Song of the Day 2/2: Joni Mitchell, “The Circle Game”

Neil Young’s protest against Spotify has found sympathy among some of his old friends. Graham Nash and, more significantly, Joni Mitchell have also asked the streaming platform to remove their music. It appears other artists are taking the opportunity to complain about the service’s stingy fee setup as well.

Young and Mitchell go way back, and this isn’t the first time Joni has had his back. She met Young in 1964 at the Fourth Dimension folk club at the University of Manitoba, and encountered him again in the Yorkville district of Toronto — Canada’s version of Greenwich Village — in 1965. They bonded over their Canadian prairie roots.

It’s pretty widely known that Mitchell wrote this song in response to Young’s “Sugar Mountain,” which he’d written on his 19th birthday, lamenting his passing childhood. Here’s how she explained it when she introduced the song at Gerdes Folk City in New York at a gig in 1968, when Young was still in Buffalo Springfield.

I wrote it for a friend of mine named Neil Young who, at the time that I knew him was a Canadian ex-rock ‘n roll type turned folkie from Winnipeg, Manitoba, which is just about as bad as Saskatoon, Saskatchewan, I guess.

Anyway he’d just turned 20 years old and was very, very depressed, because he said “You know, all my life I’ve been looking forward to being an adult. You know everything – everything that I wanted to do they kept saying ‘Well lookit, wait kid. You know, wait till you’re older.’ And suddenly here I am and I’m older and I can do just about all those things except I can’t go into the pubs ‘til next year. But I can do just about anything I want to and you know what? I wanna go out and play skipping rope and play jacks and all that stuff that I missed and left behind.” He was really depressed, so I wrote a song for him.

She didn’t record it right away, though. Canadians Ian and Sylvia were the first to release it. Tom Rush made it the title song of a 1968 LP. Buffy St. Marie’s version, recorded and released in 1967, was released as a single in 1970 after it was used in the film “The Strawberry Statement.” It barely scraped the bottom of the charts at No. 109. I can’t say the folk-rocking treatment helps.

Mitchell played the song in concert for several years before recording it for 1970’s “Ladies of the Canyon” album. The backing vocals are by Crosby, Stills and Nash.

At this point the song has been covered by more than 200 artists, according to Mitchell’s website.

As a special bonus, because you can find all kinds of obscure stuff on YouTube, here’s Mitchell singing “Sugar Mountain” on a radio program in 1967.