Graham Nash names the greatest Joni Mitchell song

He was instantly beguiled by her, and his only thoughts were about plucking up the courage to approach her. This endeavour was blighted by the witterings of his manager, Robin Britten. If only the heathen would stop so, Nash could gather his whirring thoughts.

“I asked him to be quiet as I was checking Joni out,“ Nash recalls. “He said, ‘if you’d just listen to me I’m trying to tell you that she wants to meet you’. David Crosby had told me earlier that year to look out for Joni should I ever get the chance to meet her. Joni and I hit it off immediately, and I ended up in her room at the Chateau Laurier and she beguiled me with 15 or so of the most incredible songs I’d ever heard. Obviously, I fell in love right there and then. She touched my heart and soul in a way that they had never been touched before.”

But her best songs were yet to be written. Crosby had helped Mitchell craft her debut album and was assured that she was a generational talent. However, by her own admission, she was still breaking free from the shackles of folk in the purest sense. She would soon begin to pull away from fantasy and timeless tropes and pour more of herself than pretty much any songwriter before her into her tunes.

This soon led to the anthem that Nash describes as her greatest ever piece of work, ‘A Case of You‘. He told Songfacts, “There are so many brilliant songs. I tend to go towards a simple song, and one of my favourites is ‘A Case Of You‘. I think it’s an unbelievably beautifully recorded, simple folk song. It’s beautiful.“

The timeless track towers above heart-torn imitators by means of sheer sincerity. As Mitchell once told Mojo, “I think men write very dishonestly about breakups. I wanted to be capable of being responsible for my own errors. If there was friction between me and another person, I wanted to be able to see my participation in it so I could see what could be changed and what could not.“

She sternly added, “That is part of the pursuit of happiness. You have to pull the weeds in your soul when you are young, when they are sprouting, otherwise they will choke you.” In that sense, ‘A Case Of You‘ is an act of cathartic gardening.

This profound and beautifully illustrated point about the need to take dominion over life’s unfurling circumstances, seasons and their effects on us as people is the sort of poignant intelligence that permeates Mitchell’s work as a songwriter.

Not just ‘A Case of You’ but indeed a lot of the material on her beloved album Blue is centred around a break-up that the singer-songwriter was enduring with Nash himself. The song lyrics, in part, detail the fading spark of a relationship heading towards its end and the growing divide between two lovers with lines like, “Just before our love got lost you said, / I am as constant as a northern star / And I said, ‘Constantly in the darkness‘,” illuminating poetically the notion of a rift.

What makes the track so unique and full of depth, however, is the fact that it somehow functions as both a break-up lamentation but also an ode to somebody, exemplifying the dichotomy of love and love lost. Thus there is also an argument that the idea of the song being simply about Nash is far too head-on.

The track’s production features James Taylor on guitar and Mitchell providing the strumming on the Appalachian dulcimer. The pair would later have an intense but brief relationship, so it is easy to speculate that the flowering of a new romance from the ashes of another could be the reason behind the songs self-evident light and shade.

This notion of star-crossed lovers and kindred souls is also reflected in the literary influences that Mitchell has referenced as inspirations behind some of the lyrics. “I am as constant as the Northern Star” alludes to Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar, one of the most schismatic figures in literature, whereas “Love is touching souls” is in reference to the Rainer Maria Rilke poem ‘Love Song’, which examines the inner yearnings of two guarded souls, elucidating how Mitchell may have felt at the time.

These little flourishes hint at the depth untold in Mitchell’s masterpiece, which Nash rightfully highlights as among her greatest.

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