‘Cactus Tree’: The spiky Joni Mitchell song David Crosby admitted was about him
Though she has routinely rallied against the moniker, the idea of Joni Mitchell as a “confessional songwriter” is hard to argue too intently with. Of course, to Mitchell’s own point, only bad artists aren’t confessional in their expressions, but the songwriter has routinely looked to her own life as the inspiration for her songs. It means that within the albums in her discography is a diary of her life.
Like most of us, the pages of Mitchell’s diary are splattered with the blood, sweat and tears of a life filled with emotional highs and lows, some of which can be attributed to the men in her life. Once describing herself as a “serial monogamist”, many of Mitchell’s songs have been written about the men she loved and loathed. Though she rarely opened up about the subjects in her tunes, there is one man who likely felt the brunt of her musicianship more than most.
David Crosby can count himself as one of the lucky few people Mitchell met about whom she felt so strongly that she wrote a song about them. Included in that list are some of the greats. Mitchell has written songs about Leonard Cohen, Neil Young, Jose Feliciano, James Taylor and David Geffen, to name a few. And while some were drenched in the hopeful colours of love, others were far darker and far more menacing.
Crosby and Mitchell enjoyed an intense but comparatively brief romance in the 1960s. The Canadian became the integral reason for some of Crosby’s success following The Byrds after she introduced him to her friends, Neil Young and Stephen Stills, who would join Crosby to form CSNY. And for a while, they enjoyed a whirlwind time of love and lust, with Mitchell writing the track ‘The Dawntreader’ apparently in tirbute to him. However, after it became clear Crosby was living with his ex-girlfriend and had rekindled their relationship, Mitchell took things to a different space.
Incensed by the betrayal, Mitchell confronted Crosby at a party and apparently wrote a song then and there about his infidelity. “Joni was very angry and said, ‘I’ve got a new song’,” Crosby reveals in David Browne’s book, The Wild, Definitive Saga of Rock’s Greatest Supergroup. Mitchell then played ‘That Song About the Midway,’ which had “references to a man’s sky-high harmonies and the way she had caught him cheating on her more than once… there was no question about the subject of the song,” Browne writes. “It was a very ‘Goodbye David’ song,” said Crosby. “She sang it while looking right at me, like, ‘Did you get it? I’m really mad at you.’” Before confirming, “And then she sang it again. Just to make sure.”
It would seemingly not be the final time she would put her feelings toward Crosby down in song. ‘Cactus Tree’ from Mitchell’s 1968 record Song To A Seagull, however, seems to capture the halcyon days of their relationship. The song is written in third person but is clearly a reflection of Mitchell’s life, and within the track, she speaks about the duality of both needing to be loved and desiring the freedom that single life brings. It’s unclear whether all the verses are about Crosby, but he did admit to the first verse being about him.
“There’s a man who’s been out sailing,” sings Mitchell in the first line. This is perhaps our clearest indication that Crosby is correct. Aside from the timing of the release coinciding with their relationship, the former Byrds man was also a keen sailor, having notably written both ‘Déjà Vu’ and ‘Wooden Ships’ while out sailing. Within the lyrics Mitchell clearly struggles to reconcile the two overriding feelings of love and freedom, as she battles against convention.
It’s not only typical of Mitchell’s work in general, but how she would live her life both personally and professionally. Never standing still or allowing herself to be controlled, within ‘Cactus Tree’ we see the reflection of an icon already forming. What’s perhaps most impressive is that it began at such an early point of her career.
