Who was the Joni Mitchell single ‘Carey’ written about?
When a songwriter decides to name a track after a person, it immediately invites curiosity from their audience that they’re unlikely to quell until they choose to divulge the whole story. Interviewers will take every opportunity to find out who inspired the song while fans gather to debate and dissect the track and its potential inspirations at length. As a songwriter who prides herself on her vulnerability, Joni Mitchell has often been the subject of these discussions.
The folk artist always allowed her experiences and emotions to find their way into her writings, whether it was her longings for freedom or her dealings with love. Her listeners were left to dissect the poeticisms and personal tales within her songs, from more obvious tracks like ‘Big Yellow Taxi’, which pushed into climate change and environmentalism, to odes to her exes such as ‘A Case of You’.
On Mitchell’s magnum opus, 1971’s Blue, she included one of those songs that always incites conversation, choosing to name one of the tracks ‘Carey’. Over those familiar guitar twangs, Mitchell’s wandering vocals sing of the Mermaid Café and a bottle of wine, addressing her title character in each new chorus. “Come on, Carey, get out your cane,” she sings, “I’ll put on some silver, oh you’re a mean old daddy, but I like you.”
Fortunately for those audiences who prefer answers to theories, it doesn’t take too much digging to find out who Mitchell was addressing in the song. Though she changed the spelling of his name slightly, adding an “e”, Mitchell has openly stated that the song was inspired by a man called Cary Raditz. Mitchell met Raditz in 1970 in Crete, spending a couple of months with him and penning a song about him in the process.
As Raditz recalled during a conversation with the Wall Street Journal, Mitchell gifted him the song while they were still together, though he admitted that he wasn’t hugely impressed by it. “When she sang the song,” he remembered, “I was surprised by it, since I’m the subject. But I wasn’t blown away. It sounded like a ditty, something she had tossed off.”
Raditz also knew that the song was more of a goodbye than a love song. “Joni was leaving all the time,” he recalled, “She was saying she was going to take off soon, so her intentions were clear.” His prediction was right, and their relationship didn’t last too long, but it was immortalised in a song that she would later include on her most beloved album.
This isn’t the only time Mitchell has taken inspiration from one of her lovers while writing. Many of her songs borrowed from her real-life relationships and some of them were even written about other musicians.
Did Joni Mitchell date musicians?
Just as her personal life influenced her songs, Mitchell’s ventures into music began to find their way into her personal life. The folk singer embarked upon several relationships with fellow musicians. She had a brief romance with another equally legendary lyricist, Leonard Cohen, penning a song for him, too. Mitchell wrote ‘Rainy Night House’ as a farewell to Cohen once their short-lived relationship came to an end.
Mitchell also had a relationship with David Crosby, who found fame with both the Byrds and Crosby, Stills and Nash. They began dating in the late 1970s, enhancing each other’s music careers in the process. Mitchell also penned a song to say goodbye to Crosby when their romance came to an end, ‘That Song About The Midway’, in which she sings, “You were betting on some lover, you were shaking up the dice, I thought I saw you cheating once or twice.”
