Watch Joni Mitchell perform ‘Both Sides Now’ and ‘The Circle Game’ in 1968
In 1968, Joni Mitchell wasn’t quite the Joni Mitchell that the world would come to know. She didn’t have the caustic tongue, whip-smart personality, and pop music literacy that she would judiciously employ throughout the 1970s. Instead, she was a green folk singer from Canada who was still trying to find her place in America. She had only just moved to Los Angeles, where she would lead the Laurel Canyon revolution a few years later.
Even though she was fully entrenched in the California lifestyle by the late 1960s, Mitchell frequently returned to her home country to perform. Canada caught on to their native daughter earlier than American audiences did, with Mitchell making some of her first television appearances on the Canadian Broadcast Corporation and its various programmes, most notably Let’s Sing Out and The Way It Is, a current affairs programme that occasionally featured young musical talent in its broadcasts.
Mitchell wrote the theme song for The Way It Is, a gentle acoustic piece that fits nicely into her style at the time. She was also given the opportunity to perform live in the studio, some of her first exposure as a solo artist. When Mitchell arrived to perform towards the end of 1968, she had only just put out her debut album, Song to a Seagull, a few months prior. Mitchell opted not to play any of the songs from that LP, focusing instead on two new compositions that would appear on future albums.
The first was ‘Both Sides Now’, a track that was already well-known thanks to the cover version by Judy Collins. Mitchell’s reputation as a songwriter was initially a bigger part of her identity than her reputation as a singer and performer, with a few of her songs seeing notable covers by the likes of George Hamilton and Dave Van Ronk. But Mitchell’s songs only really came to life when she was singing them herself, as can be seen by her illuminating take on ‘Both Sides Now’.
‘The Circle Game’ wouldn’t actually appear on a Mitchell album for another two years after her performance on The Way It Is, but it was another well-known song that was frequently covered before Mitchell reclaimed it as her own. Tom Rush even titled his 1968 album after the song, covering it along with two other Mitchell tracks, ‘Tin Angel’ and ‘Urge For Going’. But just like ‘Both Sides Now’, ‘The Circle Game’ wasn’t complete until Mitchell could sing it in her own voice.
Check out Mitchell’s performances of ‘Both Sides Now’ and ‘The Circle Game’ down below.
