Songfacts®:

• Joni Mitchell wrote this song, but she wasn't the first to record it. That honor went to Judy Collins, whose 1967 version went to #8 in the US, giving Collins her first hit as a singer and Mitchell her first hit as a songwriter. Mitchell didn't release her first album, Song To A Seagull, until 1968; "Both Sides, Now" she included on her second album, Clouds, in 1969.
• The song is all about perspectives - clouds look very different depending on your vantage point. Mitchell got the idea when he was on a flight, reading the 1959 novel Henderson the Rain King by Saul Bellow. In the book, there's a part where Henderson is on a plane and looks down to see the clouds. When she got to that section, Mitchell put the book down and looked out her window to do the same. Right away the song started coming to her.
• Mitchell's version is rendered with a comma in the title - "Both Sides, Now" - but the Judy Collins original recording leaves it out: "Both Sides Now," as do most covers.
• Mitchell was in her early 20s when she wrote this song, but she had been through enough tribulations in life to coax it out of her. She was a young mother, with her daughter born in 1965 to a man who left soon after she got pregnant. She gave the girl up for adoption and married the musician Chuck Mitchell later that year. In 1967, the year this song was released, they split up.
• After Judy Collins had a hit with the song, many other artists released covers. Three of them charted:
  
  Harpers Bizarre - #123 in 1968
  The Johnstons - #128 in 1968
  Dion - #91 in 1969
  
  Hundreds of others covered it as well, including Frank Sinatra, Anne Murray, Pete Seeger and Natalie Cole.
• Mitchell made quite an impression on David Crosby with this song. In an interview with Songfacts, he told the story:
  
  "She was in a coffeehouse in Florida singing "Both Sides Now," and I listened to it, I looked at her, and
  
  A) I wanted her really badly, and
  
  B) I thought I might be falling for her, and
  
  C) She was obviously a f--kin' brilliant songwriter and singer. She bowled me over completely."
  
  Crosby produced Mitchell's 1968 debut album. They dated for a while, but he cheated on her so she wrote a song to break up with him. She later took up with Graham Nash, enjoying a few years of domestic tranquility that's the subject of the Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young "Our House."
• On June 26, 1969, Mitchell performed this song live on The Mama Cass Television Program, which aired on ABC.
• Mitchell didn't release "Both Sides, Now" as a single until 2000, when she issued an orchestral version to close out her album Both Sides Now, which is mainly comprised of jazz standards.
• "Both Sides, Now" is part of a heart-rending scene in the 2003 movie Love Actually, starring Alan Rickman and Emma Thompson as a married couple who are growing apart. At one point in the film, Thompson is listening to the Joni Mitchell song "River," and Rickman says, "I can't believe you still listen to Joni Mitchell." Thompson replies, "I love her. And true love lasts a lifetime."
  
  Later on, she sees him with a necklace she thinks is a Christmas present for her, but on Christmas morning, his special gift is the Both Sides Now CD - the necklace was for his mistress. Thompson retreats to her bedroom where she listens to the song "Both Sides Now" while having an emotional breakdown.
  
  According to the film's director, Richard Curtis, they shot the scene nine times and played the song during each take. "I was so terrifically moved by that song," he told Entertainment Weekly. "Especially by the fact that it was written by a 23-year-old yet is so suitable for a woman who's had the whole of life's experience."
• This song deeply affected Led Zeppelin guitarist Jimmy Page. In a 1975 interview with Cameron Crowe of Rolling Stone, Page said that Joni Mitchell may be the one musician he knew of that was capable of creating something that had the lasting brilliance of Zeppelin's "Stairway To Heaven."
  
  Repeating the "Both Sides Now" lyrics "Now old friends are acting strange, they shake their heads, they say I've changed," he interpreted the song as being about celebrities losing all their old friends once they become famous. Page insisted he had not changed and that he valued all the old friends he still had.
• Among the many artists who cite this as a profoundly influential song is Nichole Nordeman, the two-time Dove Award winner for Female Vocalist of the Year. "It moves me endlessly and is the perfect portrait of what it means to understand love when you are young and hopeful and naive, and then again when you are wise and weathered. From both sides," she said in a Songfacts interview. "In rather beautiful irony, she recorded the original song in her 20s as a new artist and made it a hit, and then again in her 50s, when she had really lived the lyric. I like it better when older Joni sings it. Full of grit and nicotine and hard living, the regret and tenderness is what makes it more believable the second time around."
• Perhaps Mitchell's most profound performance of "Both Sides, Now" took place at the Newport Folk Festival on July 24, 2022, when at age 78 she performed it with Brandi Carlile. Her voice shaken by age and the after-effects of a 2015 brain aneurysm, Mitchell turned back the clock and delivered a powerfully emotional performance imbued with the wisdom of her life experience, punctuated with the last line of the song, "I really don't know life at all."
  
  Video from the performance quickly went viral, bringing many of Mitchell's longtime fans to tears as it felt like the life of this icon had come full circle.
• Mitchell performed at the Grammy Awards for the first time when she sang "Both Sides, Now" at the 2024 ceremony, where her album Joni Mitchell At Newport won for Best Folk Album. She was 80 and frail, but the performance packed an emotional wallop, with many of the luminaries in the crowd tearing up.
  
  She sang it again on January 30, 2025 at FireAid, a massive benefit concert for victims of wildfires in Los Angeles. This time, she sang from a gilded throne.