Joni Mitchell - Sisotowbell Lane Lyrics

One of lovely Joni's most beautiful songs on a record in serious contention for her very best album. On it are other great songs, like Marcie, Michael from Mountains, and I Had a King. David Crosby produced it and insisted that it be made with pure unadulterated Joni Mitchell and ONLY Joni Mitchell on her guitar. Her second album was also quite good, including two eery love songs and unsurpassed singing. For the Roses, to me, is the other JM album that I would class as among her very best. Ladies of the Canyon was very good, too, and so was Blue, which most of the "stars" and her fellow professional musicians think was her best effort. I don't but they do. In fact, I wrote a short book about her and her music which I've yet to publish. There are several books about her, mostly by women, I think, but mine isn't out there among them, not yet, at least. I haven't even sent her a copy because it isn't quite finished yet and hence not copyrighted, requiring deletion of some of what I had to say about certain of her boyfriends, which might hurt her feelings and aren't appropriate in a published work. There was a small time local group in New York, for example, whose name escapes me, that passed her around it's membership when she arrived there from Canada, recently divorced from her husband, and was living alone in New York City. They treated her as if she were little more than an attractive "shiksa" and a notch on their guitars, real assholes, as far as I was concerned. Her first four albums will always be my favorites, just fantastic music on them. As research for the book, I bought all of her records, but back in 1968, when Song to a Seagull was released, I was a freshman in college staying in a dorm on campus. That's when I heard her for the first time, high on what I now call weed but then called grass, and fell deeply in love with her from afar. It lasted for a long long time (just ask my wife). Of course, I knew nothing about her personal life, which I was to find out bit by bit over the next several decades. The sixties were generally a happy and very interesting time, lasting actually into the early seventies, but too often with a tragic and depressing backdrop, both personally and collectively. Yes, we rebelled against our increasingly materialistic parents, who hadn't always been that way, but we tried to do it with sensitivity and intelligence, so unlike too many of the so-called millennials of today, who actually booed our dynamic and unfairly beleaguered president and his lovely wife at a World Series Game, something never heard of or tolerated before, or Melania alone, sweet and demure and sometimes unsure of herself, at a high school in Baltimore. They were two of the most sickening displays of stupidity, abject ignorance, grotesque immaturity, utter disrespect and cruelty, and a completely inappropriate lack of dignity that I've ever had the displeasure to witness. When we got out of line, and even when we weren't, we got the police baton over our skulls, something the brats of today have begged for, raised and indulged by their misguided mommies with no father figure in their lives. Joni, for instance, wrote primarily for men, not women, although feminists have co-opted her as their own the way they've selfishly done the same thing with so much else, with no regard for what came before. Departing from my bitterness about this life, and more to the point, the music of that period, when I was young, idealistic, naive, and hopeful, was virtually unparalleled and absolutely fantastic and Joni was among the most talented, accomplished, and hard working of those that created it. She was not only a gorgeous woman for several decades but was and still is a great artist.
Some very interesting music from her came before this, when she was a popular songwriter and singer in Canada, long before most Americans knew anything about her. The name of the album put together of her best work at a popular club up there was entitled Second Fret Sets, or something similar, and you can find the songs on it on YouTube, I think. Several of them are accompanied by music videos. Urge for Going and Come to the Sunshine are examples, the latter with a video she did for the Canadian Broadcasting Company, as I recall, a good representation of that earlier period. Also, you can go on jonimitchell.com and most of it is on there, too, although some of what they used to have there has been deleted. I haven't checked it since her serious health problem of a few years ago.

Cass Elliot who was also Joni’s friend, recorded this song, but it was not released til many years after her death.
She did a very fine rendition of this song. Not sure why it was not released when she first recorded it.

I had no idea.

Sometimes we do, our tongues turn blue

Even after 50 years, Joni’s music is haunting, ethereal, timeless. And her poetry! I think her first album is really my favorite. Many don’t even know about it. It was put out before she was famous.

Yes, I think she’s a genius.

My favourite song of all time. I can and do play it but sadly don't have a voice to do it justice.