The 2000 song Joni Mitchell that would become her “definitive performance”
Joni Mitchell knew as well as anyone that a song is never truly finished when someone walks out of the studio.
Even when she laid down the foundation of some of the best turns of the 1970s, it was going to take her a while before she fully fleshed out every single aspect of the song until it sounded perfect. And even when Mitchell decided to lay down some of her masterpieces on vinyl, there was a good chance that she had the right song put together at the wrong time.
Then again, there’s nothing wrong with someone having great tunes to start out with, but Mitchell was too connected to her material to give her songs away. ‘Woodstock’ would have worked perfectly well for a band like Crosby, Stills, and Nash, but even when they recorded their own version of the song, it feels a lot more authentic coming from her since she already missed out on attending the massive festival.
But when you look through a lot of her best moments, a lot of them have a certain wisdom that she might not have been ready to work with. Most people would have claimed to have everything figured out by the time they entered their 20s, but when Mitchell first presented ‘Both Sides Now’ to the world, there were more than a few people sceptical about what they were getting themselves into when they heard Mitchell talking about knowing the ins and outs of life.
She may very well have thought that at the time, but being a musician had a lot more baggage than she ever anticipated. No one in their right mind would have kicked someone like her off their label, but even when she grew into a more accomplished musician than most, she got more and more irritated when she realised that the rest of the world wasn’t willing to listen to records she made with the biggest names in jazz.
The people simply didn’t have the time for that kind of music, but going back to her old material helped endear her to her old fans all over again. She was a much older and wiser musician, and after spending time working with more sophisticated arrangements, hearing ‘Both Sides Now’ in her weathered voice was how the song was always meant to be sung when she first heard it in her head.
The original still has its place in history, but Mitchell knew that she had hit on something profound when people started having an emotional reaction every single time she played it, saying, “I didn’t expect that. That was really shocking to me, in a beautiful way. It made me sing differently. I mean, it sparked me into a deeper performance. That’s why I think that’s the definitive performance of that song. It’s how it should be.”
In fact, that’s the kind of reaction that the song was always supposed to have but never got. ‘Both Sides Now’ is a tale of someone crossing a threshold in life, and when she talks about not knowing about life at all after decades in the industry, you can tell that she’s genuinely still interested in seeing where life will take her in the same way that she did when she was strumming her acoustic guitar.
So while the critics could have turned their nose up at the song back in the day for coming from someone still in their 20s, the fact that she didn’t have to change any lyrics in the new version is the reason why it shouldn’t have been critiqued back in the day. She was still making music that anyone could relate to; she just needed everyone else to leave their layers of pretension at the door when they turned on her records.
