The Story Behind The Song: Joni Mitchell’s masterpiece ‘Both Sides Now’
Some songs deserve to be written into the history books. Finding a way to express the inexpressible or give word to a distinct and wordless feeling, some songwriters seem able to do the impossible. Capturing a fleeting moment, an essence or an emotion too tender and specific to name, there are some songs that have given generations a language to express themselves. Joni Mitchell’s ‘Both Sides Now’ is one of those songs.
At the 2024 Grammy Award ceremony, when Mitchell took to the stage to perform, surrounded by a new generation of musicians she’d inspired, there wasn’t a dry eye in the room. To see the musician, now in her 80s, sing a track she wrote in her 20s with such power and emotional maturity was a privilege for the world. Throughout her career, as she’s returned to ‘Both Sides Now’ to rerecord it or perform it, each year seems to bring layers of added feeling and meaning to the track. Already a flawless composition, able to express the universal feeling of living and learning but yet feeling like you still have no idea what it all means, the song only gets more powerful each time she sings it.
That power undoubtedly finds its origins in the moment it was written. With each passing year, ‘Both Sides Now’ seems to make more and more sense to Mitchell, standing as a kind of portal connecting her to her younger self. “I’ve looked at life from both sides now,” she sings, both mirroring the voice of her past and holding its hand from where she is now. When Mitchell sings the track now, she quite literally has looked at life from both sides, old and young, and embodying the two in every word.
But at the start, ‘Both Sides Now’ was Mitchell’s attempt to make sense of her early life. From the childlike imagery of the first verse, singing about “ice cream castles” and “angel hair”, the song is reflecting on everything that’s come and gives word to the subtle panic we all feel about what might be coming.
By the time she wrote it in her early 20s, Mitchell had already been through a lot. In 1965, she gave birth to a daughter and placed her up for adoption after being abandoned by her partner and left alone to fend for herself. Soon after, she married a man who would consistently belittle her, making her feel she would never make anything of herself. By the late 1960s, Mitchell ran off to New York to try and figure herself out, recover from everything that had just happened and find someway to move forward without her husband, her child or her childhood innocence. That’s when she wrote ‘Both Sides Now’.
But it took a minute for Mitchell to find a way to try to express all that in a song. Attempting to articulate that distinct feeling of being sad over the things you’d had to endure, happy to have your life ahead of you but utterly confused about how it will all go, is no easy feat. But then one novel and one plane ride gave her the image she needed.
“I was reading Henderson the Rain King on a plane and early in the book Henderson is also up in a plane,” Mitchell explained, finding a moment of mirroring between her life and the life described in the 1959 novel from Saul Bellow. “He’s on his way to Africa and he looks down and sees these clouds,” she continued. “I put down the book, looked out the window and saw clouds too, and I immediately started writing the song.”
Quite literally looking out over the cloud as she floated in that liminal space between the place she left behind and the new life she was trying to land in, ‘Both Sides Now’ articulates the feeling of being in between.
Considering how clouds are merely clumps of water and air, not anything real or solid, yet can have such an impact on weather and the mood of the world, Mitchell found the perfect metaphor for her feelings. Using them as a symbol for the way life throws things at us or how humans can be left feeling completely at the whim of the world as we endure life’s challenges, Mitchell saw everything she’d been through as clouds, twisting and changing how she viewed the world as they floated in and out.
“I’ve looked at life from both sides now / From win and lose and still somehow / It’s life’s illusions I recall / I really don’t know life at all,” she sings. What is there to even say about a chorus like that? Perfectly capturing exactly how living feels, Mitchell gave word to the universal yet unique feeling of getting through life’s challenges, loving and losing, living through it but feeling totally clueless in the aftermath. In a world that demands we learn from our mistakes and experiences, ‘Both Sides Now’ is a hymn for those who simply don’t know and a reminder that maybe that’s okay.
Watching Mitchell perform the track now, with 50 more years of life and learnings within her, is endlessly moving. “I really don’t know life at all,” sounds so different from her mouth now. It is no longer a statement of fear, worry or defeat; it is instead a statement of hope and excitement. At 80, Mitchell’s version of the song is a reminder that no matter how much living we do, there will always be more to experience and see and go through. She tells us that things will always be thrown our way, but that’s the beauty of existing.
