At Just 23, Joni Mitchell Penned One Of The Most-Covered Songs In Folk Rock History

When a song's been officially covered 1,852 known times, you know it's something special. Such is the case with Joni Mitchell's "Both Sides Now" from her beloved 1969 folk album, "Clouds." Delivered to the public the same year as Woodstock, a festival that Mitchell actually passed on, Mitchell had originally written it two years earlier in 1967 for singer Judy Collins. That made her 23 years old when she wrote it.

Folks who aren't familiar with Mitchell might not find that all that impressive. After all, weren't lots of musicians young when they wrote hits? Weren't the Beatles only in their early 20s when Beatlemania hit? Right, but none of them were Joni Mitchell, a singer-songwriter about whom it's hard to talk without sounding hyperbolic. More prophetess than vocalist, Mitchell always had uncanny insight into human nature in all its absurd complexities and contradictions. She also had the ability to articulate such insight into refined music and truly poetic lyrics. 

"Both Sides Now" is a perfect example of this dual gift, a song about the struggle to realistically understand love and life in a way that's neither absolutely naive ("Rows and flows of angel hair / And ice cream castles in the air"), nor absolutely jaded. Maybe the answer, like the tops and bottoms of clouds forming one object, resides on both sides. Such nuance is why "Both Sides Now" has moved so many people, and why it's impressive that Mitchell was so young when she wrote it.

There's good reason why "Both Sides Now" carries such emotional weight, audible in Joni Mitchell's delicate voice. As Mitchell's official website says, she had to give up her daughter for adoption when she was a 21-year-old, single mother. It took years to recover from this. At some point, she was on a plane reading Saul Bellow's "Henderson the Rain King" and looking at clouds out of the window. That's when the idea for the song came to her, because at that point, she could see the clouds from both sides. By 23 years old, she'd written the song.

Whether or not cover artists know this backstory is unknown, but they feel it in "Both Sides Now's" music and lyrics. Prominent covers include Annie Lennox's heartfelt performance at the awarding of the 2023 Library Congress Gershwin Prize to Mitchell. Rufus Wainwright, meanwhile, did a cabaret club version in 2019 during a live show in Amsterdam, while Seal sang a straightforward, lounge-leaning version at a celebration of Mitchell's 75th birthday the same year. And no disrespect meant to any cover artist, but if you then listen to an old 1970 recording of Mitchell singing her own song at The Isle of Wight Festival, you'll understand why it inspired so many people.

Later in life, far past the young age of 24, Mitchell reprised "Both Sides Now" for her 2000 album of the same name, and then much later at a surprise 2022 performance at the Newport Folk Festival that just might prove her most heartbreaking version, even to Mitchell, herself. Her aged, deep, and borderline raspy voice tells the full story of a life seeing clouds from both sides, now.