The Joni Mitchell love song that was born in Somerset: “The uniting spirit”
Joni Mitchell is no stranger to making music in the dense hills of a grassy canyon.
Her 1970 album Ladies Of The Canyon was an ode to Los Angeles’ Laurel Canyon, a place that in 1969 became the epicentre of musical innovation, and it was perhaps the most densely populated neighbourhood of stars in history, becoming something of a hippie microcosm in the City of Angels when it was at its absolute peak.
Laurel Canyon almost feels like a spiritual home for the Canadian, perfectly suiting her reflective disposition. But the truth is, Mitchell has always been something of a wandering troubadour, never staying still and always seeking out a fresh life chapter to influence her art.
In 1988, that adventure took her to the green hills of Somerset. And while they don’t sit underneath the warm Californian sun or nestle Spanish villas in their creeks, they still host plenty of artistic heritage as well as the sort of ancient mythology that is perfect for the delicate songwriting of Mitchell.
In a bid to harness that, she enlisted the help of the county’s native Peter Gabriel. At that point, Gabriel was exercising the sort of opulence being a musician in the 1970s afforded, and decided to rent out a manor house for nearly a decade.
From 1978 to 1987, Gabriel had rented out Ashcombe House, outside Bath and turned it into a recording studio. While there, he recorded three of his own albums, ‘82’s Peter Gabriel, commonly known as 4, or Security. Then he penned the soundtrack for the film Birdy, in ‘84, which was then followed by his album So, recorded in ‘85 and released in ‘86.
Enticed by this experience, Mitchell descended upon the manor house with her guitar over her shoulder to lay down some parts for her own album, Chalk Mark in a Rain Storm. The song that came out of that West Country session was ‘My Secret Place’, which ended up opening Mitchell’s new album.
However, unlike her 1970 album, Mitchell didn’t tie the lyrical content of the song too closely to the location of its recording. Instead, it follows the arc of the protagonist moving from New York City to the Colorado mountains with a loved one.
But Gabriel’s inclusion on the record was imperative to establishing that arc, for his and Mitchell’s voices blended over one another in an almost conversational style to set the scene of this romantic tale.
As Mitchell remembers, “It’s a love beginning song, the song’s about the threshold of intimacy – it’s a shared thing, so I wanted it to be like the ‘Song of Solomon’, where you can’t tell what gender it is, it’s the uniting spirit of two people at the beginning of a relationship.”
That song, however, marked the beginning and the end of Mitchell’s musical relationship with Somerset. Astonishingly, Mitchell has never played a full, billed set at Glastonbury either. Despite a surprise appearance during Brandi Carlile’s set on the Pyramid Stage in 2025, Mitchell has never finished off her love affair with the county by playing its most prized asset.
