The song Joni Mitchell called “the work of an ingenue”
The start of Joni Mitchell’s music career wasn’t just the birth of a new folk star. It was the opening of a new and librated chapter in the musician’s life. After growing up in a home that disapproved of music and then finding herself in a marriage to a man who held her dreams back, her decision to head to the city and take her music seriously was a decision to live a freer life. But when Mitchell looks back at some of her earliest songs, she hears the voice of an “ingenue”, a young, innocent girl with the world ahead of her.
That energy is captured beautifully in so many of Mitchell’s early songs. ‘Both Sides Now’ combines girlish dreams with newly matured contemplations on love and loss. ‘Cactus Tree’ celebrates the excitement of her newly open life, singing “she’s so busy being free”. ‘I Think I Understand’ is a story of a fresh understanding of the world of adult emotion, perfectly representing that ingenue energy that Mitchell feels in her younger self’s songs.
But no one does she hear it louder than on ‘Chelsea Morning’, a song that, to her, represents the beauty of newfound freedom and the innocent joy of the small, simple things.
“I wrote that in Philadelphia after some girls who worked in this club where I was playing found all this colored slag glass in an alley. We collected a lot of it and built these glass mobiles with copper wire and coat hangers,” she recalled in a 1996 interview with the Los Angeles Times. “I took mine back to New York and put them in my window on West 16th Street in the Chelsea District. The sun would hit the mobile and send these moving colors all around the room,” she continued.
“Woke up, it was a Chelsea morning / And the first thing that I saw / Was the sun through yellow curtains / And a rainbow on the wall”, she sings of the “Blue, red, green and gold” shard of glass reflecting colours round her room, and the “crimson beads” of the mobile. She sings of it so beautifully because, to her, it was. She said, “As a young girl, I found that to be a thing of beauty.”
It’s a song about just that: the beauty of simplicity and finding joy in the little things. Through the song, she wakes up and moves through her morning, having toast and oranges, hearing the traffic outside her apartment, enjoying the morning in the city as she eases into the day at her own pace, luxuriating in the freedom of a slow morning. But the ability to do that was something so special to Mitchell, whose new freedom was a true privilege in her mind.
“It was a very young and lovely time,” she wrote of that period when she was beginning to integrate herself into the Greenwich Village folk scene and establish herself as a singer and powerful songwriter.
Even though now she might not see the song as “part of my best work”, it’ll always have a special place in her heart, representing a special moment and immortalising the voice and spirit of her younger self as she called the track “the work of an ingenue.”
