“I guess I’m partial to her lyrics, because they show me a slightly different perspective on life,” Neil Diamond once said of Joni Mitchell‘s songwriting. In 1976, both didn’t know one another too well but shared the stage during the Band’s final concert at the Winterland Ballroom in San Francisco on Thanksgiving Day, 1976.

At The Last Waltz, Mitchell, performed her “Coyote” from Hejira, her ode to Sam Shepard, whom she was linked to during Bob Dylan‘s Rolling Thunder Revue tour. Diamond came on after her and before Van Morrison, and singing a song he had written with the Band’s Robbie Robertson, “Dry Your Eyes” from his 1976 album Beautiful Noise (also produced by Robertson).

Though Mitchel and Diamond didn’t cross musical paths much after The Last Waltz, Diamond did cover three of Mitchell’s songs during the late 1960s through the late ’70s. Here’s a look behind his Mitchell covers.

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“Both Sides Now” (1969)

Diamond’s first Mitchell cover appeared on his his 1969 album Touching You, Touching Me, and his 1972 compilation Rainbow. Originally written by Mitchell in 1967, “Both Sides Now” first gained recognition after Judy Collins released it on her 1967 album Wildflowers. The song peaked at No. 8 on the Billboard Hot 100 and won a Grammy for Best Folk Performance.

Mitchell later released her version on her second album Clouds in 1969. The song was inspired by Candian-American author Saul Bellow’s 1959 book Henderson the Rain King.

“There’s a line in it that I especially got hung up on that was about when he was flying to Africa and searching for something, he said that in an age when people could look up and down at clouds, they shouldn’t be afraid to die,” said Mitchell during a performance in 1967. “And so I got this idea ‘from both sides now.’ There are a lot of sides to everything, and so the song is called ‘From Both Sides, Now.’”

“Chelsea Morning” (1971)

Also on Mitchell’s Clouds was a song inspired by her time living in New York City, “Chelseas Morning.” For New Yorker Diamond, the Chelsea-iinspired song was a perfect fit for his 1971 album Stones.
Mitchell wrote “Chelsea Morning” while in Philadelphia, after some women she knew found slabs of stained-glass in an alley. They created glass mobiles using coat hangers and copper wire, and Mitchell took hers back to New York City, hanging it in her apartment on West 16th Stret in Chelsea in New York City and when the light hit it, colors illuminated her walls, and created her “Chelsea Morning.”

“As a young girl, I found that to be a thing of beauty,” said Mitchell of the song. “There’s even a reference to the mobile in the song. It was a very young and lovely time, before I had a record deal. I think it’s a very sweet song, but I don’t think of it as part of my best work. To me, most of those early songs seem like the work of an ingénue.”

Judy Collins also released a version of “Chelsea Morning” in 1969 and rerecorded it decades later for her 2021 album White Bird: Anthology of Favorites.

“Free Man in Paris” (1977)

In 1977, Diamond covered Mitchell’s “Free Man in Paris” for his eleventh album, I’m Glad You’re Here with Me Tonight. Originally released on Mitchell’s 1974 album Court and Spark, and again on her live album from 1980, Shadows and Light, “Free Man in Paris” was inspired by her label president at the time, David Geffen.

“I wrote that in Paris for David Geffen [then with Asylum Records], taking a lot of it from the things he said … another song about show business and the pressures,” Mitchell told Mojo in 2019. “He didn’t like it at the time. He begged me to take it off the record. I think he felt uncomfortable being shown in that light.”

Mitchell’s original recording features José Feliciano on guitar and David Crosby and Graham Nash on backing vocals.

Photo: Michael Putland/Getty Images