The Joni Mitchell song David Crosby “always wanted to sing”, but was it about him?
One of the worst things about dating artists is the fact that even after the split, no matter how disastrous or hurtful it is, chances are your love and respect for their work remains. Heartbreak doesn’t magically cure you of admiration, which Graham Nash proved decades on from when Joni Mitchell dumped him.
This was bound to happen, though, given how much the two artists blurred the lines of work and play. They met early on in her career and by complete chance, as Crosby just happened to walk into a bar in Florida where Mitchell was playing. As generations of fans have been, he was completely won over by her voice and unique guitar style and instantly fell for her and also instantly wanted to work with her.
And so began a great musical love affair where the two spiralled into a brief but intense romance while also making Song to a Seagull together after Crosby convinced Mitchell to move to Los Angeles, truly make a go at the music industry and also let him produce her debut album.
By the time the second came around, they were not only over, but the song Mitchell used to call it off was on the record. “You were betting on some lover / You were shaking up the dice / And I thought I saw you cheatin’ once or twice,” she sings on ‘That Song About The Midway’, a track that she reportedly just sang at Crosby in order to end things.
“Joni was very angry and said, ‘I’ve got a new song’,” Crosby said in his biography about that moment. “It was a very ‘Goodbye David’ song,” he added, “She sang it while looking right at me, like, ‘Did you get it? I’m really mad at you.’”
But even after all that, his respect for her music wasn’t shifted, even through the pain of watching her fall in love with Graham Nash and the repeatedly wound-reopening of her various affairs amongst the folk scene they shared that were not only right there in front of him, but on tape in her songs, too.
With music that powerful, though, surely no heartache could ever sour it. In 2017, he proved that right when he covered ‘Amelia’, stating, “I’ve always wanted to sing that song. I love that song!” But does he love it because it’s about him?
Who was ‘Amelia’ about?
“What a stunning piece of work she did, the two levels of it talking about Amelia Earhart and talking about her own love life at the same time, so eloquently, with such a beautiful set of words,” Crosby said about the 1976 track. Like so many of Mitchell’s songs, the personal nature of it is essential as she weaves grand poetic imagery with hyperspecific moments from her own life, leaving clues as to who the inspiration could be.
In ‘Amelia’, the clues are in the “travelogue” she chronicles as she seems to tour around the world, but always comes back to thoughts of a failed love.
Instantly, the reaction is to say no, this song isn’t about David Crosby. Years on from their fling, ‘Amelia’ seems to chronicle a very different time when Mitchell was touring a lot, especially on Bob Dylan’s Rolling Thunder Revue. With that, and with another clue she provided by stating the song is about “Two scorpios couldn’t let each other go,” is could be that the song is about Sam Shepard, the writer who inspired ‘Coyote’ based on this same period of touring and a man who is a scorpio, while Crosby is a Leo.
To go purely off astrology, it could also be about John Guerin, the drummer Mitchell was on and off with from around 1973 to 1976, when Hejira, the album this song sits on, was released. Also a Scorpio, perhaps the back-and-forth false alarms are about that will-they-won’t-they love.
But then again, in the final moment, perhaps there is a second of Crosby as Mitchell sings of “the Cactus Tree Motel”, referencing a track from the debut album the old lovers worked on together.
Overwhelmingly though, Mitchell sees the song as being about herself, stating, “I think of Amelia I think solo flight.”
