Songfacts®:

• On first listen, "Man From Mars" sounds like a conventional lost-love ballad. Joni Mitchell sings it like she's addressing an ex, but the song is actually about her beloved tomcat, Nietzsche. Written for Allison Anders' 1996 film Grace of My Heart, the track turns Mitchell's panic over her missing cat into a rumination on loneliness, absence, and listening for a familiar sound in the dark.
• "Man From Mars" was Mitchell's nickname for Nietzsche, a yellow-eyed Abyssinian mix. "I call him Man From Mars because he's a little lavender lion who looks like an alien and walks on his hind legs as an expression of affection for me," she told USA Today.
  
  Mitchell described him as romantic rather than cuddly - he would give her "deep, long looks" and chew her hair while she rubbed his head.
• The song started with a request from Allison Anders, who was directing Grace of My Heart, a drama about a Brill Building-era songwriter. Mitchell's ex-husband and frequent collaborator, Larry Klein, served as the film's music supervisor, which gave Anders a direct line to the famously selective artist.
  
  "It was my luck that Larry Klein was my music producer on Grace of My Heart," Anders told Mojo magazine. "Though that didn't make it easy to convince Joni to write a song. She doesn't do what she doesn't want to do."
  
  After watching an early cut of the movie, Mitchell connected with a scene where Matt Dillon's character urges Illeana Douglas' character to make her own concept album. "Nobody ever told me that when I made Blue!" Mitchell remarked. Anders took the comment as a nod to how rare it was for women artists of that era to get full creative control.
• Mitchell struggled to write the track until Nietzsche vanished. That loss gave her the exact emotional spark she needed. "She took that grief and yearning and wrote 'Man From Mars,'" Anders said. "I was floored when I heard it. Especially that line, 'no grace in my heart.' My gosh - my title in her song!"
• It took Mitchell 17 days to finish "Man From Mars." Remarkably, Nietzsche returned the very night she completed it. "When I played the song for him, he stood on his hind legs and danced, so he recognized it somehow," she told Interview magazine. Whether he recognized the melody or just liked being the center of attention is hard to say; cats aren't known for taking press inquiries.
• Looking for Nietzsche shaped how Mitchell wrote the music. "What had happened is that I was outside at night, calling, trying to hear his voice, and in so doing, I heard far into the distance in my neighborhood," she explained. "I'd never listened to my neighborhood as closely as I did when he was gone. Especially the mix of it, the little sounds that are way in the distance. I put all that into the composition."
• The version of "Man From Mars" used in Grace of My Heart was sung by Kristen Vigard, with Douglas lip-syncing in the film. However, Mitchell's original demo was accidentally included on the first pressing of the soundtrack album. Around 40,000 CDs were shipped before being recalled and reissued with Vigard's vocal, accidentally creating a rare collector's item.
• Mitchell recorded her own version of "Man From Mars" for her 1998 album Taming the Tiger. Nietzsche's importance to the album is also visible on its cover, where he appears in Mitchell's self-portrait.
• Songs about runaway cats are rare, but "Man From Mars" shares a basic premise with Harry S. Miller's 1893 folk classic "The Cat Came Back." While Miller treats the cat's return as a comedic nightmare, Mitchell turns the same plot line into a heartfelt study of absence and attachment.