The song that took Joni Mitchell seven years to complete: “It’s a story of obsession”
The way Joni Mitchell writes makes it seem as though songs simply spill out of her. She pours her experiences and emotions into music, from trouble navigating the music industry to an ongoing longing for freedom, and she does so with unflinching vulnerability. As a result, her lyrics often sound like poeticised diary entries scrawled onto lined paper in the heat of the moment, only amended for their rhyme and rhythm later on.
Really, there is also a great deal of consideration and care in Mitchell’s approach to songwriting. Emotional honesty may be the driving force between her stories and themes, but she filters those intense feelings through poetic language and punchy phrasing. ‘A Case of You’, for example, is an intense song full of romantic devotion, but it’s also one of her most poetic offerings.
“Oh, I could drink a case of you, darling,” she sings in the song’s central metaphor, “And I would still be on my feet.” It’s an image that perfectly encapsulates the fevered feeling of the song. Mitchell refuses to compromise on the intensity of her emotions or on the quality of her phrasing, balancing her abilities in both areas.
It makes sense, then, that Mitchell pores over her material, over each metaphor and each melody, until they perfectly encapsulate the emotions that inspired them. This was the case with 1991’s ‘Two Grey Rooms’, which took her seven years to complete. The song featured on Mitchell’s 14th record, Night Ride Home, and told a story of obsession over gentle keys and strings.
As Mitchell recalled during an interview with Mojo, she came up with the instrumental for the song while working on her 1982 record Wild Things Run Fast, but she couldn’t quite match it up with the right set of lyrics. “It took seven years to find the story to fit the music,” she admitted before detailing the story that had finally allowed the song to click into place.
“It’s a story of obsession,” she explained, “About this German aristocrat who had a lover in his youth that he never got over.” But the song doesn’t focus on his former lover. Instead, it finds the aristocrat projecting his obsession onto another figure, watching over another man who passes by the titular two grey rooms each day.
“I took these two grey rooms up here,” Mitchell sings, “with a view, when you walk by, below my window.” There’s an eeriness to the track, to the protagonist’s obsession with this man who merely strolls by his house each day, but Mitchell also manages to contain those feelings of heartbreak into the instrumental, too.
It may have taken seven years, but Mitchell had found the perfect story to tell over those stirring strings, and it hadn’t even stemmed from her own experiences. “That’s a song that shows my songs aren’t all self-portraits,” she added. Even when she’s dabbling in emotions that don’t stem from her own psyche, she takes every care to pair them with the right instrumentation.
‘Two Grey Rooms’ wouldn’t necessarily go on to become one of Mitchell’s most well-loved songs — it wasn’t even released as a single. Still, it does demonstrate the care Mitchell takes with her compositions and the lengths she goes to to match story and song.
