(Credits: Press)
Thu 12 February 2026 20:30, UK
It’s impossible to judge almost any Joni Mitchell song next to the other artists on the pop charts.
She was always one step ahead of nearly everyone in her field, and even when she began working with the greatest jazz artists of all time, you would have sworn that she had the same staying power as the all-time greats like Duke Ellington and Thelonious Monk. Her musical mind went far deeper than any other singer-songwriter, but that didn’t mean there weren’t a few moments when she thought her songs could have been better.
That said, was anyone really judging her first records next to what she could do later? Everyone has to have those few songs that don’t hit as well as others later down the line, and when all she had was an acoustic guitar in her hands and her voice to rely on, how the hell was anyone going to measure a record like Blue or Ladies of the Canyon next to the intricate lines on Hejira and Mingus?
Then again, Mitchell’s first albums were still miles ahead of what everyone else was doing. David Crosby had known from the beginning that she was absolutely magical whenever she played, and a lot of her lyrics seemed to hit just as well decades after the fact. Everyone understands the heartache that she felt in a song like ‘River’, and while ‘Big Yellow Taxi’ may have been reintroduced to the world in the 2000s by bands like Counting Crows, no one was ever going to capture the charm that Mitchell put into her own version.
If there was any complaint to be had, it was that she was maybe a little bit too ahead of her time in some respects. The kind of songwriting that she worked on wouldn’t have felt out of place in the modern age, and when she started to get open and honest in her songs, most of her contemporaries weren’t quite ready to make that jump. They didn’t have the strength to take that musical mask off, but ‘Both Sides Now’ already showed us a woman who was wise well beyond her years.
Granted, she had already lived through more than most people by the time she reached her 20s. Her husband, Chuck Mitchell, had been working with her in his own outfit for years at that point, and after hanging her out to dry and nearly sabotaging her entire career, a song about growing up and moving on from the ugliness of life did make a little bit more sense to Mitchell at the time.
But since the world wasn’t ready for it, Mitchell was convinced that ‘Both Sides Now’ never worked, saying, “When I began to write, it was inner stuff that I had to work out and I didn’t quite know how to do it. It was kind of cryptic in the beginning. ‘Both Sides Now’, for example. I had thought I had just skimmed the surface of what I was contemplating. I didn’t think it was thorough. I considered it a bit of a failure and then other people started to see something in it. In its vagueness, it was very interpretable.”
And yet, without changing any of the words, Mitchell’s performance of the same song decades down the line made that vagueness work even better. ‘Both Sides Now’ already sounded like a song coming from a wise sage that had lived a full life, and after going through the ups and downs of years in the music industry, hearing Mitchell sing about her life at that stage felt a lot more earned than someone who might have thought it was a bit pretentious when she first wrote it.
But that’s sometimes the key to some of the greatest songs. Some of them might demand to be written when they first pop into the musician’s head, but whether or not the audience will accept them needs a little bit more time. Not everyone’s ready to hear someone speak their truth like that, but chances are, Mitchell could have made anything sound great if she had the right chords around it.