Judy Collins – "Both Sides Now" (1968)

Tears and fears and feeling proud

To say “I love you” right out loud

Judy Collins was the first artist to release a recording of today's featured song, which was written by Joni Mitchell.  Mitchell was not a fan of the Collins cover, which peaked at #8 on the Billboard "Hot 100" when it was released as a single in 1968.

The Collins recording is titled “Both Sides Now.”  But when Mitchell recorded the song for her Clouds album, she titled it “Both Sides, Now.”

Mitchell re-recorded the song in 2000 and released it on her Both Sides Now album – sans comma.  That version is identified as "Both Sides Now" – also sans comma – on the track listing for that album. 

Miss Joni obviously has a low opinion of consistency – as did Oscar Wilde, who famously opined that “consistency is the last refuge of the unimaginative.”

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Mitchell has said that “Both Sides Now” was inspired by this passage in Saul Bellow's 1959 novel, Henderson the Rain King, which she happened to read while flying in an airplane:

And I dreamed down at the clouds, and thought that when I was a kid I had dreamed up at them, and having dreamed at the clouds from both sides as no other generation of men has done, one should be able to accept his death very easily.

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Mitchell was inspired to write “Both Sides Now” by a passage in a novel.  Stephen Stills was inspired to write what became Crosby Stills & Nash’s best-known song by Judy Collins’s bluer-than-blue eyes.

Stephen Stills wrote “Suite: Judy Blue Eyes” about the time that it became clear that his romance with Collins was over.  

Stills and Collins in 2018

He sang the song for Collins shortly after writing it in 1969.  

“Oh, Stephen, it’s such a beautiful song,” she told him after hearing it.  “But it’s not winning me back.” 

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Did you know that both Judy Collins and Joni Mitchell both contracted polio when they were children?

From the Rotarian magazine:

In 1948, when singer-songwriter Judy Collins was nine years old, she and her family moved from Los Angeles to Denver. . . . Not long after, she developed pain in her legs.  A spinal tap revealed that she had polio. . . . “That was the year everybody got polio,” Collins says.

Doctors at the children’s hospital in Denver placed her in an isolation ward. “There was a baby in the room with me,” she says.  “He was there two days and died.  I didn’t have a roommate for another month.  They had to put my letters, flowers, and books through this big machine that sterilized everything. . . . There was a lot of pain.”

Judy Collins and her
bluer-than-blue eyes

From Insider.com:

“I had polio at the age of nine,” Mitchell told Star magazine. “My spine was twisted up like a train wreck.  I couldn’t walk. I was paralyzed.  Forty years later, it came back with a vengeance.”

Mitchell was 51 when she started feeling “mind-numbing fatigue” and muscle weakness set in for the second time.  Post-polio syndrome affects 25–40% of polio survivors decades after their initial illness, according to the CDC.

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The Collins cover of “Both Sides Now” gave me chills when I first heard it over 50 years ago, and it still does.  

I pretended not to like it when I was a teenager – my responding to it so strongly made me feel girly all over, and I didn’t want to admit that it had that effect on me.

There’s no point in pretending otherwise any more.  Mitchell wrote a great song, and Collins’s recording of it is amazing.  The record paralyzes me every time I hear it.

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Click hear to listen to the Judy Collins cover of “Both Sides Now,” the newest member of the 2 OR 3 LINES “GOLDEN DECADE” HIT SINGLES HALL OF FAME.

Click here to buy the song from Amazon.