The Joni Mitchell lyric that Jimmy Page said “brings tears to my eyes”
When Led Zeppelin achieved international acclaim, Jimmy Page‘s life was never the same again, for better or worse.
The benefits of being in one of the world’s biggest rock bands, obviously, far outweigh the negatives, and very few people are prepared to listen to any ‘woe is me’ spiel from somebody who has just achieved everything they’ve ever wished for.
Within the space of a short few years, Page had gone from being a session musician who’d work with anyone if the money was right to a guitar god whose life appeared from the outside to be straight out of a Hollywood movie. But it can be lonely at the top.
Page did find solace in the work of Joni Mitchell, whose lyrics he felt were extremely relatable to his own life. They may have specialised in different brands of music, been from different continents, but Page felt an immense kinship which was born out of how life suddenly changes after a taste of success.
The Led Zepellin guitarist made the comments in 1975, when his band were riding high, and his life was unrecognisable from the one he led pre-fame.
While discussing ‘Stairway To Heaven‘, which he said “crystallised the essence of the band”, he began to discuss his contemporaries during the same interview, heaping praise on Pete Townshend for his work on The Who’s seminal concept album, Tommy, before moving on to his love of Joni.
“I don’t think there are too many people who are capable of it. Maybe one. Joni Mitchell,” Page revealed to Rolling Stone. “That’s the music that I play at home all the time, Joni Mitchell. Court and Spark I love because I’d always hoped that she’d work with a band. But the main thing with Joni is that she’s able to look at something that’s happened to her, draw back and crystallise the whole situation, then write about it.”
Even though Page praised Court and Spark for the full band sound, a breakthrough that seemingly unlocked a new dimension of Mitchell’s brilliance, his favourite song by the Canadian doesn’t come included on that record. Instead, he selected ‘Both Sides Now’ from her sophomore album, Clouds.
The reason that ‘Both Sides Now’ struck such a chord with Page was due to one particular lyric, one that was fluent in his language and stopped him in his tracks.
“She brings tears to my eyes, what more can I say? It’s bloody eerie. I can relate so much to what she says,” he said of Mitchell’s songwriting, before revealing the killer lines that hit him like a suckerpunch to the stomach, reciting, “‘Now old friends are acting strange, They shake their heads. They say I’ve changed.'”
Page then mused, “I’d like to know how many of her original friends she’s got,” and said of his own experience, “I’d like to know how many of the original friends any well-known musician has got. You’d be surprised. They think—particularly that thing of change—they all assume that you’ve changed. For the worse. There are very few people I can call real, close friends. They’re very, very precious to me.”
While it seemed that Page was living his dream, and to a degree, he was, but there were precious people that he lost on the way in the pursuit of that endeavour. Although these so-called friends may have drifted out of his life anyway, regardless of fame or riches, Page believed it was directly linked to his newfound status as a rock star.
Admittedly, it’s not the most tear-jerking lyric in the world, but it’s raw and authentic, which is why Page gravitated towards it so heavily. Mitchell has never been one for mincing her thoughts or feelings, and processing the complexities of life in a heartwrenchingly relatable way.
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