Joni, From Both Sides Now
By Georgia Mills
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This month in LA under the starry sky I saw Joni Mitchell perform live at the Hollywood Bowl, sitting on a plush throne, flanked by her band, endearingly referred to as “the Joni Jam.”
I’ve known Joni from both sides now: her voice, young, high-pitched and clear, tinny in the kitchen air while dinner was cooking, when I was a kid. That was then. Now: cane in hand, her voice low from a life lived and cigarettes smoked, “I’ve looked at love,” she says more than sings, her voice reverberating around the bowl and up to the heavens above.
The original version of Both Sides Now, recorded in 1969, captures Joni’s essence as a young lady of the canyon. A Canadian girl, born and raised on the prairies, transplanted to California in the 60s. Bright eyed with a private past, the daughter she never knew in the arms of an adopted family, Joni wrote Both Sides Now as a “meditation on reality and fantasy.”
A dreamer with her head in the clouds, she started to question her way of living — “there was a plummeting into Earth, tinged with a little bit of apprehension and fear,” she told Rolling Stone magazine in 1979.
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I relate to Joni’s discontent in her mid-twenties with living in dreams, rather than planting both feet on the ground. She described the song then as “an idea that was so big it seemed like I’d just scratched the surface of it.” The idea being that “we’re captive on the carousel of time,” she sings in The Circle Game.
Deeper, still she went in 2000, on its rerecording — a deep intoning, her lyrics a warning. I can see glimpses of the other side she comes to know in my own life: I’m not twenty-two, a deer in the headlights of love, or twelve, lying on my back in the grass in the Canadian countryside, watching the blue sky pass by overhead. The carousel is catching up to me, I can see the way I’ve gone round and round in the little lines on my face, the steady caution in my reproach, in place of what was once wide eyed wonder.
At the Hollywood Bowl, we wept, collectively, when she sang Both Sides Now at the age of eighty. It felt like her swan song, and the lyrics hung in the nighttime static with all of the dreams and memories and lost loves and old promises and clouds gone by. A life lived as a dreamer, with her feet now pressed firmly to the ground on the stage, her hair in the same braids she always wore. Between songs, she laughed to herself with a wide smile. She knows something I don’t, from both sides now.
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