Ethical Adulthood: A Detroit Soundtrack | Both Sides, Now by Joni Mitchell

What did Joni Mitchell mean when she wrote Both Sides, Now?

When I was ten years old, I asked my parents that question after learning the song on guitar. To my surprise, neither of them would answer. Instead, they both told me the same thing:

"You'll understand when you're older."

Decades later, I think I finally do.

In this episode of Ethical Adulthood: A Detroit Soundtrack, we explore the three movements of this remarkable song: childhood, love, and adulthood. Joni begins with clouds, moves through romance, and arrives at the difficult work of becoming fully human. Along the way she rejects both innocence and cynicism, arriving instead at something far more valuable: humility.

What happens when certainty falls away? What is gained when we stop pretending we have life figured out? And why do some songs take a lifetime to understand?

Join me as we look at one of the most beloved songs of the twentieth century and discover why "I really don't know life at all" may be one of the wisest things ever written.

Ethical Adulthood: A Detroit Soundtrack is a podcast about music, meaning, and the lifelong work of becoming.

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:01

Oh, welcome back into Ethical Adulthood, uh Detroit soundtrack. Today I'm covering Both Sides Now by Joni Mitchell. My mom was a bit of a tough act to follow. She started out like before I was born as a secretary at Chrysler. She learned to type 100 words a minute and became an expert at grammar and spelling. And then she was a stay-at-home mom for a bit. When she got restless and talked to my dad, he said, Why don't you find a hobby? So she took a guitar class at the Rec Center one summer. I might have been three or four years old. Well, the next summer, the teacher said that he couldn't teach the class. Could she take the position? She said, I only took one 10-week block of lessons from you. He said, Yeah, but you practiced and you're good enough. Just stay a week ahead of them. So she did. Well, this led to her creating her own teaching method, typing an entire book to support that method. And then that was followed by four more progressively harder classes as her students stayed with her and made progress, plus several other courses as her students asked her for them. So my mom taught guitar through adult education from 1969 to 1999. She started at Dunby High School in Detroit Public Schools and Canon Recreation while that was open over on the east side. And finally, she moved to Southlake High School, which was where I went to school when we moved to St. Clair Shores. So of course I took guitar lessons as soon as my hands were big enough to make a D, an A, and an E chord. I loved the words. Rows and flows of angel hair and ice cream castles in the air. But I didn't know what the song meant. And I'm gonna confess that when I asked my mom what the song meant, she just looked at me with wide eyes and said, Oh, don't worry about it. It's kind of about growing up. You'll understand it when you're older. I asked my dad too. He said the same thing. And let me tell you, this was not typical. My parents often took painstaking effort to explain songs to me, to tell me the answers to my questions. This time separately. They just couldn't. So let's take a look at both sides now. It moves from childhood to adolescence to adulthood, full circle. We begin in childhood. When we were kids, we took time to lay on our backs, on our grass, for an hour and watch the clouds go by. We used our imagination to call out what we saw. And then maybe we concocted stories about the rabbits that we saw or the cotton candy castles we might live in someday, or the dogs we would own someday when we grew up. Innocent imagination. Clouds are beautiful, magical, constantly changing, almost edible. But there is the reality of that great gig in the sky. Clouds block the sun. They rain and snow on everyone. They ruin our plans. So Joni sees both the innocence and the inconvenience. And does she pout? No. She arrives instead at humility. She doesn't land on clouds are wonderful. She doesn't land on clouds are terrible. She says, I really don't know clouds at all. Next, we encounter adolescents. We fall in love if we're lucky, several times in our teens and twenties. We write bad poetry, the moon in June, yada yada yada. Oh, the stuffed animal, one at the fair, the kiss on the ferris wheel, the candlelight, the hushed nights spent gazing into each other's eyes. The Cinderella story of being swept off our feet and taken away from an ordinary life, into a life of love, abundance, and happily ever after. Or if you're the prince in the story of sweeping us off our feet and horse riding us off into a castle, ruddy-made on the other side of the forest. Then love changes. Right? It becomes a performance. It becomes concealment. It lives inside a self that is intent mostly on self-protection. Don't care too visibly. Don't become too vulnerable. Don't fall in love. She once again refuses both naivete and bitterness. She doesn't land on love's going to save us all. She doesn't land on love is fake. She tells the truth. I really don't know love at all. Then she arrives at the threshold of adulthood. We grow up, we get into our thirties and beyond, and we try to embrace life. We encounter pride, schemes, crowds, identity. And then she names one of the costs of becoming. Old friends shake their heads, they say we've changed. Something has changed. Something is lost. But something is gained. That line is the hinge. This is the ethical adulthood center. Growth is not all gain, no loss. It may look like that for a plant, but alas, we are mammals. Evolution may cost us a lot. Old friends may drop away. In fact, that's almost guaranteed. To become more honest, more awake, more real, some relationships inevitably end. Sometimes it's family that falls away. Sometimes a version of ourselves falls away. Sometimes whole sections of our lives fall away. The unavoidable grief we have spoken about rides up and takes from us as we evolve. And still something important is gained in living life from an authentic place. What, you ask? A life you can stand behind. A life without excuses. A life lived ethically. A life based not on certainty, but on responsibility. Because as we've seen, just because your certainty about life has fallen away doesn't mean your responsibility to it has or ever will. Then the song lands in the mature position. Not certainty, nothing is certain. Not cynicism, we're not bitter, not despair, we're not depressed by our realizations, not innocence. We refuse childish simplification. Joni lands on humility. I've seen enough to know my seeing is incomplete. And the clincher? I am and you are still here. We are still acting, still participating, still sticking our necks out when we're never fully sure it won't get nicked by the blades of life. When certainty falls away, life actually can become more precious, more beautiful, and more meaningful because we don't know. Not in spite of the fact that we don't know. I am now outlining in essays on ethical adulthood. The older I get, the more I realize how many of my favorite songs are not really about politics or romance or spirituality. They are about perception. About how we know what we think we know. Joni spends this entire song watching certainty dissolve, not into despair, but into humility. How do we know what we think we know? Joni's answer is gentler than most. Look carefully. Grow up. Stay humble. Keep living anyway. All blessings upon Joni Mitchell. She's as close to one of my gurus as my own parents were. Thanks for listening. This is Andrea Fiando. I'll see you next time.