“Very angry”: the songs Joni Mitchell wrote about the men she broke up with
One of the main facets of Joni Mitchell‘s ability to steer the music industry through any storm is her honesty. Rather than dabbling in ambiguity and overcomplexity, like many of her “confessional” peers, Mitchell always valued artistic authenticity and integrity, blending personal experience with poetic lyricism in ways that felt open, raw, and entirely laid bare.
At the same time, despite the intricacy of Mitchell’s stories, she always left enough room for the listener, too. It’s a delicate balance – being able to remain accessible even when stories come from deep within – but one that Mitchell mastered with absolute effortlessness, providing narratives that not only resonated but transcended any semblance of restriction. In other words, her feelings rippled, changing the way others viewed their own lives and views.
As a result, much of Mitchell’s discography presents like an open gateway into her mind and soul. Much of these twists and turns centre around her own relationships and navigations of love, romance, loss, and grief, and what it means to find yourself and others during times of immense personal transformation. Sometimes, however, these chronicle Mitchell’s journey through romance-turned-bitterness, which was the case when she first felt inspired to write ‘That Song About the Midway’.
Spawning from the anger of finding a loved one cheating with someone else, ‘That Song About the Midway’ came from Mitchell’s flare-up of anger towards David Crosby, and she felt compelled to write a song that accurately represented her anguish. “Joni was very angry and said, ‘I’ve got a new song’,” Crosby later recalled in The Wild, Definitive Saga of Rock’s Greatest Supergroup, explaining how she played him the song with “references to a man’s sky-high harmonies and the way she had caught him cheating on her more than once.”
To make sure he hadn’t mistaken the “subject of the song”, she then played it again, giving eye contact from start to finish so that Crosby had no choice but to pay close attention to how his actions had burned through her soul. Such feverish angst didn’t always infiltrate Mitchell’s breakup songs, including the James Taylor-inspired ‘See You Sometime’, which followed a far more familiar path of solemn lamentation and the curiosity you might feel when thinking about someone you were once close to.
“Where are you now?” Mitchell asks during the song, “Are you in some hotel room? Does it have a view?” These notes are far more tragic than hate-fuelled, with Mitchell acknowledging the bittersweetness of moving on when all you want is to see someone one last time. Similar lines can be traced throughout ‘River’, a song Mitchell wrote in the midst of her breakup with Graham Nash, set during the one time most of us find ourselves most nostalgic: Christmastime.
However, this time, her words feel particularly cutting, though not in the way usual breakup songs convey. Instead, Mitchell recalls the beauty of the relationship and how lovely her partner was, leading to a different kind of heartache that lingers on the magic of what could have been. It’s the kind of deep-seated absence that torments with pain so palpable it feels physical, and that sort of devastation comes through in spades.
Mitchell knows the intricacies of heartache perhaps more than anybody, but what’s particularly insightful about her different experiences with loss is that, most of the time, it seems more an exploration of her and who she is rather than the person she is giving up. While that sounds somewhat similar to navel-gazing, it’s the kind of inward reflection that always made Mitchell the best in her game, with words and stories rippling from the heart outward, like the sharp pinch of suffering and the beauty of healing.
