My mother, when I was small enough to love music, and to understand the melodies, sung me the heavenly song ‘Both Sides Now’ by Joni Mitchell. And for some reason, that song haunted me throughout my childhood. I never heard it, if I remember right, in the many sing-a-longs we had together (we sang mostly John Denver and Peter Paul and Mary), but for some reason, it came out during the most important and emotional times of my childhood. When I was hurting, and when I felt that special feeling that you get when you are just overflowing with happiness…

I ran into the song again in college, among the coffeehouse neo-folk neo-beatnik friends I had… and I fell in love with it again.

Run into the song yourself via amazon.com’s free sample here: Joni Mitchell :: Dreamland

Of course my mother learned it from Judy Collins — she didn’t listen to Joni Mitchell until later — and I learned it from my mother — so I wasn’t that excited when i heard Joni Mitchell’s original version. Beautiful, but didn’t floor me.

What did floor me was hearing ‘Both Sides Now’ in the surprisingly fantastic (in my opinion) movie ‘Love Actually.’ The song, in context was so moving I felt my chest cave in, and had to struggle to breathe. I’m a movie-cryer, and I couldn’t even do that. It was very moving.

And for years, I have been remembering that moment, and wondering where that song came from. (What album). I kept looking in record stores, in my sporadic and hurried visits to those incredibly alluring places… and found nothing — only the same old stuff I’d heard before from Joni Mitchell… I kind of gave up, actually.

Until I got I-tunes, and somehow I stumbled across Joni Mitchell, as Itunes intends us to do, turning the capatalistic machine as we do — and I thought about this instance again.

I found the song, and it is heavenly. Perhaps it is because this is the haunt song of my childhood. Perhaps it is because this might be a lullaby my mother sang me to sleep with. But this version, caked with age and coated with the honey-sweetness of lush modernist orchestral arrangements, is heart-stopping.

Check it out. It is the bed of roses alongside the road for me — where I stop to whiff:)

Peace.

“I’ve looked at love from both sides now
From up and down, and still somehow,
it’s love’s illusions I recall.
I really don’t know love at all…”

Check out Joni Mitchell’s album “Dreamland”