When David Crosby first saw Joni Mitchell performing in a small coffeehouse in Florida in 1967, he was immediately captivated. “I walked into a coffeehouse in Coconut Grove [Florida], and she was standing there singing those songs, and I just was gobsmacked,” Crosby remembered in 2016. “I fell for her—immediately. It’s a little like falling into a cement mixer. She’s kind of a turbulent girl.”
Both started a relationship, which lasted around a year and during this time Crosby produced Mitchell’s 1968 debut Song to a Seagull. By the mid-’60s, Mitchell’s songs were also highly coveted with Judy Collins pulling the first cuts of Mitchell’s “Michael from Mountains” and “Both Sides, Now” for her sixth album Wildflowers. Mitchell also shared some of her earliest songs with Tom Rush, Canadian folk duo Ian & Sylvia, The Foggy Dew-O, and other artists.
Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young even released Mitchell’s “Woodstock” on their 1970 album Déjà Vu a month before she got it out on her Ladies of the Canyon.
“She’s brilliant and tough and opinionated and slightly crazy and incredibly talented,” added Crosby of Mitchell. “She’s the best singer-songwriter that we’ve had in the past 100 years. She’s as good a poet as Bob [Dylan], and a way better musician.”
Shortly after the end of their relationship, which Mitchell called a “summer affair,” she began dating Crosby’s bandmate Graham Nash. “It was never serious, but it was sweet,” said Mitchell of her relationship with Crosby in David Yaffe’s 2017 book Reckless Daughter: A Portrait of Joni Mitchell. “I was kind of impressed. He was a star. He loved my music. And he was really good.”
Despite their short-lived run together, Crosby left an impression on Mitchell and inspired two of her songs.
[RELATED: 5 Songs You Didn’t Know Joni Mitchell Wrote for Other Artists]
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“The Dawntreader”
The second track on side two of Song to a Seagull (Out of the City and Down to the Seaside), Mitchell’s “The Dawntreader” is laced with imagery of the sea and tells of the hopefulness and skepticism of a new relationship.
City satins left at home I will not need them
I believe him when he tells of loving me
Something truthful in the sea your lies will find you
Leave behind your streets he said and come to me
Come down from the neon nights
Come down from the tourist sights
Run down till the rain delights you
You do not hide
Sunlight will renew your pride
Skin white by skin golden
Like a promise to be free
Dolphins playing in the sea
All his sea dreams come to me
“That Song About the Midway”
Soon after their romance began, it ended due to Crosby’s infidelity. Mitchell told Crosby it was over the only way she knew how: in song. During a party at the home of The Monkees‘ Peter Tork, Mitchell gathered guests in the living room to share her new song, “That Song About the Midway.”
“She’s like, ‘I’ve got a new song,’ and we were all there, and we all said, ‘Oh, fantastic, a new Joni song.’ And she starts to sing it, and it’s plainly a goodbye to me. And then she sang it again in case I didn’t get it the first time—unbelievable. Everybody in the room was going, ‘Oh.’ Everybody. It’s hysterically funny.”
Mitchell’s lyrics follow their relationship and early attraction and openly calls out Crosby’s cheating—once or twice.
I met you on a midway at a fair last year
And you stood out like a ruby in a black man’s ear *
You were playing on the horses, you were playing on the guitar strings
You were playing like a devil wearing wings, wearing wings
You looked so grand wearing wings
Do you tape them to your shoulders just to sing
Can you fly
I heard you can! Can you fly
Like an eagle doin’ your hunting from the sky
I followed with the sideshows to another town
And I found you in a trailer on the camping grounds
You were betting on some lover, you were shaking up the dice
And I thought I saw you cheating once or twice, once or twice
In his 2019 documentary Remember My Name, Crosby said the message was clear that their romance was over once Mitchell performed the song for him.
“‘That Song About the Midway,’ it was her goodbye song to me,” said Crosby. “The look on her face when she finished singing the song, looking right at me, and then she started and sang it again. Yeah, that was a very definite message there. She’s quite a lady.”
A Reunion of Sorts: “Yvette in English”
In the early ’90s, Crosby reached out to Mitchell asking her to produce a song on his next album, but she suggested they write one together instead. Both sent lyrics to one another via a fax machine and wrote “Yvette In English,” a story of two strangers meeting at a cafe in France.
He’s fumbling with her foreign tongue
Reaching for words and drawing blanks
A loudmouth is stricken deaf and dumb
In a bistro on the left bank
“If I were a painter,” Picasso said
“I’d paint this girl from toe to head!”
Yvette in English saying
“Please have this
Little bit of instant bliss”
“Yvette in English” marked one of the few rare occasions Mitchell worked with a co-writer, and the song was featured on Crosby’s 1993 album Thousand Roads. A year later, Mitchell also included “Yvette in English” on her 1994 album Turbulent Indigo.
In 2016, Crosby was still praising his ex Mitchell and called her 1971 album Blue “arguably the best singer-songwriter album ever made—much better than my stuff.”
Crosby added, “I don’t get along with her [Mitchell] that well anymore, but I do love her with my whole heart for what she’s given us.” When asked why they don’t talk much, Crosby smiled, “It’s not just me. I don’t think she gets along with any of her exes.”
Photo: Joni Mitchell, The New Victoria, London, April 1974 by Andre Csillag/Shutterstock
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