November 7, 2014
Happy 71st birthday Joni Mitchell!
Whenever the world marks the birthday of this most singular of artists, I find myself going back to this orchestra-backed performance of “Both Sides Now” from 2000. One of her early classics, of course, it’s a song she wrote in 1967 when she was a mere slip of a 23-year-old folksinger (mind you, a mere slip who had just been through one failed marriage and musical partnership and had previously given up her out-of-wedlock baby daughter to adoption, so not your typical, wide-eyed, innocent 23-year-old).
There’s just something so wonderfully poignant and powerful about this performance. Maybe it’s because it’s the older, more experienced version of the artist singing the wise-beyond-her-years words of her younger self. Maybe it’s because both come to the same conclusion: I really don’t know life at all. Or maybe it’s the knowing smile and ever-so-slight affirming nod when she sings in the final verse the truism that we all come to understand if we hang around long enough: “Well, something’s lost; but something’s gained…”
The young artist’s preternatural wisdom is there, now perhaps more seasoned and confirmed by further experience, but the mature artist standing on that stage hasn’t become calloused to the wonder of it all, nor the ability to be amused by and accepting of life’s paradoxes. Still vulnerable, still mystified, still open and still going.
It’s a graceful performance of reinterpretation; maybe we really never get to know life at all, but I think that’s as fine a way of approaching it as I can imagine – with constant grace and continual reinterpretation.
