Canada, her move to California came about after she was signed by Reprise Records in 1967. A meeting with Crosby in October of that year solidified his position as the album’s producer, even though Crosby himself knew little about studio production at the time.
Mitchell and Crosby were briefly an item around the making of the album. He was just one of many famous paramours that Mitchell took on during the height of her fame, and Crosby remembered the competition fondly when The Guardian asked him about his favourite song from Mitchell’s Blue album.
“Joni went out with me, Graham Nash, James Taylor, Jackson Browne and Leonard Cohen. She was exciting and turbulent and fun and we all loved her – yet I don’t think she was ever happy,” Crosby recalled.
Adding: “She’d been through polio, the marriage to Chuck Mitchell and giving up a child – and music was her way of processing this. It could be difficult to be around her because she’d have you laughing or crying real tears in the same half an hour, like her music. It’s genuinely who she is.”
Crosby singled out ‘A Case of You’ as his favourite track from the album. He even went as far as to compare Mitchell with another songwriting giant. “Bob Dylan’s as good a poet as Joni, but nowhere near as good a musician. Paul Simon and James Taylor made some stunners – but for me, Blue is the best singer-songwriter album.”
“Picking a song from it is like choosing between your children,” Crosby added. “Can you imagine a better song than ‘A Case of You’? She was so brilliant as a songwriter, it crushed me. But she gives us all something to strive for.”
‘A Case of You’ came about just after Mitchell broke up with Crosby’s CSNY bandmate Graham Nash. Together, Crosby and Nash, along with Neil Young and Stephen Stills, covered Mitchell’s ‘Woodstock’ on their iconic 1970 LP Deja Vu. Crosby would later return to Mitchell’s canon with his studio album For Free, on which he covers Mitchell’s 1970 Ladies of the Canyon song of the same name. It would be Crosby’s final studio album before his death in January of 2023.
