‘Little Green’: The most difficult song of Joni Mitchell’s career
Late Autumn to early winter in Canada is stark and cold. It rains hard before the snow comes later in the year. The cities quiet down to small towns as the tourists stop coming, and all that’s left is the working people trying to earn their keep. Among it, somewhere in the Yorkville area, in a dingy rooming house in 1964, a young woman was alone, scared and pregnant. Back then, she felt like a nobody. The father of the child she was carrying left her, and she saw no real future stretching out beyond that one frightening moment. Now, the world knows her as Joni Mitchell.
The power of Joni Mitchell’s music has always lied in her honesty. As a deeply confessional songwriter, she has a talent for weaving her words into a kind of poetic veil that both protects her life and allows the silhouette of her shape to move behind it. She’s sung of love affairs, littering songs of longing and heartbreak with personal and specific details that mark them as her own. She’s sung of her struggles with her career, borrowing lines people have said to her or critiques she’s faced and reclaiming them in her work. Across all of Mitchell’s best and most beloved works, there is the feeling that she’s revealing something of herself but in a way that is not only poignant but just as powerful for her as it is for her listeners.
Maybe she gets strength from it or catharsis. Maybe the mere act of sitting down and writing her feelings or thoughts out helps her to keep moving forward, and the ability to turn them into something truly beautiful helps her navigate the struggles of life with more hope or optimism that she can not only get through it but make something of it too. Perhaps all that was the thinking behind ‘Little Green’ and her need to write one of her most beautiful yet heartbreaking songs about one of the hardest things she went through.
Before she’d released a single song and was merely doing the round playing gigs to very few people “in church basements and YMCA meeting halls,” Mitchell was in love. At 21, she didn’t mind her situation so much as she was beginning to sing, and even though the shows she was doing were small, they were shows nonetheless. With her boyfriend Brad MacMath by her side, they were young and infatuated. Then she got pregnant, and he ran.
“[He] left me three months pregnant in an attic room with no money and winter coming on and only a fireplace for heat. The spindles of the banister were gap-toothed—fuel for last winter’s occupants,” she wrote, remembering this period of her life where everything seemed to crumble. She gave birth to a baby girl in February 1965, but knowing that she had big dreams yet to achieve and couldn’t be the mother her child deserved, she placed her up for adoption. A few weeks later, she performed her own original music for the first time, properly launching her own artistry and career into the world with a new determination to make it.
‘Little Green’ is her song about it all, sitting on her legacy-making album, Blue. Part retelling of the story, part message to her child – it’s a devastating yet tender track that is full of love, care, and bittersweet sadness, having made the best decision she could for her child.
“Child with a child pretending / Weary of lies you are sending home / So you sign all the papers in the family name / You’re sad and you’re sorry, but you’re not ashamed,” she sings about the choice, adding directly to her child, “Little Green, have a happy ending.”
“An unhappy mother does not raise a happy child,” she said in 1998 about this difficult moment. But in ‘Little Green’, she dreams up a happy life for her baby, singing, “There’ll be icicles and birthday clothes,” before adding as her one piece of motherly advice, a warning that “sometimes there’ll be sorrow.”
While Mitchell’s child was named Kelly Dale Anderson by her adoptive parents, to the singer that birthed her, she was Green, singing “Call Her Green, and the winters cannot fade her” as her one hope that her baby would live a life of vibrant happiness, strength and joy – even if she couldn’t provide that.
