If there was any doubt about the potency of live music being so welcome back after its long, multiple absences in the pandemic era, one only needs to watch the surprise performance of Joni Mitchell at Newport Folk Festival last week. Mitchell played a gig with Brandi Carlile and a stageful of musicians, her first full set in 20 years. In an era of nasty surprises, it’s familiarity we hold on to. There is comfort in a cultural pillar of the past appearing now. It anchors us, and examples abound of music from the past experiencing renewed appreciation at the moment.
Mitchell sang Both Sides Now. She sat in a chair and eased the lyrics from herself, “But now old friends they’re acting strange, and they shake their heads, and they tell me that I’ve changed. Well, something’s lost, but something’s gained, in living every day.”
Zadie Smith’s 2012 essay on Mitchell, Some Notes On Attunement, opened with: “The first time I heard her I didn’t hear her at all.” This idea that one grows into Mitchell’s music is a common one. Mitchell lands when she lands, and when she does, she will never leave you, because this is not surface music, it’s deep music.
When we were coming out of the worst part of the pandemic, there was a realisation that things and people had changed
So there was something grounding about watching the performance on YouTube. You could feel the energy charging, even from afar. That song in particular drops in at times of flux, evolution, reflection, and self-examination. I suppose, spiritually, it makes sense that it’s reappearing now. When we were coming out of the worst part of the pandemic, there was a realisation that things and people had changed. But now we’re a click on from that, with a burgeoning sense that things are in fact different. It’s not all pleasant, as though everything has gone from feeling unmoored to shifting jarringly.
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The week of the All-Ireland football final, the air felt strange. The heatwave ebbed. There was a swirling bluster around, an intensity in the barometric pressure, a foreign humidity seemingly trapped between the ground and thick, overcast clouds, suspending us in the gloopy air. It was different. Is this what weather is now? It seemed as though no one couldn’t concentrate. There was a brusqueness and heedlessness around. Nothing was landing. It’s as though we were all holding a secret we couldn’t talk about, distracted. And I’ve noticed, strangely, that the pandemic has stopped being the dominant feature of conversation.
Cycling in this weird warm breeze, I found myself thinking of Joan Didion’s writing on the Santa Ana winds in California, “We know it because we feel it,” Didion wrote of their arrival. “The baby frets. The maid sulks. I rekindle a waning argument with the telephone company, then cut my losses and lie down, given over to whatever it is in the air.”
Systems are breaking down. “Where did everyone go?” I asked friends, as we discussed the staffing crises disrupting every sector imaginable. We all know about the Great Resignation, but it’s all quite strange. Prices going up, services going down, and the nagging feeling that you still need to sit down and allot some serious time to sorting your life out, or at least coming up with a vague plan given the seismic events that we’ve just been through.
Mitchell wrote Both Sides Now in the mid-60s when she was 21 years old
Unless we all collectively took a year off, nobody can have conceivably properly processed the wear and tear of the pandemic. Some people have upended their lives, moved homes, ended relationships, had babies, quit jobs, ruminated on their sense of purpose, wondered why certain pleasures weren’t connecting anymore, changed their social habits, quietly ended friendships, found themselves still in “pandemic mode” at home, laptop on the kitchen table, wondering how different really was their life “before” when “before” is now the pandemic, not the era that preceded it. That world is gone. How odd.
Mitchell wrote Both Sides Now in the mid-60s when she was 21 years old. It was great then, but I think it’s fair to say the sedimentary quality of its evolution when it was re-recorded, and orchestrated, 3½ decades later, is profound. In a famous, epic live performance of the track, with a 70-piece orchestra at the Hammerstein Ballroom in 2000, it’s clear that Mitchell is moving to something we can’t access. When I watch footage of that performance, I’m frozen in stillness, but Mitchell is swaying away, to spaces between notes that perhaps our mere listener-brains miss.
I interviewed Mitchell in 2014, and we talked about Both Sides Now a lot. “I grew into that song,” she said. That is undeniable. Isn’t it funny how some things we do only truly hold meaning later on? As though every action, decision and gesture is not self-contained or concluded in the moment, but a mode of preparation for a future unknown? Perhaps now, there is an awkward growing happening, into the ideas we had about the impact of this era, but the clothes don’t exactly fit, the seats are a bit wobbly, and maybe our entry ticket has gone missing momentarily. Our collective desire for certainty may be misplaced, or a fool’s errand altogether. “I’ve looked at life from both sides now,” Mitchell sang. “From win and lose and still somehow it’s life’s illusions I recall, I really don’t know life at all.”