Joni Mitchell

Poor thing . . . her life didn’t turn out too well. She kind of prognosticated it with the lines from “The Last Time I Saw Richard” . . .

All romantics meet the same fate one day:
Cynical and drunk and boring someone in some dark café.

She wrote intelligent lyrics. What I wouldn’t give for more of that in today’s [dumb] popular music!

On account of songs like “Woodstock” and “Nathan La Franeer” she’s associated with the counterculture and activism and social ferment of the Sixties, but she didn’t actually write much about political or topical stuff. Nonetheless, she wrote three lines that just about encapsulate the Green movement:

“I dreamed I saw the bombers riding shotgun in the sky
Turning into butterflies above our Woodstock Nation.”

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

“We’ve got to get ourselves back to the garden.”

Y’know what, everybody . . . we’ve got to get ourselves back to the garden.