These 3 Joni Mitchell Lyrics Will Change the Way You Think

Joni Mitchell is the quintessential songstress of the 21st century. While there are too many good one-liners in her catalog to name, here are some Joni Mitchell lyrics that will definitely make you stop and think. Or, at the very least, make you wish you’d thought of them first.

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“Both Sides Now”

“So many things I would’ve done / But clouds got in my way / I’ve looked at clouds from both sides now.”

“Both Sides Now”, released in 2000, sings of how time can change your perspective on love, life, and happiness. This specific cloud analogy literally takes your breath away when you hear Joni sing it for the first time. It’s the perfect way to describe not only how negative thinking or holding onto our past can get in the way of things that we do, but also how thinking positively can change our point of view. However, depending on how you look at it, this song can also be an ode to getting older and how life experience introduces you to a more realistic way of looking at things. 

“The Circle Game”

“We can’t return / we can only look / Behind, from where we came / And go round and round and round, in the circle game.”

Gosh, this song. There’s absolutely nothing like hearing this one for the first time. In “The Circle Game”, Joni sings of the “carousel of time” and how the seasons go on and on forever. She also sings that we can’t really take back time; we can only live in what we have right now. Apparently, Joni actually wrote this song as a response to songwriter Neil Young, who wrote “Sugar Mountain” and showed it to Mitchell. In “Sugar Mountain” Neil laments his youth, singing “You can’t be twenty on Sugar Mountain.” Mitchell counteracts this by saying that there’s beauty in aging. We have many opportunities to live, over and over again. 

“Big Yellow Taxi”

“They paved paradise, put up a parking lot.”

I mean, wow. What an opening line! Joni Mitchell’s “Big Yellow Taxi” is obviously an ode to the concrete jungle and the sad reality of nature being “paved over” to make way for human greed. This song has been covered by many people over the years, including Harry Styles and Bob Dylan. Styles even spoke of his obsession with Blue with Rolling Stone, admitting that he was in a “big Joni hole” for a while.

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