Who did Joni Mitchell write the song ‘Free Man in Paris’ about?
The song ‘Free Man in Paris’ is one of Joni Mitchell’s best-known and most famous creations, initially appearing on her 1974 album Court and Sparks. In homage to the city it’s written about, the song incorporates elements of jazz, particularly in its varying syncopated rhythms and harmonised woodwind hook.
Unusually, except for the verb phrase “he said” in the first line indicating direct speech, Mitchell sings the entire song from a male perspective. “I was a free man in Paris,” she tells listeners on the track. Clearly, she’s not singing about herself but delivering these words on someone else’s behalf. But who?
The most obvious place people start when trying to work out the identity of a song’s subject matter is the singer’s love interests at the time. Although Mitchell’s ex-boyfriend, Graham Nash, of the Hollies and Crosby, Stills and Nash fame, provides backing vocals for ‘Free Man in Paris’, the song has nothing to do with him.
Instead of a love interest, this is a song Mitchell wrote on behalf of her close friend about their holiday together in Paris with two other musicians. She noticed how the friend seemed “unfettered and alive” on holiday for the first time since she’d known him and felt moved to write a song about this observation.
‘Free Man in Paris’ cleverly contrasts the lightness of being on that holiday with the heaviness of the man’s day job. It’s in this contrast that Mitchell laces an otherwise happy and upbeat folk-jazz rocker with a tinge of tragedy.
Who is the friend speaking for, then?
The man Mitchell was writing about is record executive David Geffen. She’d met Geffen in Los Angeles in 1967, while she was trying to obtain a record contract via her manager Elliot Roberts, an acquaintance of Geffen’s. The two became friends, particularly after Mitchell moved to the West Coast once she’d signed for LA-based Reprise Records.
In 1972, Mitchell signed a contract with Geffen’s new label Asylum Records. Starting with 1972’s For the Roses, all of Mitchell’s studio albums until 1994’s Turbulent Indigo would be released by one of Geffen’s labels.
Given their longstanding friendship, it made sense that Geffen and one of his flagship artists mixed business with leisure. There’s no question that their relationship was anything more than a friendship, though, and Geffen would come out as gay two decades later.
Mitchell’s song is especially unique in choosing to take on the perspective of a businessman at the top of the music industry. One of its standout moments is a couplet in which she rhymes “dreamers” with “telephone screamers”, contrasting the dream of working in music with Geffen’s difficult reality. She emphasises the burden of responsibility on his shoulders, reminding us that while in Paris, he has “no one’s future to decide”.
Although it’s hard to sympathise with billionaire Geffen over the budding musicians he makes or breaks, Joni Mitchell once again proves the sheer range of her songwriting talent in taking on this topic. And turning it into an innovative soft-rock classic.
