Songfacts®:

• "Song for Sharon" is a sprawling, contemplative track from Joni Mitchell's 1976 album Hejira. Running 8:40, it's a song with neither chorus nor haste, weaving together fragments of Mitchell's past and present.
• The song originated with a trip Mitchell made to the Mandolin Brothers guitar shop on Staten Island to replace a guitar that had been stolen. On her way there, she spotted a wedding dress in a shop window. This became a portal back to Mitchell's childhood in Maidstone, Saskatchewan, and her friend, Sharon Bell. Sharon had once dreamed of being a singer but married a farmer. Mitchell, ironically, had wanted to be a farmer's wife but wound up becoming one of the most celebrated singer-songwriters of her generation.
  
  Later, back at the Plaza Hotel in New York City, Mitchell sat by her high-rise window and began writing. The memories spilled out - weddings attended with Sharon in Maidstone, childhood games of bride and groom and the way those early fantasies of love and life contrasted with the realities of adulthood.
  
  In the liner notes for her Archives, Vol. 4, Mitchell recalls this period with archivist Cameron Crowe: "Marilyn McGee and I would play bride and groom. I was always in drag... I remember looking out the window of the Plaza and seeing the white smoke of winter chimneys and the reflections on the buildings across the way."
• Mitchell wrote the song in the form of a letter to Sharon Bell. She juxtaposes her own path with Sharon's, exploring themes of love and marriage, and touches on some of her relationships. The track stands as the longest on Hejira, though not the longest in her discography - that honor goes to "Paprika Plains," the 16-minute odyssey from Don Juan's Reckless Daughter (1977).
• "Song for Sharon" shares some thematic DNA with Mitchell's Ladies of the Canyon track "The Circle Game." Both songs mine childhood memories for deeper truths, but they diverge in tone and complexity. "The Circle Game," written in 1970, has a bittersweet, nostalgic air, gently musing on life's cycles and the inevitability of growing up. It's hopeful, linear, and deceptively simple - a carousel ride of a song. "Song for Sharon," by contrast, is a labyrinth. It skips between past and present, delves into thornier themes like love and ambition, and unfolds with the intricate, jazz-inflected style that defines Mitchell's later work.
  
  Whereas Mitchell wrote "The Circle Game" as a response to Neil Young's "Sugar Mountain," offering a rosier view of aging, "Song for Sharon" feels deeply personal, as if Mitchell has invited us to sift through her memories alongside her.