‘Clouds’: How Joni Mitchell Began To See Life From All Sides Now

Both Sides, Now was written while Mitchell was literally gazing at clouds, on a plane, alongside reading Saul Bellow’s Henderson The Rain King. A passage in that novel inspired her to reflect on how she had looked up at the clouds throughout her life, and now, at that moment, she was looking down on them: both sides, now. But this didn’t help her to understand clouds any more, at all: they retained their glorious gossamer illusion. Mitchell recorded the song again in her 60s, for the 2000 album Both Sides Now, her narrative arc of a romantic journey. This time the song – now shorn of its apostrophe – came at the album’s close.

Reaching further into myth and darkness

Looking at life from both sides is a running theme throughout Clouds. The Gallery, a study of two people growing older, is taken from the woman’s point of view. She has given “all her pretty years” to a man, who now looks elsewhere. It’s almost an inversion of Cactus Tree on Song To A Seagull: in that song, the woman was the unconstrained spirit, largely unconcerned about collateral emotional damage to others. On The Gallery, Mitchell looks at that injury from the reverse angle, understanding that an expressed desire for freedom often leads to selfish actions.

There is a bleaker feel to this second album. While her debut had found in fairy tales and myth a vehicle to explore narrative, on Clouds Mitchell reaches further into their pagan heart of darkness. Roses Blue, for example, tells of the journey of Rose, a hippie psychic dabbler who falls into a cultish rabbit hole: casting spells, shunning friends, prophesying their deaths. I Think I Understand also details fragile mental health (in this case, anxiety). As the 60s ended, Mitchell sensed see that the decade had sown its own destruction.

Certainly, the mood in 1969 had grown grave, with the war in Vietnam a quagmire, police brutality staining civil-rights and anti-war protests, and political assassinations making depressingly regular newspaper headlines. In this space, the quietest song on Clouds wasn’t about love, but the pity of war: The Fiddle And The Drum, a stark a cappella piece on “trading the handshake for the fist”. It could be an ancient folk song; in Mitchell’s hands it is utterly contemporary.

“I decorated my own house. I don’t need a decorator”

Following her dissatisfaction with David Crosby’s production job on Song To A Seagull, Mitchell’s label Reprise brought in Paul A Rothchild. He was a house producer at Elektra Records and had produced The Doors and Love. He had also produced Tim Buckley’s debut album – the work of another wilful, experimental talent who would soon refuse the folk-singer box allocated to him. Unfortunately, Rothchild and Mitchell were not suited and didn’t get along. In their early sessions, recording the track Tin Angel, he told her off for moving when she sang, and then actually taped her feet to the floor. (“How soulless can you get?” Mitchell later seethed).

Mitchell never takes well to being told off, and didn’t particularly like the direction the sessions were going, either. Rothchild had some time off, so Mitchell turned to Henry Lewy, the engineer. “Could we get it done in two weeks before he gets back?” she asked him. He nodded. Mitchell and Lewy worked together – his technical expertise, with her vision and growing production confidence – to complete Clouds. The pair collaborated in this way for over a decade more, right up to 1982’s Wild Things Run Fast. “You don’t need a producer,” Mitchell has said. “A producer is a babysitter if you don’t know what you’re doing. A producer is an interior decorator. I decorated my own house. I don’t need a decorator.”

Released on 1 May 1969, Clouds was a much bigger success than its predecessor, peaking at No.31 on the Billboard chart and proving to be an enduring seller ever since. Mitchell had found her sweet spots: the joins between intimacy and universality, hope and despair, love and freedom, accessibility and experimentation. She would go on to explore these much, much more in the next decade and beyond.

Buy Joni Mitchell vinyl, box sets and more and the Dig! Store.