"Both Sides Now", also known as "Clouds," was written and composed by Joni Mitchell. Reckless Daughter is an engrossing, well-told, but ultimately conventional biography. Then people started calling me confessional, and then it was like a blood sport. “Why is Joni Mitchell the token female musician that even the most macho rock guys are comfortable calling ‘great’? Combine all that with her smooth, gentle vocals, and you’ve got an artist whose work makes sense for a stereotypical mom character on TV — from a music supervisor’s perspective, at least — in a way that more overtly radical female artists like Patti Smith maybe don’t. Very often, women who live as freely and hedonistically as the average man are criticized by outside forces for not behaving correctly, for not taking proper care of their bodies. She was discovered unconscious in her California home, having suffered a brain aneurysm. When she first discovered Picasso as a teen, she felt she’d communed with a kindred spirit—ditto with Miles Davis. The detail that haunted me was that she’d been lying unconscious for three days before she was found. Those many people before me, of course, are not just women. “Somehow,” her friend John Simon later recalled, “she became one of the boys.”. She survived. And awesome. And yet in this time of her bleak self-reliance, she was learning something incredible about herself: She could write songs. "Both Sides, Now" is one of the best-known songs of Canadian singer-songwriter Joni Mitchell. You can, of course, chart the transformation of Mitchell’s voice across her albums. In the opening moments of her first album, 1968’s Song to a Seagull, she bid goodbye not only to Chuck, but to the roadmap of a traditional life. They were embarrassed for me. "Both Sides Now" was performed by Canadian soprano, Measha Brueggergosman, at the 2007 CSHF Induction Ceremony. She dropped out of art school, moved into a cheap room, and prepared to deliver a child she wasn’t sure she could afford to raise. But it also makes you mourn for how much music by women didn’t get written just because not everyone can be as nervy and impervious to male authority as Joni Mitchell. That shamelessness juxtaposes nicely onscreen with the melancholy regrets of the women who settled for a life they maybe didn’t want because society pressured them to do so. As Jody Amable wrote in a piece for Vinyl Me, Please that declared “It’s Time to Establish the Mom Rock Canon,” “As the most obvious entry point to the wider mom rock canon, moms almost listen to Joni Mitchell out of obligation. On a terrible night in March two and a half years ago, many people feared the worst for Joni Mitchell. It isn’t the voice of hope nor is it the voice of resignation. Here’s why. “I remember thinking, ‘You gotta drop this guy,’” Baez recalled. Had she listened to her husband at the time and crumpled up that little song he’d “ridiculed,” there wouldn’t be any version of “Both Sides Now,” let alone the dozens and dozens of covers other artists have performed over the years. Though plenty of jazz purists scoffed at Mitchell’s involvement, she earned the admiration of her brilliant, cantankerous collaborator. Maybe he changed his mind once she agreed to marry him, and maybe she was having second thoughts about raising a child, too. – Nicole Nordeman. Over a singular career that has spanned many different cultural eras, she explored—in public, to an almost unprecedented degree—exactly what it meant to be female and free, in full acknowledgement of all its injustice and joy. This kind of male-hero worship has made Mitchell a difficult figure to some feminist critics, since both Picasso and Davis behaved badly toward the women in their lives. I’d agreed to it,” Mitchell recalls in the 2003 documentary Woman of Heart and Mind. She represents fulfillment and freedom, a life they could have had — or perhaps used to. It is an attempt to find a way of conducting oneself in a world becoming increasingly violent and perverse. It was the detailed precision of her lyrics—that teetering on the edge of oversharing—that made listeners connect so intimately with her. A female genius must have talent to spare, yes. These chords that I was getting by twisting the knobs on the guitar until I could get these chords that I heard inside that suited me—they feel like my feelings. There’s a sense of yearning — for a former life, or a different one entirely — implied in all these scenes that makes sense, to a certain extent, given both Mitchell’s refusal to settle into the traditional life expected of women in that era and the frank, beautiful way she addresses that choice in her music. It’s free. 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