“Both Sides, Now” 3 Life Lessons from Joni Mitchell’s Viral Performance

What Her Heart-Stopping Appearance at Newport Folk Festival Can Teach Us About Navigating Challenging Times

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Eugene Henderson was a troubled middle-aged man. Wealthy, prominent, and handsome, he nonetheless felt lost and unfulfilled, so he set out on a mission to find meaning and purpose in Africa. Through a series of colorful, mind-altering mishaps, he befriends the members of an isolated village, performs a random act of heroism, briefly becomes king of a tribe, then realizes that his true life and purpose lie back at home.

This story, with its surprising message of rebirth and renewal, forms the plot of Saul Bellow’s 1959 novel, Henderson the Rain King, which Modern Library ranked number 21 on its list of 100 best novels in the English language.

This week, that story—and that same uplifting message—came crashing into a much different world in the form of a viral video of Joni Mitchell making a surprise appearance at the Newport Folk Festival that was inspired by Eugene Henderson and his personal quest to find meaning in a time of despair.

What connects these two stories? And what lessons can we draw from the symmetry?

Let’s go back in time to when the connection was made.

In 1966, the Canadian-American singer-songwriter Joni Mitchell, then 22, was going through a difficult time. She had secretly given up her first child for adoption; she was getting divorced from her first husband; she was moving to New York to become a solo artist.

Here’s how she described what happened next to Robert Hilburn in the Los Angeles Times:

I was reading Saul Bellow’s Henderson the Rain King on a plane and early in the book Henderson the Rain King is also up in a plane. He’s on his way to Africa and he looks down and sees these clouds. I put down the book, looked out the window and saw clouds too, and I immediately started writing the song.

The song begins with this indelible verse:

Rows and floes of angel hair

And ice cream castles in the air

And feather canyons everywhere

I've looked at clouds that way

And climaxes with this evocative, poignant chorus:

I've looked at clouds from both sides now

From up and down, and still somehow

It's cloud illusions I recall

I really don't know clouds at all

Mitchell performed the song, which she called “Both Sides, Now” for the first time ten days after her 23rd birthday, on November 17, 1966, in Philadelphia. The first commercial version was released the following year by Judy Collins. This version ultimately reached number 8 on the pop music charts and earned Collins a Grammy for Best Folk Performance. A performance by Mitchell was included on her 1969 album, Clouds, which was named after the lyric. You can see her singing the song in the above video from Live at the Isle of White Festival in 1970.

One thing that made Mitchell’s performance this week so stunning and emotional is that she has hardly performed in public for most of this century. After going on to win nine Grammy Awards in her distinguished year career, Mitchell has not performed publicly with a guitar since her 55th birthday, nearly 9,000 days ago, according to her own website.

Part of that gap can be explained by the fact that on March 31, 2015, Mitchell experienced a brain aneurysm. As she told the Guardian in 2020, the effects of that incident were more devastating than the bout of polio that made her unable to walk as a child.

"Polio didn't grab me like that, but the aneurysm took away a lot more, really. Took away my speech and my ability to walk. And, you know, I got my speech back quickly, but the walking I'm still struggling with.”

While she didn’t perform publicly, she did spend the last few years in private jam sessions called “Joni Jams” at her home, including such friends as country-folk singer Brandi Carlile. It was Carlile who talked Mitchell into appearing last Sunday at the Newport Folk Festival. The YouTube of her performance of “Both Sides, Now” quickly went viral.

So what does this phenomenon tell us about the moment we’re in now?

I’d say three things:

1. We all look at life from both sides now. While the easy explanation for the popularity of the video is that we see in Joni Mitchell’s performance—the struggling voice, the imperfect notes, the sheer willpower—the power of human resilience. She told CBS News in an interview after the performance that she had to reteach herself how to play guitar by watching videos of herself "to see where I put my fingers."

But I don’t think that’s the only reason. Every single one of us had to reteach ourselves basic human skills in the last few years. In fact, watching her 1970 performance, I was struck by how unsure she seemed then, too. Instead, I think the first lesson of her viral video is that each of us, like her, has recently been to the other side of the clouds, too.

2. We’re not alone. As I wrote in one of the earliest posts of The Nonlinear Life, the three most important words to say to someone in a life crisis are “You’re not alone.” To me, one of the most profound experiences of watching Mitchell perform was watching—feeling, admiring, empathizing with—Carlile as she sits alongside her role model. You can feel Carlile cheering her on, being frightened that Mithcell might forget the words, then breaking down with joy as her idol gives the performance of her life.

The same is even more true for Wynonna, who can be seen crying over Mitchell’s right shoulder. As longtime readers of this newsletter know, I spent a large chunk of the mid-1990s traveling with Wynonna for a book I was writing about country music, and I’ve written widely in recent weeks on what the death of her mother, Naomi, means for the family. To see Wynonna process her own grief through the resurrection of Mitchell was profound. As Wynonna wrote on her Instagram page this week, “I feel so many emotions writing this note today! I feel so broken and blessed these days, so getting the chance to be a small part of the weekend at @newportfolkfest has been so very healing.”

She went on to thank Carlile and explained that she’d loved Mitchell since she was 9. “Getting to sit onstage with my shero and sing background vocal. What a full circle moment. You helped make my little girl dreams come true!”

3. Even in a turbulent time, we can find bliss. In Henderson the Rain King, Eugene Henderson says, “Maybe time was invented so that misery might have an end. So that it shouldn't last forever? There may be something in this. And bliss, just the opposite, is eternal? There is no time in bliss. All the clocks were thrown out of heaven.”

To me, the most remarkable thing about the Mitchell/Carlile/Wynonna moment was how deeply it struck the country. Judging by my Facebook feed, where dozens of people from all walks of life posted about it, along with the vast media coverage of the scene, this performance may have been the most unifying moment of the summer.

Why? Because we all need to stop. We all need to cry. And we all need to step out of our worldly concerns, to experience, in Mitchell's enduring words, “tears and fears and feeling proud / to say, ‘I love you’ right out loud” and to know that through all the “dreams and schemes and circus crowds” that “life’s illusions” are merely a bump on our journey to accepting that “I really don’t know life at all.”

No surprise, then, that Carlile captured that moment of pause perfectly immediately after the performance was over. As you can see in the tail-end of the video, she hugs Mitchell and says, “Did the world just stop? Did the world just stop? Did everything that was wrong with it just go away? I feel that it did.”

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Thank you for reading The Nonlinear Life. Please help us grow the community by subscribing, sharing, and commenting below. Also, you can learn more about me, read my introductory post, watch my latest TED Talk, or scroll through my other posts. And if you'd like to do a storytelling project with a loved one similar to the one I did with my father, click here to learn more.

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Or check out my books that inspired this newsletter: Life Is in the Transitions and The Secrets of Happy Families.

Or, you can contact me directly.

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Cover photo credit (Photo by Carlin Stiehl for The Boston Globe via Getty Images)